 Can the Libertarian Party become a major contender that consistently wins elections? If the organization's dismal 50-year track record isn't discouraging enough, now the LP is in disarray after its chairman and two members of its National Committee resigned in the wake of an attempt to decertify the New Hampshire affiliate due to conflicts over its social media presence. This episode has revealed an organization at war with itself over vision, tactics, and messaging. To get a better sense of what's going on, reason spoke with former Michigan congressman Justin Amash, who finished his five terms in office as the first and only Libertarian to hold national office. He had been elected as a Republican, became an independent, and affiliated with the LP for the last few months of his tenure. Amash flirted with a run for the LP's presidential nomination in 2020 before choosing to drop out of consideration. Despite not holding an official position in the party's leadership, he is its best known member. In the wake of the recent scandal, he chastised the New Hampshire affiliate for what he called its horrible messaging, even as he said attempts to remove its leadership were illegitimate. I'm committed to making the Libertarian party a major contender that consistently wins elections. He wrote, we must work together to build a big tent party that can take on the old parties and defend the rights of the people. Representative Justin Amash, thanks for talking to reason. Thanks, Nick. So you've written and you've talked about the LP as you you see it or you insist that it should be a major contender that consistently wins elections. How are you feeling about that right now in the wake of this? You had a resignation of the Libertarian Party's national chairperson as well as two members of the Libertarian National Committee. I still feel positive. It's a small party. So when you have a small party, you can have things get upset pretty quickly and pretty easily, you know, a few people shake up one state affiliate. And all of a sudden, a lot of things start to crumble. So it's not that surprising when you have a party of this size. But my goal is to make the party much, much larger. And when you have a much larger party, things like this just don't have the same impact. I mean, when you look at the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, they have crazy stuff going on all the time. And the party doesn't fall apart because it's it's big enough and robust enough. So that's kind of a success story, right? Their parties fall apart because they are rife with liars and hypocrites. The Libertarian Party falls apart because people disagree. Yeah, I mean, it's it's small. It's not it's not that the party is falling apart. It's that the party doesn't really have an identity yet. OK, you know, it doesn't have a clear identity. And let's let's talk about that in a second. I want to ask us in a tweet that came out right after all of this stuff between the, you know, the National Party and particularly things going on in the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire came out. You wrote, I think what was a perfectly balanced kind of discussion, you said that there was a due process violation on the part of the National Party or some people in the National Party. You know, what was what due process got mucked up in in in this? Well, it didn't seem to me that you could just go off and start a new state affiliate and claim that it was the legitimate state affiliate without going through proper channels. You can't just have one state party chairman go off and do that. And it's it it doesn't reflect on my opinion of the, you know, like, do I agree with the chairman philosophically or not? I had plenty of concerns about the way the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire was running at social media accounts and other things that were going on. But at the same time, you have to go through the proper process. And if we don't like what's going on with the state affiliate, the thing you do is bring it to the attention of the party at large. You might bring it to the attention of the Libertarian National Committee. You you definitely bring it to attention of people within the state. But you don't just run off and form a new state affiliate and say, well, this is the new party and and we're going to also take the resources, by the way, of the old party and lock out the executive committee that was elected at the previous election. So in the same statement about it, you also you talked about horrible messaging and edge lording coming from people running, particularly the social media kind of the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire. What were the examples of that? Or what what was what were the horrible messages that were being sent? Oh, there was one about John McCain's brain tumor. Yeah, that McCain's McCain's brain tumor saved more lives than Anthony Fauci. Something. Yeah, something like that. There was another one about child labor. There were there were a lot of examples. And the person who was allegedly doing the tweets through the party account was also putting out some pretty crazy personal tweets as well. So, you know, there was a lot of horrible messaging. When you message like that, it actually indicates an insecurity in your ideas. I mean, it suggests that you don't have profound ideas. And the way to get attention is to say things that sound extreme or sound shocking, because, you know, you don't really believe in what you're saying. You've just got to get some attention some other way. I always would tell my staff whenever we'd write anything, you know, cut out some of the adjectives, cut out the descriptions, like of how we feel about it. Just talk about the facts. Talk