The unlikely victory that our now President-Elect, Donald Trump, pulled off this week has left many wondering about the future of our nation.
What does this mean, in particular, for the future of the liberty movement? Allow me to sift through the hearsay and leave you with the facts.
To do this we must examine one enormous lie regarding Trump’s victory that, although both sides know to be false, they have been spinning in their favor. This egregious untruth is that Donald Trump took the election through no small victory. I don’t mean that he won by a large margin, more so, that we were told he had a large swath of voters come out in support to carry him over the finish.
The left used this against him, with news outlets accrediting the biggest political upset in American history to a voter turnout that was largely unaccounted for. This was supposedly a group of racist, white, rural voters who only came out because Trump’s unbecoming character related to their idea of leadership. Without this support, he would’ve lost, helping you believe the accusations of Trump’s racism to be true all along.
The right obviously went in the opposite direction, telling this lie to overexaggerate their victory, giving off the impression that they’re larger than they really are. Equating the nobility of their platform to be tied to its number of followers. As if what they stand for touched Americans so deeply, that an unobserved movement quietly formed around it. Their new-found support manifesting itself into votes and throwing down the metaphorical gauntlet on Washington, D.C. yelling “No more!” The reality, however, is quite different.
There was neither an influx of altruistic turnout, nor a bigoted, regressive wave propping up Trump to his impending office.
It was actually the story of how less people showed up, and what that says about American’s resolve for liberty.
In 2012, Mitt Romney received 60.7 million total votes, losing to Barack Obama’s 65.4 million. Yet, the left and right won’t mention this, because in comparison, Trump’s victory this month came from a whopping 59.6 million, although Hillary had 59.9 million. This means the Republican victor won with less votes than the losing Republican had four years ago. The news is even worse for Clinton, having over 5 million voters drop off the Democrat wagon in only four short years. In actuality, then, an overwhelming call to action was not the cause, but rather, the longstanding assault on our basic freedoms led Americans to look elsewhere for an answer.
This means the crooked election system that has forever been considered inevitable, became unraveled all on its own just by a reluctance of voters to participate, resulting in an unforeseen turn of events. I don’t need to tell you why this is good news for the liberty movement.
Trump may have won, but by giving these candidates historically-low turnout figures, and giving libertarians the highest third party numbers in a generation, Americans are saying that they aren’t going to stand for what’s been going on in Washington. While the media will have you thinking that the modern left is growing larger each year, or that Trump represents the virtues of middle America, the truth is that America is moving back to its founding principles of small government and personal liberty.
So even though Johnson may not have performed as well as many of us were hoping for, third party options are not dead in this country. The bad news is that we were right: this election really did hold the potential for a third party win, had we have not been so underprepared and unorganized. In the end, what does that mean for us? It means that, now more than ever, it is time to organize and capitalize, because what America has shown us, is that we are closer than we think.
* Thomas J. Eckert is a college student graduating with his degree in December. He studies economics and history and writes in his spare time on political and economic current events.
Thomas J. Eckert
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