Hearing this guy a bit more lately. Figured I'd slip him in here to start some conversation. Unfortunately, "Feel the Gary" doesn't sound as good, and well... Feel the Johnson... yeah.
Any who.
- An Everest-climbing, Ironman-competing, self-made millionaire, Johnson notched 10 percent or more in a couple of recent national polls against Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the two most disliked presidential candidates in modern American history. He’s chosen another former Republican governor as a running mate, one with fundraising bona fides, and is seen by many as the great tan hope of the Libertarian Party, a man who, as Johnson recently described himself to a crowd of the faithful, might be able to take “your weekly meeting that’s occurring in the tree house” and move it to an auditorium.
“I think 30 million people here are up for grabs that are probably Libertarian; it’s that they just don’t know it,” he said to me.
In other words, Gary Johnson is looking to make libertarianism normal. In the year of Trump, Bernie Sanders and flipping the system the bird, he might just have a shot. Still, it all depends on how weird Americans are willing to let things get.
EDIT:
For his boiled down stances.
My perception of the Libertarian Party is that they want to double down on the "I've already got mine, so you can go fuck yourself" part of the Republican platform. Nothing I've seen this so far this election cycle has convinced me that this has changed.
And abandon the culture war parts and the war on drugs. So in Libertopia you choose between starving in the street or earning your right to live by rimming your capitalist overlords if you're lucky enough to find a capitalist overlord who wants rimming, rentacops are the only cops, and you can't afford medical care, but you can marry who you want and spend your free time tripping balls to escape.
Basically. Don't get me wrong, I agree the government should be more hands off when it comes to cultural issues, but as you say, the end result is madness. Or it's especially so when they do what the capital-L Libertarians do and forget that you then have to do all this stuff at the state level, which means massive state-level tax increases. And you didn't see many Libertarians heading for Somalia during their period of no government, did you?