E.D. Kain on Gary Johnson

E.D. Kain has an interesting follow-up post on Republican presidential candidate Gary Johnson (unfortunately it's at Balloon Juice, so he's being buffeted by a fusillade of inane comments).

In his initial post over the weekend, Kain first offered a caveat — "I don’t know what I’ll do when it comes time to pull the lever " — before lauding Johnson's opposition to militarism and the war on drugs. Kain also acknowledged the myriad issues with which him and Johnson disagreed, but doubted whether the former New Mexico governor would be able to enact his preferred policies on such issues:

In other words, if you’re president it’s really hard to enact the domestic legislation you had in mind, but it’s really easy – almost effortless – to start dropping bombs half a world away. And this is exactly why I can imagine myself supporting Gary Johnson. I don’t think he’d have much luck at all with his domestic spending agenda, except at the margins.

The post was no encomium, but it's also no surprise it roiled some readers. As I've written before, left-liberals and libertarians often have a mutual disdain for each other.

In his Balloon Juice post, though, Kain appears to have backtracked. First, he contends that single-issue support could be equated with unalloyed backing of Johnson:

Probably the best argument against supporting Johnson is this: supporting a candidate based on a single-issue alliance is not as effective as supporting a cause. It’s also more dangerous because if that cause becomes too embodied by that candidate, then the rest of his ideas – like abolishing the Fed, for instance – can then become conflated with the good cause as well. And so you weaken and undermine those ideas by associating them too closely with the bad ideas of the candidate you supported.

Here's his second argument:

If you want a more anti-war, civil-liberties-based liberalism than you have to argue for it, work with activists to build up grass-roots support for those policies, and vote for local and state candidates who support those ideas.

As a small-d democrat, I'm sympathetic to Kain's second point. I despise Schumpeter-style democracy. Of course leftists (and libertarians, I'd add) need to build grassroots support for ending the drug war and foreign interventionism. And partisan ciphers have been known to kill grassroots movements. But we're talking about presidential politics. Does Kain believe that left-liberals must jettison Johnson in order to build grassroots support for such policies? Does the one obviate the other?

And on the first point, what happened to Kain's optimism about Johnson's domestic impotence (save for ending the drug war)? I'm incredibly skeptical, for instance, a Johnson presidency would result in a shuttered Fed.

Second, it's a matter of priorities. Johnson is also a big fan of school vouchers. I'm not. Johnson probably wouldn't get his entire education agenda enacted, but he'd likely push the nation's education system in a deleterious direction. The question for those on the Left, then, is whether the status quo is so repugnant, so repellent that they're willing to bite the bullet and support a potentially unpalatable denizen of the White House that also abhors the War on Drugs.

Like Kain, I can't commit to voting for Johnson in the general election — it's way too early. (At this point, I also can't fathom voting for Obama.) Without some pressure against the current political paradigm, though, the bipartisan baseline will only continue. That's why a broad-based Left-libertarian alliance on the aforementioned national issues — and left-liberal backing for Johnson, at least during the primaries — is so important.

One final point: Kain's contention that those on the Left should "vote for local and state candidates" that favor "anti-war, civil-liberties-based liberalism" seems kind of silly. These aren't the people enacting pro-war policies. It's great if my local council member opposes the Libyan intervention, but he or she has little say in the matter.

In a similar vein, the issues of import in state and local politics are often the issues on which libertarians and leftists diverge. Seeing Tea Party governors in action — LePage, Snyder, and Scott have been the most ignominious — has reminded me how of little I have in common with small-government types on the state and local levels.

On the national level, it's different. The drug war needs to end. Civil liberties need to be restored. Bellicose foreign policy needs to come to a halt. Johnson is no savior. No politician is. But in the presidential election, he's the best chance the Left has to alter the conversation.

UPDATE: E.D. Kain responded to my post; here's the link: http://tinyurl.com/43qz22j