On April 28, US Representative Justin Amash (?-MI) launched a presidential “exploratory committee.”  He wants to take on Republican incumbent Donald Trump and Democratic nominee-apparent Joe Biden this November as the nominee of the Libertarian Party.

If this was a “straight news” story instead of an op-ed, the first paragraph above would be known as the “lede” — an introductory paragraph summarizing the most important facts the story covers.

And if this was a straight news story, that opening paragraph’s author — me — would also be guilty of committing the supreme journalistic sin. To “bury the lede,” the good folks at Merriam-Webster tell us, “refers to hiding the most important and relevant pieces of a story within other distracting information.”

What’s important, relevant, and missing from my lede paragraph (and, so far, the lede paragraph of every “straight news” story I’ve seen on Amash’s campaign launch)? This:

For the first time ever, there’s a sitting member of Congress whose party affiliation is “Libertarian.”

Amash formally left the Republican Party on July 4, 2019, becoming the only bona fide independent member of Congress (the US Senate’s two supposed “independents,” Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, caucus with the Democratic Party and are Democrats in all but name).

Amash has displayed libertarian ideological leanings since his days in Michigan’s state legislature, and more prominently and combatively since his election to Congress in 2010. But he’s kept the party dedicated to that ideology — the Libertarian Party — at arm’s length.

Until now.

Since its founding in 1971, the Libertarian Party has won thousands of local elections and put a few state legislators in office on its ballot line, but Congress and the White House have always proven beyond its reach.

Until now.

As a long-time Libertarian Party activist (and as a former Libertarian appointee to federal office and the spouse of a former Libertarian local elected officeholder), I’m grateful to Congressman Amash for planting my party’s flag on Capitol Hill.

I’m less enthusiastic about the congressman’s presidential ambitions, for two reasons.

One is branding. If the Libertarian Party nominates Amash, it will be the fourth time in a row that we’ve nominated a “recently Republican” candidate instead of choosing someone closely associated with our own party. That kind of record promotes the false and damaging perception that Libertarians are just “Republicans who smoke dope.”

The other is timing.

Amash has spent most of the last year flirting with, and teasing the media about, the possibility of running a third party or independent presidential campaign.

While he’s been doing that, other candidates have been actively working to EARN the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination. They’ve visited state party conventions, participated in debates, run in presidential preference primaries. Now comes Amash, swooping in a month before the party’s national convention and apparently counting on Libertarians to  lose our minds and throw our panties on stage like teenagers at an Elvis concert.

Well, maybe we will.

Either way, I’m glad he finally made it to the party.

Welcome, Congressman Amash (L-MI)!

CORRECTION: The original version of this article incorrectly named New Hampshire, rather than Vermont, as the state Bernie Sanders represents in the US Senate. Thanks to Jeanette Burhans for noticing the error and letting me know – TLK

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On April 25, 2020, US president Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin issued a joint statement commemorating the 75th anniversary of “Elbe Day” — the day, presaging the end of World War 2 in Europe, when Russian and US troops met near the German towns of Strehla and Torgau.

The Wall Street Journal reports that this congenial interaction between the two presidents “stirs concern among” members of Congress and officials at the US Departments of State and Defense.

What’s inherently controversial about the Trump/Putin statement that wasn’t controversial about the similar 65th anniversary message from Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev?

The supposed concern appears to have little, if anything, to do with actual foreign policy matters.

Yes, the US is still at odds with Russia on various issues — Russian support for new states which seceded from Ukraine after a US-backed coup in that country, and Russian support for Syria’s government against US-backed rebels, to name two.

But it’s not like US-Russian relations were particularly great in 2010, either. The Obama-Medvedev statement came  less than two years after Russian troops kicked US-allied Georgian invaders out of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and after Medvedev’s announcement that he intended to respond in kind to proposed US missile deployments in Poland.

The supposed “concern” seems to be that playing nice with Russia might undermine “stern messages” the US government keeps sending to the Russian government in the form of sanctions.

