The Libertarian Party is the third party John Kiriakou joined after prison. A third-generation Democrat, he says he was angry enough about the Obama administration and what had happened to him to throw his lot in with it, and that he found a home there.[1][2]
Why he joined
His reason is narrow and consistent. He is under no illusion that the Libertarians will win a presidential race and knows the party is small; but the Libertarians were the only ones talking about whistleblowing, about protecting and respecting the Constitution, and about the trade-off in national security between security and civil liberties.[3][4] He frames the choice as a rejection of tactical voting altogether: “a vote for the lesser of two evils is still evil.”[5]
He is not uncritical of his adopted party. Campaigning, he found “a lot of kooky Libertarians” — people who will not carry mobile telephones for fear the government is tracking their movements, of whom he observes drily that nobody cares about the movements of a life-insurance salesman in Dallas.[6] Asked by his wife whether he intended to stay, he said he thought he would probably go back to the Democrats — but only if they became serious about these rights.[4]
The circle, not the line
Underneath the party affiliation is a claim about the shape of politics. Kiriakou says he now considers himself part of the libertarian left, because the ideological spectrum is not a straight line but a circle, and the left and the right meet at the point where they care about civil liberties. It was those civil libertarians of both sides, he argues, who came out in support of Edward Snowden, and to whom he credits the eventual erosion of parts of the Patriot Act.[7] His own legal team ran along the same seam: he describes Bruce Fein, one of his attorneys, as a constitutional lawyer and a senior figure in the Libertarian Party.[8]
He keeps the label knowing it is contested. “I like to describe myself politically as a member of the libertarian left. Some libertarians will tell you there is no such thing as the libertarian left, that the libertarian movement by its nature is a right-wing movement. I disagree strongly” — while conceding that he walks a fine line.[9] The line runs through the American form of the doctrine, which he characterises as an ideology of self-sufficiency: “I don’t need anything from the government. I take care of myself.” On his reading that premise obliges a libertarian to hate the police, the military and the intelligence services alike, and is read in the United States as a conservative position.[10]
He takes only part of it. He does not hate the military or the intelligence services, he says; the police he does. And against the self-sufficiency premise he sets a commitment most libertarians do not share — a social safety net, care for the old and the poor, and the welcoming of refugees and immigrants.[11] What he retains from the other side is the founding suspicion, which he attributes to Ronald Reagan in 1984 — that government is the problem rather than the solution to the problem — on the ground that government is corrupt by its nature. He applies that specifically to his own country, against what he says Americans like to think of themselves: they are not smarter, more honest or more forward-thinking than anybody else, and “corruption is a terrible problem in the United States.”[12] The same reasoning carries into his test of American military action abroad, the three legal ways to enter another country.[13]
The money problem
The party’s structural weakness, in his telling, was explained to him offhandedly by Gary Johnson during the 2016 campaign and stuck with him: the Libertarian Party does not have a benefactor. There had been a generous California family that made its money in canned tomatoes, but no ongoing patron — while the Democrats and Republicans have hundreds of them.[14][15] In a later telling he gives the figure the party lacked as somebody able to write a cheque for $150 million, and adds the reason no such patron appears: AIPAC would never support a libertarian candidate for president, because libertarians are anti-militarist. What the party had instead was $40,000 from a man described to him only as the canned-tomato king of California, spent on a Winnebago that carried the campaign from state to state and was sold after the election.[16]
The 2016 campaign
Kiriakou joined the board of the party and travelled with Johnson — he gives the figure variously as twelve, eighteen and twenty states — everywhere from Kalamazoo to Anchorage in the weeks before the election.[17][18] The strategy was not to win outright but to hold the eventual winner below 270 electoral votes and throw the election into the House of Representatives, with the aim of encouraging the growth of third parties; Kiriakou wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing they would take Utah and New Mexico. They polled 23 per cent in Utah and finished with about 11. Nationally the Libertarians took roughly 3 per cent, a historic high for the party.[18][19]
Kiriakou sets that against a longer American history in which viable third parties were normal: as recently as a century ago the United States had a viable socialist party and a viable progressive party.[20]