Gary Johnson, an Anti-Government Radical

By Ronnie Dugger, Reader Supported News

29 October 16

 

re we, the American people, going to make Donald J. Trump the most powerful human being on earth?

The maybe ten or eleven million citizens who, judging from his 8% in the late-stage polls, are going to vote for Gary Johnson for President, along with those for Jill Stein, may very well be the deciding actors if our collective No or Yes is close on November 8th.

Johnson is the former Republican governor of New Mexico who is now the Libertarian Party’s candidate for President along with Hillary Clinton, Trump, and Stein, the Green Party’s candidate who, at 2 or 3% in the polls, can pull maybe about three million votes. Clinton runs stronger in the head-to-head polls against only Trump than she does in the polls among the four.

When mentioned in the national press, Stein is usually accurately characterized as liberal and bitingly anti-Clinton. Most of those voting for Johnson, though, can hardly comprehend what they are voting for because the national press, when occasionally giving him a passing report, quick-sketch him as a social liberal on issues of personal life and a foe of our wars. He is very much more or less than that.

His supporters might want to know more about what they are voting or about to vote for.

Gary Johnson’s idolized writer-philosopher is Ayn Rand, the hardcore right-wing novelist. “I view government in the same way as philosopher Ayn Rand,” he says, namely, he explains, “that it really oppresses those that create, if you will, and tries to take away from those that produce and give it to non-producers.” When Johnson’s wife-to-be asked him about his politics he gave her a copy of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. As if for the icing on his Rand cake, Johnson says his favorite “political philosopher” is Milton Friedman, the famous American champion of hard-right-wing economics.

Accordingly, Johnson believes that “government is the problem” and not the solution “except by getting out of the way.” He opposes as wrong the existence of any minimum wage; as governor he vetoed raising the minimum at that time in New Mexico from $4.25 to $5.65. Pro-choice on (but no federal money to pay for) abortions, he opposes the Roe v. Wade decision itself as none of the Supreme Court’s business.

He is for the abolition of unemployment compensation, which, he reasons, weakens the jobless workers’ search for work. He proposes a “gross income cap” on welfare recipients. He opposes President Obama’s economic stimulus program “or any type of federal stimulus” – the 2008 federal bailout of the banks, any federal subsidies to farmers, any federal money for mass transit – all No.

He favors unlimited political campaign contributions by corporations – “no limits on campaign contributions” from corporations or PACs; he opposes federal spending or action against climate change, such as federal support for renewable energy or taxing carbon emissions; he condemns, too, affirmative action that considers race or sex by either universities or government. On gun control he believes that legalizing “concealed carry” reduces crime; he argues against outlawing civilians’ possession of military-type assault rifles.

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The Libertarians’ candidate opposed Bush’s and our nation’s war of aggression on Iraq and proposes now our military withdrawal from Afghanistan and Libya. He opposes our country having “100,000 troops on the ground in Europe.” Killing terrorists by drone bombings increases terrorists, he maintains.

As for Israel, to which the U.S. is committed for $38 billion in the next decade, he would “cut all support and aid.” Indeed, he would cut and stop all U.S. foreign aid to every foreign country. He would close one fifth of U.S. military bases here and abroad. Concerning genocide in Sudan, he said, “Do not get involved.”

Johnson would cut the total federal budget by 43%, almost half, and, as he said, he would “Start out with the big four, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and Defense.” On another occasion he said, “You got to start off by talking about Medicare and Medicaid by 43%.”

Kill the graduated income tax, “eliminate the corporate income tax,” and abolish the Internal Revenue Service, he declares! The income tax is “a massive deployment of government force on our lives, our finances, and our freedom.” He would repeal not only the income, corporate, capital gains, and estate taxes, he would replace all federal taxes with one flat 23% national sales tax on new purchases, but not on those between businesses. From his 23% national tax on consumers he postulates a monthly payback to roughly offset the cost of “necessities.”

“I would cut Social Security by raising the retirement age,” he says, and he would reduce that historic universal social-insurance plan to a politics-vulnerable welfare program open only to those poor enough to pass a new “means test.” He is also open to turning it into a states-run program or abolishing it altogether. “A portion of Social Security needs to be privatized, if not all,” he has written. Instead of starting full benefits at age 65 as now, he has said variously that he’d start them at ages “70 or 72” (2010), maybe 75 (by implication last June 22), or 70 (last July 7).