about what's going on. If you have really profound ideas, if you have solid ideas, if you're speaking the truth, people will latch onto that. It's actually when you don't have a solid foundation that you have to resort to all sorts of edge lording or or shock value in order to bring attention to it. And I suggest this is the Michigander and you coming out like Ernest Hemingway. You want to get rid of adjectives and just simple declarative sentences, right? I love Ernest Hemingway, and it's funny you bring Hemingway up because I would tell my staff we have to write like Ernest Hemingway. Literally, I literally I encourage them to read Ernest Hemingway and said, when we write, we're going to try to write more like Ernest Hemingway, you know, keep it simple or write adjectives. It seems like the party is acting more like Ernest Hemingway towards the very end of his life, though, putting the gun in their own mouths. So you talk about like the Libertarian Party's identity or message. What, you know, what is the where is the lack of clarity coming from? And then what, you know, what is the process by which a unified message comes out and what do you think that message should be? I think part of the problems was that we have had a relatively weak Libertarian National Committee, you know, the party at the highest level has been pretty weak, and this is not an indictment of the particular people. There are people who work in the Libertarian Party and work at the LNC who work very hard, have dedicated a lot of time and effort to it and have built up something that has been successful in many respects. For example, we've been getting ballot access for for several years. And Gary Johnson, despite all of the criticisms, was with the most successful presidential candidate. Yeah, I mean, you know, can I, I mean, like people say this all the time. And it's true, you know, I was preparing for this and I was looking at the, you know, 50 year history of the LP, you know, currently, and I think one of them might have resigned, there are two state level officers, you know, over a 50 year period. So the LP electorally isn't doing particularly well. But Gary Johnson, you know, four years ago or five years ago now did historically well. Joe Jurgensen, you know, in a weird campaign with virtually no publicity got the second highest vote total ever in the LP. So is it possible that actually the reason why there's, you know, so much climate going on is because maybe there, you know, in the last three presidential elections, we've had basically like a million votes or better, I mean, substantially more. So maybe the party is worth fighting over now. It is worth fighting over. And I think that is part of what's going on. I think there is a sense that the party has capacity now to make a difference. And there are people now who want to to be able to use that capacity. So there is a fight now for what does the Libertarian Party stand for? What does it mean to be in the Libertarian Party? And and I I still think, despite the recent successes, I agree with many of the people who have been critical of the party in suggesting that the party hasn't really made an effort to stand out, you know, a lot of times it presents itself as the third option. It presents itself as something that is a fallback sort of choice. And has it really distinguished itself from the Republican Party or the Democratic Party? And and we need to do more of that because we have ideas. We have principles. We have policies that I think more Americans identify with than the Republicans or the Democrats have. Yeah. So what are some of those key, you know, is it is it a question of like hammering home the topics that or the subjects, the policy areas that people agree with? Or is it the type of messaging? Because I was looking at Gallup, you know, a couple of times a year, releases political self identification polls. What do most people think, regardless of whether they register as a Republican and Democrat, a Libertarian, whatever, how do they identify themselves? And just recently, it was like 40 percent of Americans say they are independent, 30 percent say they're Democrat, 24 percent say they're Republican. So, you know, granted, you know, a lot of everybody votes basically either Democratic or Republican, but for the past 20 years, there has been a plurality of people who say they're independent. How do the Libertarians get to those people? What are the issues that they need to really kind of focus on? Well, I think we need to focus on federalism, decentralization, localism. I think when you talk to people, and I've done a lot of that during my time in office, talk to people about what concerns them. A lot of it comes down to who is doing what and who has the power to do what. And at any given moment, people prefer the federal government to have more power than the state government. But as a general matter, people actually prefer decisions being made closer to home. This is across the board. You can talk to Republicans. You can talk to Democrats. And as a general matter, they do not prefer the decisions being made far away. And I think Democrats got to see that with Donald Trump in office. They got to really feel what it's like to have someone at the federal level doing things that they vehemently disagree with. And hoping and dreaming of having more power at home to make their own decisions. And actually, you saw a lot of cities and states try to go on their own on a number of issues to say, like, look, we don't care what Donald Trump's doing. We're going to do our own thing. So I think Democrats understand this now better than ever. Republicans certainly for a long time have spoken about federalism. They haven't always lived up to it. And they certainly