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A Libertarian Perspective on the 2026 Election
I was going to write a post about why, in this election, the right thing for libertarians to do is vote for Democrats for all federal offices, unless either 1) the Dem candidate is DSA, or 2) the GOP candidate is one of those very rare Republicans who oppose all or most of Trump's awful policies. But libertarian political philosopher Dan Shapiro beat me to it, in an excellent post at the Bleeding Heart Libertarian substack. I agree with the vast bulk of what he says. But I have a few additions and caveats that I will append after quoting a few key passages from Dan's post. Before getting into detail, I will note that I generally believe in voting for the lesser evil among those candidates with a realistic chance to win. Thus, unlike Dan, I don't usually vote for third party candidates, even in more normal times. If you're opposed to "lesser evil" voting on principle, we have a disagreement that goes far beyond the present election. But I would urge you to check out my defense of that practice, where I explain why you should even vote for the evil Queen Cersei over the even more evil Sauron, if those are the only available choices.
I don't expect this post or Dan's will change the outcome of the election. They almost certainly won't. But they might still be helpful in thinking through big issues we face in the current political moment.
Here's an excerpt from Dan's post:
Most of my voting life I voted for the Libertarian Party when they advocated classical liberal/libertarian policies. Now those who care about and prioritize liberty and a free society—however they label themselves—should vote Democratic unless the candidate is a Democratic Socialist….
There's been so much criminality and misdeeds in the Trump administration that it's exhausting to cover it all, but keeping "the land of the free and the home of the brave" means remembering the essentials. I provide links when the points I make are not common knowledge and/or might be controversial.
Violating the norm of peaceful transfer of political power
January 6: Trump is the only presidential candidate in the US who refused to concede that he lost. He told a crowd to "fight like hell," and the mob then stormed the Capitol to try to overturn the results. The House impeached him for "incitement of insurrection," and 57 senators, including seven Republicans, voted to convict—short of the two-thirds required. After his campaign of lies and deception and pressuring election officials to falsify the results failed to overturn the election, he later pardoned all the perpetrators of the violence.
Violating the rule of law, shredding due process, torture
ICE: masked secret police who kidnap people and send them to hellholes in El Salvador, where they were subject to constant beatings, sexual abuse, and torture; to the Central African Republic, in the midst of a brutal civil war with severe human rights abuses; to Florida's "Alligator Alcatraz," where large numbers of detainees were held in cages the size of phone booths; and to Fort Bliss, Texas, where guards grabbed detainees' testicles while beating them. There've been zero consequences for this; indeed, Trump says they are "immune."
Not only were the deportations done without any notification to families or lawyers, but ICE has disappeared from databases those they seized so lawyers and families can't find them.
ICE and CBP have rammed people in their cars, dragged the occupants out, and rammed into houses without warrants. They have murdered, wounded, and assaulted protestors and ICE monitors—Alex Pretti and Renee Good, during the ICE occupation of Minneapolis, being the most publicized—but there have been many others.
There is now "expedited removal" for anyone undocumented, which means no hearing before a judge. (And this is even though immigration judges are—wrongly—a part of, and not independent of, the executive branch.) Indeed, Trump fired any immigration judge who disagreed with him or whom he perceived as not being deportation-friendly enough, and replaced the Board of Immigration Appeals, which has denied appeals for almost all deportation orders.
The administration removed TPS (temporary protected status) for immigrants fleeing violence and is deporting them to the very countries the State Department has declared unsafe—e.g., Haiti.
ICE apprehended immigrant parents after they dropped their kids off at school (see here, here, and here), as well as apprehending children and toddlers and using them as bait (the Liam Conejo Ramos incident)….
Violating the ban on using the military for policing
Trump sent Marines to LA, and National Guard troops to Chicago and DC. This violates a basic norm since the Founding and violates Posse Comitatus, a statute banning the military from policing.
Assaults on free speech and free assembly
Trump and FCC chairman Carr threatened talk shows and networks for dissenting political opinions.
As mentioned, ICE murdered, assaulted, and wounded protestors and ICE monitors.
The administration targeted people for their political views and for writing op-eds. Rochester resident David Streever sent a critical email to the director of ICE, and five months later, federal officers tracked his movements and staked out his New York City hotel as he returned from an overseas trip….
There is much more, including explanations of why the Democrats (with the notable exception of DSA types) are far less bad than this, despite their considerable flaws. I myself have written about the evils of the DSA here, explaining why they are comparable to MAGA nationalist Republicans. In addition to the harm individual DSA members might cause if elected to office, it is important to reduce their numbers as much as possible, so as to minimize the chances that socialists could take over the Democratic Party, as MAGA nationalists have done with the GOP.
I have a few additions to Dan's arguments.
First, it is essential consider the enormous scale of Trump's harmful and unjust immigration and trade policies. Even under normal administrations, immigration restrictions threaten the economic and civil liberties of American citizens (to say nothing of those of immigrants themselves) more than any other federal policy. Trump's vast expansion of exclusion and mass deportation has made things a lot worse. The liberty and well-being of millions of people is at stake.