What we’re seeing here is not “concern,” but “concern trolling”:  Per Oxford Dictionaries, “the action or practice of disingenuously expressing concern about an issue in order to undermine or derail genuine discussion.”

There’s a deep divide within the US political establishment at the moment over whether the next US Cold War should pit Americans against Russia or China. Iran and Venezuela are dark horse contenders, but ever since the 2003 Iraq fiasco it’s become a lot more difficult to portray smaller regional players as convincing “threats.”

The growing Trump faux-populist wing of the establishment prefers China, at least for the moment, because the faux-populists already have a trade war going with the Chinese, and because they have a temporary “COVID-19 as a manifestation of the Yellow Peril” gravy train of nonsense they can hitch a ride on.

Establishment Democrats and Republicans prefer Russia as perpetual Enemy of the Week because they’re conservative. It’s been Russia most of the time since shortly after that first Elbe Day. Why change horses in mid-saber-rattle? They’re concern trolling Trump because he’s not reading from their script (it doesn’t help that he beat their favored 2016 presidential candidate, another thing they blame on Russia).

So, why not eschew Cold War altogether, relax, and enjoy a long overdue “peace dividend?”

Unfortunately, that’s not one of the options that the “all options are on the table” crowd of “serious people” (read: “Concern trolls whose political and financial interests require constant Cold War”) are willing to even put on said table.

Thanks to  Cold War concern trolls,  world peace remains further away today than it got in April 1945.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Are you an “essential worker” who needs to be on the job? Do you run a “non-essential” business” that’s required to close and isn’t eligible for a government bailout? When you leave your home is it for “essential travel” or are you engaging in “non-essential activity?”

“Essential” versus “non-essential” may be the single most significant word pairing that’s come out of the COVID-19 panic and its associated shutdowns, lockdowns, and shakedowns.

But I haven’t seen many attempts to actually define the words (laundry lists of activities the issuing authority approves or disapproves of aren’t definitions). What do they actually mean?

Among the definitions offered in the 1913 edition of Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, I suspect this is the definition of “essential” we’re looking for:

“Important in the highest degree; indispensable to the attainment of an object; indispensably necessary.”

But that definition raises more questions than it answers: Important to whom? Indispensable to the attainment of what object? Necessary why?

Those same questions, of course, are also relevant to what makes an activity unimportant, dispensable, and unnecessary, i.e. “non-essential.”

I can’t really answer those questions, but I have a good idea how, and by whom, they can and can’t be answered.

The best mechanism for answering questions pertaining to how essential a business or a job might be is called “the market.”

If customers consider a business “essential,” they’ll do business with it. If not, they won’t.

If employers consider a job “essential,” they’ll pay what it takes to convince someone to do that job. If not, they won’t.

Yes, it really is that simple. Those judgments may change over time and for different situations, but the aggregate judgments of billions of customers and millions of business owners constitute a pretty reliable indicator of what is or isn’t important, indispensable, and necessary.

The judgments of politicians and bureaucrats, on the other hand, are only a reliable indicator of one thing: What serves or doesn’t serve the desire of politicians and bureaucrats to order the rest of us around and run our lives.

The “shutdown, lockdown, shakedown” response to COVID-19 wasn’t just unnecessary: It will almost certainly turn out to have killed more people than COVID-19 itself.

Patients with non-COVID-19 illnesses have had procedures pushed back as “non-essential.” Some of them are going to unnecessarily die.

Crops are rotting in the fields. Some people are going to starve. Maybe even in America.

People with debilitating mental conditions already pushing them toward suicidal thoughts are locked in their homes. Some of them are going to surrender to those thoughts.

Businesses, workers and customers were far more competent than politicians and bureaucrats to decide what needed to shut down or be re-arranged. They should have been left free to make those decisions instead of being brought under absolute despotism.

As the panic winds down and the world gets back to work, our top political priority must be to deprive politicians and bureaucrats of  power to ever pull this kind of authoritarian con on us again.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY