Over the past decades, Americans have seen many of their rights come under fire from the federal government. In 1971, President Nixon announced the drug war; along with this war came mandatory sentencing for non-violent offenders. In 2013, it was discovered that the NSA had been collecting Americans’ phone data, violating the rights to privacy guaranteed by the Constitution. The candidate most likely to be the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, has called for less protection for journalists for what he views as libelous speech.
America needs a political movement that will continue to secure these and other rights for future Americans. This movement is the liberty movement, which has been active and growing for many years.
The current leader of the movement in the federal government is libertarian-leaning Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). Sen. Paul, like his father before him, ran with a fair amount of traction for the Republican presidential nomination for president, but was not successful, despite support for popular movements such as criminal justice reform and the federal decriminalization of marijuana. Why was this the case? Was it because there was no liberty movement to support them?
Mainly, the media drowned both Ron and Rand Paul out. In this election cycle Rand Paul was largely ignored by the media, and he received least amount of speaking time of any Republican candidate during the first debate.
Perhaps more egregious is the complete and utter blind eye the media has turned on the actual Libertarian Party itself. In 2012 presidential election, Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson received over one million votes, a significant sum for a third party.
Nevertheless, Libertarians are excluded from national debates just as liberty-minded Republicans are denied adequate media coverage. It appears that the cards are stacked against the liberty movement ever having a great voice in American politics.
Unsurprisingly, in the 2016 election, the two main candidates of each party seek to increase the size and scope of the federal government. Donald Trump, as stated before, seeks to punish those who denounce him in the media; he has vowed attacks on religious freedom in the name of security and has spoken generally authoritarian rhetoric throughout his campaign.
Likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is your standard establishment and interventionist politician. She voted for the invasion of Iraq and orchestrated the disastrous regime change in Libya. She is seemingly at the will of large donors; she has received plentiful donations from large Wall Street firms and billionaire investor Warren Buffett, to name a few.
Whichever one of these two likely candidates will be a threat to liberty in the United States, it will be up to the liberty movement to stop them from further trampling over Americans’ constitutional rights.
Even if the movement is small, its influence is still greatly important and it is a voice that needs to be heard. Even if you disagree with many Libertarian positions, such as what some will consider to be extreme pro-gun views and pro-drug views, the Libertarian cause can be a great unifier between the Republican and Democratic parties. In this age where regulation and government oversight bears harder on our lives, it is the liberty movement that will continue the fight for the freedoms we take for granted.