didn't live up to it during the Donald Trump years. But I think that is an important issue. Decentralization, localism. I think another one is the rule of law and equality before the law. This idea that laws are going to be general. They're not going to be arbitrary things that someone comes up with. They're going to be general rules of just conduct. And you're not going to have someone essentially operating as like some kind of dictator, someone who's telling you how to behave. What's an example of that? Where a recent law or laws that are being passed that are just like, OK, you people, you have to live by a different standard than the rest of us. Well, I mean, we see this all the time. It comes up most clearly in equality before the law issues. One of the most important elements of the rule of law is this idea of equality before the law. And we see all the time where there are two standards. There is an approach for sometimes big corporations or rich people. And there's an approach for other people. Look at the COVID relief package where the cash distributions to people were relatively limited. But then there was a $500 billion slush fund that Mnuchin could just dip into to help whoever he wants. And we saw that the majority of the COVID package was like that. And that's pretty common. This idea of corporate welfare or helping those who don't need that much help while ignoring those who do need help. So I think that this sort of disparity is something that libertarians can talk about, can latch on to, that I think really will resonate. You know, we're against corporate welfare. We're against unequal treatment. We believe people should be treated equally before the law. And there shouldn't be two systems of justice. There shouldn't be a system of civil asset forfeiture across the nation. Right now we have adoptive forfeiture, which Donald Trump put in place. And Joe Biden hasn't gotten rid of. So the feds are actually working with states and local governments now on civil asset forfeiture. And this really hurts people at lower income levels. It definitely hurts people in the black community, in the Hispanic community, in other communities across the country. And if you're a rich white person, you're not affected that much by civil asset forfeiture. But if you are a person in many neighborhoods and communities across America, you are deeply affected by it. And you are in trouble if they come and take your property. So those kinds of things, drug laws as well, there are lots of issues with how drug laws are enforced and the equality issues that relate to drug laws and our justice system generally. So I think talking about these things can be very effective concepts for the libertarian part. You know, part of the part of the wrap of being a libertarian is like you're either a conservative who smokes weed or something you smoke weed, you smoke weed, you smoke weed, is hammering home that I mean drug legalization is happening. Marijuana, you know, over two thirds of Americans believe that marijuana should be legal for recreational use. States are passing last November every ballot initiative that was for legalizing either pot or other types of drugs, you know, past Oregon decriminalize small possession of all sorts of drugs and things like that. Is that something that libertarians should lead with or does that risk stereotyping libertarians as you know, just drug users? Well, I think it used to be more of a stereotype. Actually, when the public wasn't as much on our side. So now I think we should move forward with it. We should push hard on it. You know, maybe if you asked me 20 years ago, I'd say, hey, you know, that's not necessarily the topic you should lead with as a libertarian. Nowadays, I don't think it's that big a deal if a libertarian wants to lead with that, depending on the context, depending on the community. Again, we were talking about the libertarian party and how it should operate. I think the libertarian party needs to think in terms of big ideas and let the candidates go out and make the decisions for how they want to communicate those messages. So if a candidate feels like the drug war is a big issue in that person's community, then then go ahead and lead with it. I think that's important. How much, what about, you know, I'm looking, I prepared a list of things that, you know, the LP may not have been particularly successful in pushing forward, but you know, society has gotten there that libertarians probably should be claiming something like that is non-interventionism and, you know, a kind of anti-war sentiment. Libertarians have been there for decades and it's a pretty, that's a pretty lonely protest line to be on. Do you think libertarians or the LP should be focusing on foreign policy questions and the ways in which the government has misprosecuted wars for, you know, so, you know, I mean, for the entire life really of millennials and Gen Z? Yeah, of course. I think we need to be on top of that issue and that should be one of the issues we emphasize. I mean, you look at the Trump administration, the Biden administration and previous administrations and they've all been terrible on this issue. You know, if we get Kamala Harris in there running against Donald Trump or even like Rhonda Santis or whatever, they're going to be terrible on that issue as well. So, you know, it's something that libertarians can focus on, can stress, where I think the majority of the public are with us or at least the plurality of the public are with us. And, you know, the easiest message here is at least make sure that our wars are constitutional, you know, like, we can argue all we want and I do about the morality of it. And I think that that's important. It's important to talk about the morality of