After taking over the Libertarian Party through the Mises Caucus, comedian/podcaster Dave Smith is considering to run for president of the United States in 2024 via the LP. I love Dave and think he has the best political podcast (Part of the Problem), and I agree with him on almost every issue. He's a great communicator and public speaker with charisma and is able to explain the ideas of liberty clearly and persuasively. But there are downsides to him running for president, as some critics within the liberty movement have pointed out.
On the one hand, it would be nice to be able to point my friends and family to the Libertarian candidate and say that is what I believe. But on the other hand, I will constantly be having to defend Dave to my friends and family against the constant propaganda smear campaign the corporate media will inevitably launch against him. “No, I know everyone is saying he’s a science-denying racist, but they’re all lying…”
Obviously Dave knows he cannot win the presidential election, but he sees the campaign more as an opportunity to spread the message of liberty. Many people have simply never heard the philosophy of libertarianism—and that is by design. The government schools and state-sponsored media (or media-sponsored state) do not want libertarian ideas (which threaten the state's power) to spread. So libertarianism is either distorted or ignored by the entire corporate media complex.
That is why I had never sincerely learned about libertarianism until my early 30s. After the Trump election, I started to do some intellectual soul-searching to make sense of what happened. Until then I was not very political but basically a default liberal democrat. But when the liberal media I followed had gotten everything so wrong, I had to reassess my prior assumptions.
Dave Smith’s critics are partially right, in that many people—perhaps even the majority of people—are not interested in the libertarian message. 2020 was a mass rejection of liberty. There is not much that can be done about the authoritarians other than separate (secede). But there remain many more people like me who upon hearing libertarian ideas for the first time, will have an awakening.
That is what the liberty movement most needs: more numbers. We don't need all of the country, or even the majority. But with a significant enough minority, real change can be made.
Of course, Dave should and will continue to spread that message the way he currently does, through podcasts and his comedy—as do many others. It was through podcasts that I first learned about libertarianism, first through Dave Rubin, then Michael Malice, Dave Smith, and Tom Woods, who led me to the OGs like Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises.
But sadly, many people will not seek this information out on their own. The only chance they have of ever hearing anything about libertarianism is during the presidential elections. They will see the LP candidate, who is usually a joke, so most normies will thereby assume libertarianism is a joke. It would be nice to have a real libertarian on the LP ticket for once to show the country that libertarianism is NOT a joke—that the system itself is a joke.
Dave Smith has the charisma and public speaking props to really engage audiences and red-pill a massive amount of people. Then again, I don't know how many more people there are to recruit to libertarianism at this point. Trump was one red-pill moment that woke many up, including me. Then Covid was an even larger event that woke up many more. But at this point, after the Covid propaganda barrage, if you haven't woken up yet, will you ever? Is hearing Dave Smith gonna be enough to break through? He can possibly persuade some conservatives on the right fed up with the GOP, plus many of the already politically disillusioned who likely weren't going to vote for anyone anyway, and there may also be some on the center-left who are growing tired of the Covid restrictions. But there will remain a significant number on each side who will always vote red or blue no matter what.
This does seem like a ripe time especially to strike at the GOP. They are halfway there with libertarians on many issues already. They are theoretically free market, so they could be convinced to become more consistent on the economic front. War is the major issue libertarians and Republicans disagree on, but again, after the recent disasters in the Middle East, conservatives could be persuaded to become more isolationist for the benefit of the country. There's never been a greater opportunity to turn conservatives more toward libertarianism. While on the other hand, progressives only grow further and further from the aims of liberty. As Mencius Moldbug said, "Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left." (Though Cthulhu seems to be swimming faster and faster lately.) Ultimately, focusing more on local elections is probably a better strategy. As is agorism and crypto and simply exiting the system.
Speaking of Moldbug, many in the "post-libertarian" crowd are influenced by Curtis Yarvin (as am I), but I don’t think Dave Smith’s strategy is in conflict with Moldbug’s. See his open letter to Ron Paul supporters, in which he explains that Dr. Paul's campaign was futile in the sense that even in the rare case that he won, he'd have no chance of actually succeeding in his platform to reduce the size of the government. What Moldbug laid out as the only way to real change is to change public opinion on a mass scale by providing a different (more accurate) narrative about reality. Ron Paul's campaign was a success in that sense—it woke up a lot of people (including Dave Smith), introducing them to the philosophy of libertarianism for the first time.
I love both Dave Smith and Curtis Yarvin, and though they have their differences, there is no reason for libertarians to have to choose between them. The post-libertarian crowd, influenced by Moldbug, are criticizing Dave's plan to run for president, but Dave's plan is actually right in line with the one Moldbug prescribed. Dave Smith would not be trying to win the presidency and reform the government. He knows he has no chance of either. His run for president would be a campaign to red-pill as many people as possible by using the platform of the Libertarian Party. “But there are other ways to spread the message than politics,” they say. Yes, of course there is, and Dave and others are already doing that. But as long as the platform of presidential elections exists, why not use it also. The truth is many people still care about the presidential election, even third-party candidates. So if Dave is up on the stage, they'll listen to what he has to say.
As Moldbug said, we need mass numbers of Americans to become red-pilled on the nature of the State and realize that the Federal government does not and will never work in their interest. Many people are hopelessly blue-pilled and have no desire or ability to see the truth. But there remain millions in that purple-pilled state, for whom Dave could push into red.
Of course if someone like Dave Smith is on the presidential ballot, the Cathedral will pull all kinds of dirty tricks to smear him. If they were willing to call Bernie Sanders and his followers Nazis, imagine what they'd do to Dave and anarcho-capitalists. The propaganda will certainly get ugly. The corporate media’s tactic against Ron Paul was to ignore him, but with the internet and social media of today, they may not have that option with Dave Smith. They will instead give him the Trump (or horse de-wormer) treatment and try to defame him.
The most obvious line of attack the corporate press will try to pull is to paint Dave as a “racist comedian.” Sadly, many people will fall for it and by association consider anyone who supports Dave to be racists too. They will also paint Dave and libertarians as science-deniers because of his criticisms of the Covid regime and therefore label him and his supporters as “dangerous” to public health. They will also focus on the “anarchist” part of anarcho-capitalism and label him and his followers as violent anti-government extremists trying to destroy democracy. Libertarians are against violence, but they’d at least be right about the other part. And naturally they'll call him a fascist neo-Nazi white supremacist because...why not? So instead of simply being able to point to the Libertarian candidate and tell my friends/family "that's what I am," I'd have to explain to them why libertarians are not racist fascist terrorists.
So it is a conundrum. I love Dave Smith and he has influenced my politics enormously. I would in a heartbeat vote for him. But still, I don't know that running for president is the best idea. If he runs there will undoubtedly be two definite outcomes: 1) People will discover libertarianism for the first time, become red-pilled, and join the liberty movement. 2) People will associate Dave Smith, his supporters, and the entire concept of libertarianism as racist, fascist, science-denying domestic terrorists who are a danger to public health and democracy and must be de-platformed from Twitter, YouTube, and all major media networks.
If Dave runs for president both will happen. The ultimate question is which of the two groups will be larger? I hope for the first but fear for the second. I won't tell Dave what to do, because it's a free country (or was...or should be...hopefully will be), and I honestly don't know what the best strategy to achieve liberty is, but I will support him no matter what he chooses.
