As millions of Sanders supporters continue wrestling with the hard choice facing them as the November elections grow near, one point should be made crystal clear: while Johnson appears to align with Sanders on some issues (gay rights, abortion rights, legalizing marijuana, reducing military interventionism, etc.), both candidates represent completely separate worldviews.
If we boil down the libertarian ideology to its fundamentals, they essentially believe that we should have as minimal government as possible. Government protections of civil rights? Zip. Government regulations of large, unsustainable financial institutions that have already wreaked havoc on our economy? Nope. Government policies that preserve the environment and protect our natural resources? Zilch.
In the context of the issues where there is basic agreement between Sanders and Johnson, we find that the supposed “73 percent” agreement statistic is a gross exaggeration. Sure, Johnson believes that women should have the right the choose whether or not to get an abortion, but the libertarian ideology dictates that employers should be able to control whether or not their employees’ insurance polices cover contraceptive healthcare. Johnson says that he is all for gay rights, but should businesses be able to fire their workers because of their gender identity or sexuality? According to libertarians, government has no place in protecting victims of wrongful employment termination.
The biggest hypocrisy that libertarians often express when it comes to social issues, particularly when they are trying to pander to progressives, is the issue of “state’s rights”. Oftentimes, libertarians conveniently leave out their position that social issues should be left to the states. This means, for example, that the federal government should never restrict one’s right to smoke marijuana, pay for sex, get married, or control their own bodies…but when it comes to state and local governments, the ability to restrict all of these rights are fair game. In fact, this “small government” ideology is a lingering by-product of the racist counter-ideology expressed by conservatives in the 1960s in response to civil rights: the federal government shouldn’t restrict the rights of black people, but if racist politicians in the Louisiana legislature want to allow business owners to enforce a “No Colored People” policy, then the “big, bad” government should simply stay out of it, according to this troubling mindset.
I am not accusing Johnson of racism, but he has consistently criticized the federal government for encroaching upon “states’ rights” throughout his career. In 2010, for example, when Arizona upended the federal government’s immigration policy authority by passing SB 1070, which also had the impact of further institutionalizing racial profiling, Gary Johnson strongly defended Arizona’s right to pass this racist, shortsighted, xenophobic policy on the grounds of “states’ rights”:
Quote:Every state is different, and is presented with its own challenges and opportunities related to immigration — and countless other issues. Rather than trying, as the Obama administration is doing, to stop Arizona from implementing its own approach, we should be encouraging the states to be the policy laboratories they were intended to be in our federal system.
Keep in mind that, in the same op-ed, he openly expressed concern that this law could lead to racial profiling. Despite admitting that the constitutional and human rights of Latinos and immigrants could be abused by the law, he still supported it and called the act taken by the Obama administration to challenge this law “a very bad decision”.
This is a clear-cut example of the dangers of libertarian “states’ rights”. Even when a libertarian politician expresses concern that a certain state-level policy will lead to racial profiling, their unshakable faith in the decision-making capacities of individual states, even when those acts infringe upon the civil rights of their citizens, outweighs the myriad of harms that results from a lack of federal oversight.
Here is another example: Gary Johnson says that he is pro-choice, but he holds the incompatible libertarian belief that abortion should be “left to the states”. In fact, he even touted his record of restricting abortion rights as the governor of New Mexico. Once again, Johnson is trying to have it both ways, but you can’t fool us: if you believe that a woman should have the right to choose, you cannot also say that the individual states should be able to decide whether or not to abridge the right to choose…unless if you prescribe to libertarianism.
On paper, Johnson and Sanders share similar views on some social and civil rights topics, but when you dive into the overarching libertarian ideology that informs Johnson’s worldview, we find that inalienable, bodily, human rights are not always protected for their own sake; if these rights are being infringed upon by the federal government, Johnson may be the first to protect the vulnerable, but if individual states enact the very same tyrannical, rights-abusing, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, privacy-abridging policies, according to his worldview, he’d have no problem with the individual states taking charge and protecting their “sovereignty”.