it. But a baby step, at least an initial step that gets most of the public on our side is the wars need to be constitutional. If they're not authorized, they're not authorized. And there are currently no legitimately authorized wars, in my opinion. When you look at the 2001 AUMF, that was for going after the perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks. It is not for willy-nilly terrorism here or there. And when you look at the 2002 AUMF, that's for going after Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime. It's not for just general matters in Iraq or in the Levant or the Fertile Crescent or wherever. It's not for that kind of thing. So, I think we need to focus on that as an initial step. And then we can bring people along to a lot of the other aspects of war, the immorality of it. But look, you can stop a lot of it by just talking about how it's unconstitutional, it's not authorized, the American people haven't supported it. I don't want to put you on the spot in terms of Monday morning quarterback in Gary Johnson or Joe Jorgensen. But where did they fail then? Because in a lot of this stuff, they talked about being anti-war. They talked about being in favor of federalization of laws and of decentralization, of pushing decision-making down to as local a level as possible and things like that. So what failed in their general issue set or was it more the way in which they expressed themselves? Well, I think Joe Jorgensen was at a clear disadvantage in this election because of the way it played out because you had such a polarized electorate and there was such a compressed time period for the campaign. You couldn't really go out and campaign in the traditional sense because of COVID and all the masking and the lockdowns and everything else. That made it very difficult for her. So I think it's hard to say how that would have played out in a different environment and with a longer stretch. And I've encouraged libertarians to make decisions about the presidential candidate sooner. I think we're waiting too long and we're getting into the game too late to make the impact we need to make. We need to start the process sooner. As for Gary Johnson, I think he was someone who ran a robust campaign but came across as a bit goofy at times. I like Gary. Every person has characteristics. It's just the way he is. He is kind of a guy who isn't taken seriously enough, unfortunately, on the national stage. I mean that is no disrespect to him. I think he's a very nice guy and he worked hard but it just didn't play out the right way. It is odd too though that he gets a huge amount of abuse despite tripling or quadrupling and the previous best effort. I want to make it clear. I don't think that he was, like when you think of relative to other candidates libertarian parties had, people often present him as a weak candidate. I think actually he was a relatively strong candidate for the libertarian party and got the best numbers we've ever had. Again, I think, look, this is just what people tell me when I talk to them about Gary Johnson. People think he was a little goofy at times. That's just a personal characteristic and I'm not sure that's something someone can change. I'm sure people have adjectives to describe me and to describe you and that's just the way life is. How important is it for the libertarian party to be a political party as opposed to a kind of libertarian outreach group? One of the things that was different about Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, his vice president, is that they were both twice elected governors of states. They actually lived and worked as politicians who got into office. That doesn't always mean anything. I mean somebody like Bob Barr had been a former congressman, had been a libertarian party presidential candidate, Ron Paul, had been in 1988, he had been a congressman for a decade. But how important is it that the LP be a political party that is first and foremost about running campaigns and getting people into office at the state, local, and federal level? It's critically important. It's the libertarian party. It has to be both libertarian and a party. And I think a lot of people miss that. They are focused on turning it into some kind of activist group. And if you want to do activism, go out and start a nonprofit. The libertarian party is not for activism in that sense. Political parties exist to organize people to win elections. And we as a party have to go and reach out to people who think of themselves as libertarian or who can fairly easily be brought over to the libertarian side. And I think actually that's a very big pool of voters. That's not a small pool of voters. If you're going out and trying to evangelize people and convert them into libertarians, I think you will fail as a political party. You can't do that. That's for outside organizations. That's for entertainers, podcasters, other people. But it is not for the political party. The political party has to go find libertarians and bring them together. And when you talk about all of those independent voters out there, it might be 50% of the electorate or something like that. When you talk about all those independent voters, those are available voters. Those are people who are open to voting for a libertarian candidate. And because of the nature of this country, because we are a very classically liberal country, that we are a country that believes in a lot of things that the libertarian party believes in. People believe in it innately, inherently. A lot of our structures and systems are built up around classical liberalism, including our constitution. So when you talk to people, there is a classical liberal bias in most Americans. So it is not actually that hard to bring them over