Likewise, he says, Medicare needs to be “means-tested” (limited to those certified poor instead of, as now, universal), and he would “dial back” Medicaid benefits. Maybe the government could provide insurance for “catastrophic injury and illness,” he grants, but government-administered health care, such as single-payer, national health insurance, or a public option, “is insanity.”

And education? Johnson would abolish the U.S. Department of Education (and, in passing, the Housing and Urban Renewal, since renamed). He says that he is for the separation of religion and state, but he enthusiastically advocates the use of federal money to pay students’ costs of education in private and church-run schools in order, he says, to provide competition with the public schools.

To double-check any of this about Johnson readers could Google “Gary Johnson on the issues,” thereby receiving entry into his records and many statements in the public-records search site, “On the Issues.” (Voters for other federal candidates can Google this same reliable site for policy positions and excerpts of candidates’ statements.)

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Despite all, this exploding year in a close outcome very wild cards could elect Donald Trump – his unceasing lying and his cruel ruthlessness; Putin’s maliciously timed releases of Clinton emails; Comey’s re-opening of the FBI investigation (just this morning as I write); Trump voters too embarrassed to admit it to the pollsters; racism, misogyny, hypernationalism, deep in the body politic; the convulsive and genuine revolt in progress against the U.S. corporate oligarchy and our two corrupt controlling political parties. I believe high-minded abstainers and voters for Johnson or Stein could and may swing a close election to Trump.

But his election would be an unpredictable disaster for the United States and the human race.

On this, let me briefly tell you about the worst mistake of a number of them that I ever made in my life. In 1996 I had personally urged my friend Ralph Nader to run for President as a Democrat, but he refused. In 2000, after an agonized inner debate walking for hours with myself I think it was in Kansas City, I agreed to introduce and celebrate him to the national convention that then, as planned, nominated him to run against Al Gore.

At campaign’s end, going back on contrary assurances, Ralph as-if deliberately beat Gore by campaigning at the last in the swing state, Florida, getting 97,000 votes there and causing the razor-thin state outcome which enabled the Republicans and the Supreme Court to then boldly steal the presidency from Gore. Bush the Third led us deceitfully into waging aggressive wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, killing millions, that is, millions of people so far.

To the very minor extent of any impact that my support for and introducing to nominate Nader against Gore, I will always bear my personal portion of guilt for those deaths and for so much rotten else that Bush the Third did to us all. Let’s go on fighting for an open system of multiple and multiply-debating political parties, but in this trapped situation we are still in I will never do that again.

So, as Bernie Sanders keeps asking the young voters thinking to not vote or to vote for Johnson or Stein and not Clinton, please consider our whole human situation very carefully. Given Trump’s temperament and his total indifference to the suffering which his actions, opinions, and heartless cruelties directly and repeatedly cause – diminishing opponent after opponent, insulting and groping women, specifically committing again and again to use torture, twice suggesting Hillary’s assassination, “bombing the shit out of” – his volatile anger and his determined revengefulness – this all feels like murderous war, and far worse even than that, because as President in sole control of them he well actually might launch our nation’s nuclear weapons into mutual mass murder – any one of them can kill a million people, and certainly then there would be mass-murdering retaliation against us. Of course none of us know in advance. Non-voters, Johnson, Stein voters, please do think this through. Your grandchildren may be asking you about it before you go, if we're still here.

And anyway, you do know now that, as the facts pertain, Gary Johnson is not just social liberalism and anti-war, that his sincerely-held but potently destructive Ayn Rand-Friedmanesque anti-democracy convictions are nothing to be strengthening nationally past the 5% threshold for possibly on-the-ballot voting in 2020 by voting now for Gary Johnson.

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Ronnie Dugger won the 2011 George Polk career award in journalism. He founded The Texas Observer, has written biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, a book on Hiroshima and one on universities, many articles in The New Yorker, The Nation, Harper’s, Atlantic, Mother Jones, and other publications, and is now writing a book on new thinking about nuclear war. His email is This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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