In an exclusive interview with Reason on Wednesday, former New Mexico governor and former Republican Gary Johnson announced that he will again seek the Libertarian party presidential nomination in order to, among other things, ban Muslim women from wearing burqas.



Are we France now? Do we tell Lafayette that we are here?

I’m not a Libertarian, but I’m familiar with the schtick: its purpose in American politics is to decouple the Republican goal of ending taxation on the wealthy and eliminating pro-labor regulation from the party’s sex policing, religious outrage and marginal-group “othering” that makes Republicans actually electable.



So Hayek only knows what Johnson is doing; his position undermines the entire Libertarian brand. You’re supposed to tell college kids that the invisible hand of the market will totally never result in their living in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis but, even if it did, you could wear whatever you wanted and smoke weed at the time. You’re not supposed to tell them that the government is going to impose a dress code and undermine religious freedoms.

Johnson has the pro-weed part of the Libertarian thing down, at least: he recently resigned as CEO of marijuana marketer Cannabis Sativa. And his 2012 Libertarian bid garnered one million votes, which was the most votes received by any Libertarian presidential campaign since 1980 Ed Clark-David Koch ticket (yes, that David Koch, of the Brothers Koch).

The newly minted candidate probably recognized an opportunity in 2012, especially after his own Republican party kept him off the debate stage in the primaries. All those cars in 2008 carrying “Ron Paul rEVOLution” stickers sported far fewer in 2012, and they’re not sporting Rand Paul 2016 stickers now.

The younger Paul is polling at 3.8% in New Hampshire, which gets him ninth place in a state whose Live Free Or Die license plates reflect the attitudes of a decent chunk of Libertarian-leaning voters. He’s losing for a lot of reasons: he doesn’t seem to like campaigning too hard; he’s not a magnetic speaker; and his pedantic delivery isn’t leavened by didja-know facts that aren’t really obscure.

Plus, Rand Paul inherited his father’s movement and took it for granted, toning down his stances on drug decriminalization – which remains one of the animating issues for the youngest members of the movement – and supporting more neoconservative interventionist positions to suck up to Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson. In trying to triangulate between elements of libertarianism and mainstream conservatism, Paul turned off the former and failed to woo the latter.

But if Johnson is running as a Libertarian (again) to fill the vacuum in the movement left by the Paul dynasty, it’s curious that his first major announcement included a pledge to eliminate some Americans’ personal liberties.

Johnson’s explanations for his anti-hijab pledge in the Reason interview made no sense: “Under sharia law ... women are not afforded the same rights as men ... Honor killings are allowed for under sharia law and so is deceiving non-Muslims.” Those are both great reasons to ban burqas if it can be proved that burqas commit murder, or if wearing a burqa eliminates the US government’s ability to afford women equal rights.

But his reasoning even sounds stupid within the bounds of Johnson’s own politics: a peddler of libertarian economic theory should be familiar with the concept of people doing things against their own self-interest, and the supposed reasons that the government should nonetheless not intervene.

Johnson’s paraphrased comments in the Reason interview don’t make him seem any smarter. “Under a burqa, how do you know if a woman has been beaten?”, he supposedly wondered. I don’t know, Gary, under a shirt, how can you tell she’s been either? How about under pants? Or under underpants? Maybe women should be nude for evidentiary purposes; every (privatized) police force can have a Hubba Hubba Flying Squad.

The Reason writer added, “Sharia, [Johnson] insisted, was not an expression of religion but of ‘politics’,” which is one of those distinctions that sound damning if you’ve never learned anything about most religions – and Gary Johnson doesn’t deserve a free pass on that.

Johnson has assuredly heard of Prosperity Gospel, which has been shoveling the economic theories of people like Gary Johnson at evangelicals for years. One could certainly dismiss entire chunks of Christianity as spiritually branded control of women. And Johnson wisely kept mum on whether his burqa ban would apply to, say, offshoots of Haredi Judaism, some of which demand that women clothe themselves in burqa-like garb (and which could not be painted as a font of grrl power).

Johnson’s anti-burqa stance isn’t about women’s rights, and it’s not about rolling back patriarchy. For one, rock-ribbed libertarians regularly reject the idea of legal mandates that are helpful to women – like equal pay, which supposedly merely rewards people who fail at negotiation and punishes private ownership. Johnson’s fatwa on burqas is just an effort to prohibit a visible, photogenic totem to capitalize on a political climate of increasing anti-Muslim hatred and paranoia. The ban is just Trumpism swaddled in a headscarf.

If Gary Johnson intends to rescue Libertarianism from the likes of Rand Paul, good luck. Rand Paul sold out his Libertarian cred in order to profit politically from nativist voters’ desire to combat the alleged Muslim problem over there. Johnson proposes to opportunistically tackle the same voters’ problems with Muslims over here, by suggesting that we violate the rights of consenting adults and overrule millions of parents who practice a religion of which its political demonization plays to the cheap seats.

If Donald Trump comes down hard on pot smokers, maybe Johnson has a chance to pick up another million votes in 2016; otherwise, he’ll just run the brand further into the ground. Gary Johnson can’t reverse the perception of Libertarians as nativist anti-government wing-nuts who like smoking pot with a campaign launch that begins by tripping and face-planting over the first line of the Bill of Rights.