to libertarianism. I think the mistake a lot of people are making is they're presenting libertarianism as something that is almost foreign and unusual, something that is not inherently American. And they're presenting it as something that is very different. And look, I'm going to shock you with how different this is. When actually we should be doing the opposite, we should be showing them how mainstream this is, how practical this is, how American it is. It is the essence of America, is this sort of libertarian philosophy. So that's in a nutshell, it's kind of like live and let live. It's limited government. It's having the right level of government making the right decisions that are most relevant to its jurisdiction. Yeah, absolutely. It's all of those things. It's protecting our rights. When people think about the First Amendment or the Second Amendment or the Fourth Amendment, we're thinking of things that are very libertarian. When we watch movies, how often are the plots libertarian plots? It's the government trying to do something corrupt and they're violating people's rights and they're using your data in various ways. The plots are very libertarian in our movies and people love those movies. They go out and they watch these movies and they don't necessarily ascribe it to libertarianism. They don't watch the movie and think, well, this is libertarian because they actually don't think about libertarianism in that way because it's so innate. It's so inherent that they're not even thinking about it. It's almost like libertarianism is so close to home to most Americans that they don't even think about it as libertarianism. So when we as a party, God and try to say libertarianism is this other thing. It's this foreign concept. It's this unusual thing. We are actually pushing people away. What we want to say to them is, this is what you already believe. You already hold these views and then we bring them along. Maybe they have some inconsistencies. So okay, they do generally hold those views but they have some other inconsistent views. Once they see that actually what they believe at their core is libertarianism, they'll start to modify their other views. They'll say like, look, I've been analyzing this other issue kind of wrong. I now see that actually I am pretty libertarian. I have these ideas about how our system should work and maybe I've been making a mistake about this particular issue. So you can bring them along and other issues by showing them how libertarian they are in the first place. What is your official relationship with the libertarian party because you're not actually in a leadership role? Okay. So I mean, you are certainly you're the only member of Congress who have ever been affiliated as a libertarian. You transferred your representation or your affiliation in the final few months of your time in Congress. Are you going to be running for libertarian offices in the future or running for office as a libertarian? I hope I can. I mean, I hope I can run as a libertarian in the future. I don't think the time for me to do that is right now. I'm happy spending time with my family right now, taking a break from political life. But I do want to build up a big strong party that believes in libertarian principles that can advocate for these principles effectively and bring people together. And I'd love to be a part of that. So it's a matter of using my skills and talents right now to grow that party. And then we can talk about in the future what I might do, if I want to run for office again and what office I might want to run for. But right now I want to make sure that we do have a party that can compete with the two old parties because the old parties aren't cutting it. Nobody thinks that they're cutting it. Nobody is happy with this. I mean, when you look across America, there's maybe 10% on one side and 10% on the other side who are really happy with it. And then everyone else, about 70, 80% of the country, is unhappy with the system. So we can do better. And I want to be part of building that up. What are the lessons from COVID? Because I want to get into a couple more of the specific issues and get your sense of whether or not the LP at the national level or at the atomic level should be emphasizing. It seems like the response to COVID in ways big and small was nothing short of disastrous, stupid, certainly anti-freedom. Is this a great way to talk about how a libertarian party approach or if libertarians had been in office, they would have done things differently and better? I think it's important to talk about. I mean, we can talk about the way the FDA works in the CDC. Those are things that libertarians have been critical about for a long time. We can talk about the way things were centralized in very dangerous and harmful ways. I mean, we saw across the country centralization actually do tremendous damage. Where ideas came from the top and people were either coerced or compelled in some way to follow those ideas all the way through from the national level down to the local grocery store. And how that actually did tremendous damage. It helped spread COVID. It created a lot of harm. We saw people go on TV and tell us one week that you shouldn't buy mass. And then a few weeks later, oh yeah, you definitely should buy mass. People constantly changing their mind about that stuff. This is why we want decentralization. We want people to try different things. And actually, by the way, the results of all of it, when you look at how the states fared, it seems like the differences across the states, while some states were very much criticized for how they approached it and other states were padded on the back. Some of the worst states were the ones that had the most restrictive lockdowns and