All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

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I Don’t Know’s On Third

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Philip Rucker and Robert Costa of the Washington Post report that Mitt Romney and other establishment Republicans are unsheathing their threatened final sword: Attempting to put together an “independent” Republican presidential campaign versus GOP nominee-apparent Donald Trump. The draft effort’s reputed short list includes Ohio governor John Kasich and US Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE). Good idea or bad idea? Depends on how one looks at it.

If the goal is partisan Republican victory this November, two Republican candidates — one chosen by the voters, one chosen by the party bosses — is a very bad idea. Two well-funded, ably promoted Republican candidates on the same ballots means a Democratic win. So let’s assume that winning the election is not what this move is about.

If the goal is preserving the Republican Party’s “soul” — its core ideology — we’re also looking at a very bad idea here. Why? Simple: The Republican Party HAS no core ideology. Maybe it did once upon a time, but these days it’s just an ad hoc coalition of interest groups and identity politics blocs like the Democratic Party. The GOP leadership’s problem with Trump isn’t lack of appeal to its traditional demographics (whites, males, evangelical Christians, people whose livelihoods depend on a hawkish foreign policy, etc.). The GOP leadership’s problem with Trump is that he’s displacing them in their role as Pied Pipers.

But that second prospective goal does hit somewhat close to the mark. The real purpose of an “independent Republican” campaign against Trump is to give anti-Trump members of the Republican coalition another Republican to vote for so that those voters don’t abandon the GOP for good in favor of the Libertarian Party or Constitution Party.

How real is the danger of such abandonment? I don’t know. But I do know that to the extent that the danger is real, it is a danger created by decades of Republican failure to deliver on the  things Republicans supposedly stand for.

The Libertarian Party might or might not be able to deliver on lower taxes, balanced budgets, civil liberties and George W. Bush’s promise of a “humbler foreign policy.” The Constitution Party might or might not be able to deliver on the pro-life agenda. They haven’t had their chance to deliver yet. The Republicans — under the influence of their “leadership” — have had, and blown, chance after chance. Now they’d rather put up with four years of Hillary Clinton than face the music they themselves made.

The Republican establishment created Donald Trump. Now they’re paying for their hubris with the disintegration of their party. A fake third party campaign won’t save the GOP. Real third parties simply have more to offer. Or at least their offers are more believable.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Government and Technology: A Modest Proposal

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Twitter’s making it just a little bit harder for the US intelligence community to surveil your online activity.  As Kevin McCoy of USA Today reports, the company “told Dataminr, the business partner that sifts through and provides access to the full output of Twitter’s social media postings known as tweets, that it didn’t want the service provided to government investigators …”

I’m sure the National Security Agency and other organizations will come up with their own tools to monitor your 140-character descriptions of what you had for lunch, but it’s still a nice gesture on Twitter’s part — the latest little bit of welcome pushback against the surveillance state by American tech companies.

From the use of “warrant canaries” — a way of getting around government orders to not reveal government demands for information — to an increasing ethos of companies making it impossible for themselves to decrypt their users’ data, to Apple’s refusal to build a backdoor into its iPhone operating system for the FBI’s use, there’s a seeming sea change occurring in the relationship between Silicon Valley and Washington, DC.

To what extent that change is real and not just public relations theater, I can’t say. But  either way it reflects increasing public understanding of two key lessons taught to us by Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers:

First, almost nothing you do could possibly be any of the US government’s business; we should make it as hard as possible for government to pry into our affairs.

Second, everything the US government does is YOUR business.  You pay the bills and the people claiming to be “your employees” have proven, over and over, that they can’t be trusted with the privilege of keeping secrets from the boss.

For those two reasons, if there’s going to be a differential in technological power between citizens and government, that differential should work to the advantage of citizens, not government.

Somehow the US government managed to win World War Two without digital computers and put men on the moon with, rumor has it, less computing power than most of us have on our desktops these days. Let’s get back to that ethos.

Instead of letting politicians limit our computing power and access to encryption, let’s limit theirs. Because I’m a moderate, I won’t call for a complete regression to pen and paper. I think we can allow the FBI and NSA to have old circa-1983 Commodore VIC-20 machines with 4.5 kilobytes of RAM, cassette tape drives for storage and 300-baud acoustic coupler modems for communications, don’t you? Heck, in the spirit of compromise, maybe even Commodore 64s with floppy disk drives!

But modern computers, smart phones and strong crypto? Sorry, bureaucrats. That stuff is reserved for your bosses.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Rumors of the GOP’s Demise are Exaggerated, but There’s Still Good News

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Libertarian Party Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As a callow youth, I cast my first vote in a presidential election for Michael Dukakis, the Democratic Party’s 1988 nominee. Since then, I’ve never again voted for a Democrat or Republican for president. If George HW Bush had bothered to read his own lips in 1992, he’d have had my vote and I might never have ended up as a Libertarian Party member, activist and candidate. Thanks, George.

Nearly a quarter of a century later,  160 years into its life as a national political organization and 156 years after it became the most recent new party to put up a winning presidential candidate,  the Grand Old Party seems to be coming apart at the seams thanks to Donald Trump.

That’s probably an illusion. Fifty years from now this year will most likely have been, in retrospect, just another inflection point. It would be far from the first. Eisenhower’s defeat of Taft in 1952 made the Republicans the party of Cold War instead of non-interventionism. The period connecting Goldwater and Reagan spanned several major changes including but not limited to a rhetorical co-option of libertarianism at those end points and Nixon’s actual co-option of the formerly Democratic “Solid South.”

The Republican Party may be imploding, or it may just be shifting gears. Either way, I’m relieved. Not because I necessarily think New GOP will be any better than Classic GOP. But at least it will be less vexing on one front:

For my entire adult life, Republicans have campaigned as libertarians and governed as Democrats. I doubt we’ll see any major change on the latter point. But it will make my year (heck, my decade) if this election cycle means America stops running off to bed with a beer-goggles-induced Thomas Jefferson on the first Tuesday night every fourth November and waking up next to Hubert Humphrey the following morning.

If you’re a conservative or a progressive, okay. Just be that, take pride in it, and openly act on it instead of trying to convince yourself (and everyone around you) that you’re something else.

If you love freedom, though, this election cycle should be the point where you stop screwing around and get serious. You’ve GOT a political party, the Libertarian Party. We’ve been around for nearly half a century. We’re America’s third largest political party. We’ve elected hundreds of local officials and even some state legislators.  Let’s hit the next level together. And welcome home.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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