Trump's trade policies seek to impose the highest tariff levels since those that gravely exacerbated the Great Depression, and also are a grave menace to the rule of law. Here too, we're talking about massive effects on the liberty and welfare of millions. Judicial review can and has helped curb these abuses (more on the tariff front than immigration). But there is much Congress can do to help, including curbing funding to ICE and other agencies complicit in wrongdoing. Congressional Democrats also plan to cut back executive tariff authority. That may not succeed while Trump remains in office, but can help set the stage for later progress.
Dan raises the issue of whether non-DSA Democrats might be worse than the Trump-era GOP on economic liberty issues. This becomes an easy issue if you recognize that immigration restrictions and tariffs are also violations of economic liberty. Due to their massive scale, Trump's actions in this area easily outweigh the very real economic policy flaws of non-DSA Dems. And then we have such things as his acquisition of federal government stakes in numerous private firms, something that even the most left-wing recent Democratic presidents didn't attempt. It's a dramatic example of how MAGA nationalists have dangerous economic policies similar to those of socialists.
It is also important to remember that a Democratic Senate could block Trump's horrible executive and judicial nominees. I don't want to see any more Pete Hegseths and RFK, Jrs. In Trump's first term, he had some good judicial nominees. In the second, he has mostly bad ones (Emil Bove is a particularly egregious example). From a libertarian perspective, I'd rather have a standard liberal nominee fill the next Supreme Court vacancy (despite all the flaws such jurists have) than the type of right-winger Trump II is all too likely to nominate. Such a person would probably be selected for his willingness to turn a blind eye to executive abuses of power, trample civil liberties, and bulldoze constitutional obstacles to MAGA nationalist policies, such as federalism and separation of powers. There may well not be any Supreme Court vacancies, of course. But lower court nominations will arise, and they matter too.
Finally, I'm more hawkish than the average libertarian, and I think it's important to counter Trump's policies of undermining the Western alliance, and coddling mass-murdering dictators like Vladimir Putin and (to a lesser extent) Xi Jinping. We should care about defending liberty worldwide, not just in one country, especially since the two are interconnected. The Democrats (except for a few far-leftists) oppose this awfulness and could use control of Congress to help curb it.
In these and other areas, a Democratic-controlled Congress could not fully stop Trump's abuses. The executive has accumulated too much power for that, often in constitutionally dubious ways. But congressional control of nominations and purse strings can do much to constrain the executive at the margin. And electoral repudiation of Trump's abuses can reduce the risk that future presidents will imitate them.
I do have a few caveats to attach to Dan's otherwise compelling points:
First, Dan doesn't differentiate between elections for federal offices and those for state and local ones. I do. Beating the GOP in federal races is vital for countering Trump's awful agenda. At the state and local level, other issues are dominant, and Republicans are often better than Dems on the crucial issues of housing, state-level taxation, and state and local economic regulation. Which party is better on these and other state and local issues will vary from state to state. For example, red state Republicans are much better on the crucial issue of housing deregulation than blue state ones (who often back exclusionary zoning against Democratic reform efforts). Thus, it might make sense to vote for Republican candidates in some state and local races, but not others, depending on the issues involved.
Second, when it comes to the DSA problem, there can be difficult questions about what to do with Dem candidates who are not actual DSA members, but seem closely adjacent to them. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is a notable example. He says he's not a socialist, but also is closely aligned with socialists like Bernie Sanders, and "influencer" Hasan Piker, the guy who - among other things - praises communist mass murderers like Mao Zedong.
In this post, I'm not going to try to adjudicate each individual candidate and race. I will merely say that if you're trying to figure out whether a non-DSA member is actually a socialist, two noteworthy indicators are 1) whether he or she supports government control of all or most of the economy and 2) whether they praise socialist despots abroad, such as Mao, Fidel Castro, and others. If the answers to one or both questions are "yes," that's a strong indication they might be socialists, and therefore not worth voting for, except perhaps against the very worst Republicans.
There is a similar calculation in identifying the few Republicans who have opposed Trump's worst policies. Here, key indicators are whether they have opposed his tariffs, his mass deportations, his kowtowing to Vladimir Putin, and his attacks on civil liberties. Sadly, Republican candidates with consistent strong records on all or most of these issues, are few and far between, though Republican criticism of the tariffs and policies towards Russia have picked up in recent weeks.
Finally, as Dan would agree, voting for Democratic candidates does not imply supporting everything the Democratic Party does, or abstaining from criticizing Democrats on the many occasions when they do bad things.
Elsewhere, I have argued that libertarians, in the current political moment, should seek an alliance with "abundance liberals." But alliance is not the same thing as total agreement. And the Democratic Party obviously includes various factions who are much worse than the abundance types. We should keep that in mind, even as we recognize that right now the Republicans are much worse.
The post A Libertarian Perspective on the 2026 Election appeared first on Reason Magazine.