the restrictive approaches. And then other states that had much more lenient approaches did just as well or much better. So there doesn't seem to be any clear pattern across the country. And I think that should instruct us about this going forward. But I think the most important thing to think about here is decentralization. And who knows what? How much information does the president of the United States have about your local community? How much information does the president have about your local store or your family and how it lives its life? How about your state governor? How much information does that person have? We had governors like here in Michigan making decisions for how people should line up at stores and how they might walk through a store and what they might buy when they're in the store. And all of those things proved to be total failures. Total failures so much so that these governors who pushed them eventually had to rescind them, but they quietly rescind them. Like, oh, well, we're quietly going to do away with this. And when Whitmer was not as high-profile as a hypocrite, as somebody like Gavin Newsom in California, but she also was more than willing to break her own travel, telling people don't travel because it suited her, that's obviously a lesson that a lot of people are going to respond to. Do you, what about somebody like Ron DeSantis? You had mentioned him, governor of Florida, which overall did kind of in the middle of the pack, not so great in terms of deaths, but it was a non-lockdown state relatively speaking. Ron DeSantis has come out, he passed regulation telling social media companies that they can't kick people off. Now he signed a law saying you can't teach critical race theory or certain types of history in Florida schools, but he's just about to sign a bill saying that you have to teach the evils of communism. DeSantis comes out of all of this as one of the strongest figures in a Republican party looking towards 2024. What's wrong with Ron DeSantis? Is he the type of person who's kind of free marketing? Is he going to suck up a lot of oxygen that the Libertarian party should actually be getting? It depends on what kind of audience we're going for. If we're trying to be a big party that can win over, say, a third of the electorate, then he won't suck up the oxygen. If you're trying to be a small party that's focused on just owning the libs or edgelorting, then yeah, he'll suck up a lot of the oxygen, because Trump and DeSantis and those types of Republicans, the national conservatives, if you will, they've already got that lane. That's their lane. If you want to be in that lane, go ahead and be in that lane, it's not really in the Libertarian party. The Libertarian party is not a party of national conservatives. We're not the party that's going to tell people that we know better how they should educate their children, that the state government's going to come in and tell them that, yes, you must do it this way. People always will make the excuse, well, there's taxpayer money going to it. As long as there's taxpayer money going to it, we're going to tell them exactly what to do. The answer then is to get the taxpayer money out of it or accept that even when there is taxpayer money in it, people still should have the freedom to make decisions. If we're going to go down the taxpayer money road, people could make an excuse for violating the rights of anyone for coming in and coercing anyone to do anything because they'll say we all receive some kind of taxpayer money. Do you receive a child tax credit? Okay, you receive some taxpayer money. How about the road to your house? Did taxpayers pay for that? Okay, then we're going to tell you exactly how you can deal with your lawn or whatever. You're always going to have taxpayer money intertwined in our lives. You can't use that as an excuse to say, well, now the government can come in and tell you exactly how to live your life because there's some taxpayer money involved. Because I think this is what national conservatives are saying, basically. Well, as long as there's taxpayer money going to public schools, we're going to tell them exactly how to teach the children. I don't know if it's any different than the left. Yeah, it's the exact inverse. You either learn that America is irredeemably racist or you learn that it is irredeemably non-racist. But the idea that you as a parent might get to pick where your kid goes to school, you're kind of out of luck. I was just saying, if you don't like that, then we should support private schools and private education. There are other routes that we can support. There are other ways if you don't want your kids indoctrinated in whatever way, if that's the word to use. Then there are other routes, and we can find those routes together. We can pool resources and find those routes. But the idea that we're going to use the government now to impose particular views on everyone I think is really bad and anti-libertarian. What do you think the LPs stance towards January 6 should be? You're talking about the edgelords in the LP, certainly in New Hampshire, but in another other state affiliates. There's a downplaying of what actually happened on January 6. They're saying it was a bunch of buffoons, which it certainly was. It was not a serious attempt to take over the government. It's mostly liberals using January 6 and the riot and broaching of the Capitol building as pretext for a national security state. How should the Libertarian Party be talking about something like January 6? I think we should be appalled about January 6. We should say so. We don't accept people breaking into the Capitol building and smashing things and injuring people and doing damage to our system of government. We're a party as a Libertarian Party. We're a party working within this system of government. If anything, we are the strongest advocates for the Constitution and our constitutional system. We're the ones who believe in it. We're the ones who actually support the classical liberal system outlined in the Constitution. It's not a perfect Constitution, but it's very Libertarian. It's undoubtedly the most Libertarian Constitution in the world. We're not going to get a more Libertarian Constitution. If things are reconstituted, the Constitution will not be as Libertarian. That is a guarantee. We should be defending our Constitution, defending our system from those who want to totally tear it down. Because I think those who want to tear it down, they imagine some kind of utopia when actually what we'll get is a dystopia. We'll have some future where the government is more powerful, government is more dangerous, and there are fewer safeguards in place. I would encourage us to stand up and say, look, what happened on January 6th was appalling. At the same time, to say it is not okay for the government to use a new war on terror as the de facto next war on civil liberties, which is what will happen. They're going to say, all these sorts of people are domestic terrorists. We know how this starts. They use some event. They say, it's these people, and we're going to go after them. It ends up being essentially collective punishment of society, where everyone is put under the microscope. We're going to collect all of your information. We're going to make sure you're not talking to the wrong people. They're going to pass red flag laws and other things. It becomes a world of pre-crime. We're going to stop the crime before it happens, and we're going to investigate everything, and due process, we'll throw that out the window. In my opinion, the best way for libertarians to advocate for this is to advocate, to stop that kind of thing, is to say, look, we are horrified by the events of January 6th. We totally condemn that kind of stuff, and we totally condemn and oppose the use of January 6th to bring about a new war on civil liberties. Here is one of the weird juncture points. I think you call them the edgelords in the Libertarian Party. Certainly this was at work in the New Hampshire social media messaging stuff. It's part of the Mises Caucus, which is an ascending group within the Libertarian Party, who tend to be more, they'll say they're more principled, they're more extreme. They want to push the envelope, but on the one hand, libertarians tend to be very anti-police. They believe in legitimate law enforcement, but libertarians for decades have been in the front of trying to end asset forfeiture, getting rid of qualified immunity, of having the police have fewer things to do by legalizing more things and not criminalizing. On another level, because the current debate over defunding the police and reigning in the police came in the wake of the arrest and the death of George Floyd at the hands of police. People in the Mises Caucus, people in the LP of New Hampshire say wokeism is taking over the LP. One of the reasons why Joe Jorgensen was put down by this faction was that she had one point said, citing an old piece by a guy who was at the Cato incident at the time saying the libertarians had to be actively anti-racist. She was brushed aside as a Marxist, as a Black Lives Matter, aficionado. What is the message that needs to be taken out of traditional libertarian concerns about the police state and then this backlash against wokeism? I think we have to walk a fine line. I don't think you want to adopt all of the language that's used by the left because sometimes that gets misinterpreted. Just like you don't want to adopt all the language used by the right. There are certain messages that convey a certain meaning. In any case, we don't need to adopt those things because we are a party that has a long history of being critical of abusive policing. We have a long history of protecting civil liberties and civil rights. We can stand on our own and say our own thing. We don't have to mimic the language of others. I do think that when you start to mimic that language, you run the risk of being misinterpreted. That I think is also not helpful to our efforts to be misinterpreted. I understand the criticism that Joe Jorgensen faced at the time. I think maybe people were too harsh on her, but I understand where they were coming from. At the same time, I do worry that there are a lot of people now in the libertarian party who are afraid to say the right thing for politically correct reasons in the other direction. It's not okay to just not be woke. You must be actively anti-woke. There's a new anti-wokeism that is starting to permeate the party that I think can also be dangerous because then it leads you astray. It leads you away from your own principles. If you're about to say something to stand up for someone's rights or say something about the George Floyd situation or say something about policing or ending qualified immunity or whatever the issue might be and you're stopped if you hesitate because you don't want to be perceived as being woke, that is also a problem. That's a weakness. I think that there are people in the party now who have to reconcile with that. They have to look themselves in the mirror and say, am I afraid to say libertarian things because I don't want to be perceived as being woke. That I saw people, Juneteenth being named a new national holiday. I saw a lot of libertarians questioning that. Which is weird. It's a very libertarian holiday. The whole idea, this is another one that gets me, the whole idea of ending slavery, you couldn't have a more libertarian event in history than this idea of emancipating people from being enslaved. So it's something libertarians should celebrate. Instead it was turned into, well, do we have too many federal holidays? It sounds a little bit contrived. There's a lot of excuses being made for why it shouldn't happen. Look, if you don't like too many holidays, get rid of Columbus Day or some other day. You're talking to an Italian American, so screw you, buddy. Italian, nobody's been put down more than Italian. Propose something else if you're worried about too many, because this is a very libertarian one. So if you're a libertarian and this is the one that gets you, well, this is too far, well, then propose getting rid of something else if you're really concerned about the number of holidays. Do you have a sense, and if I'm not mistaken, you are a millennial, right? Technically, you're right on the cross. I'm a Gen X in my opinion. Okay. You're Gen X in your opinion, but you're right at the border. I'm 1980, so I think most people will put me in Gen X, but that's right on the border. Right. Oh, yeah, yeah. That would, I think it's 1981 or the first millennials, but you're right there on the cusp. One of the defining factors- And by the way, I'm proud to be Gen X. Okay. The best generation. I, you know, as somebody who was born at the end of the baby boom, I say, screw you, but I hate the boomers more. But let's talk about millennials in Gen Z, because one of the, you know, one of the, one of the realities is that millennials in Gen Z are much more, you know, kind of multi-ethnic than older generation, certainly boomers or the silent generation. And, you know, with that comes a different set of lived experiences and a couple, you know, different expectations. How do the kind of eternal libertarian verities, you know, the truths, how do those have to be adapted or, you know, kind of translated into what millennials and Gen Z care about? Because it seems to me kind of extending this question of woke-ism versus anti-woke-ism. A lot of, you know, the hardcore principled libertarians now are, you know, talking about, you know, kind of race like any indication that, you know, being black or being Latino or being a foreigner matters at all is a sign that you have signed on to critical race theory and you're part of Black Lives Matter and you're a secret socialist. That doesn't seem like it's going to play very well in, you know, as millennials in Gen Z, who are the largest cohorts basically in America now, start to get older and move into positions of power. Yeah, it's not going to play well with them. And look, I understand the criticism of making everything about race. There are people out there who make everything about race and that's definitely not what's going on in the world. Not everything is about race. There are a lot of factors involved. There are a lot of reasons why society has problems and it's not all based on race. But to deny that race ever plays a role, I think, is also wrong. And there are people I know who come from a good place and they want to see everything as, you know, colorblind. They say, well, we have to be colorblind and I don't see race and all that. But the problem is not whether you see race. The problem is whether other people see a race and there are still a lot of other people who do see race and therefore it remains a problem. And I know this from interactions I've had with people, you know, in my life where people definitely do see race. And I have seen racism expressed in me very explicitly, not toward me, but toward others in my life. And I don't think I really saw that much growing up, but I do see it these days. And so I think there is a problem that needs to be addressed. And young people, we have the advantage as a libertarian party in that we have been talking about social issues for a long time. We've been talking about equality for a long time. So there's a lot to latch onto. And so we have to be able to talk to them in a way that shows we do care about these things. We do understand that racism still exists. While also pointing out that racism is not the only problem and that a lot of times problems that are described as racism are actually related to something else. It might be some discrimination based on income or discrimination based on just where you sit within your community's hierarchy. Sometimes in a community, you might have poor white people are considered at the lowest end. There might be communities in Kentucky or West Virginia where this happens. And then there's discrimination of another sort that happens towards them. So I think all of these things need to be talked about. And they should be talked about in a libertarian way. We don't have to adopt the left's rhetoric on it. We don't have to adopt the right's rhetoric on it. And I think the right and the left are trending toward the extremes where on the left, more and more, it's the case that everything is about race. And on the right, it's more and more the case that nothing is about race. They're going to pretend like nothing is ever about race. And the only racist people are the people on the left who are constantly talking about race. That's the prevailing view now on the right. What about so here's a couple of issues that are big among millennials and Gen Z people and present complications, I think for libertarians. One is voluntary association. And this is something that Gary Johnson in 2016 took a lot of heat for when he said, when posed with the question of should a baker in Colorado, should a Jewish heterosexual Christian baker be forced to bake a gay Nazi wedding cake or something. And Gary's response to that hypothetical was to bake the cake. And a lot of libertarians would say, no, that is absolutely, that's a Rubicon we cannot cross. And, you know, this comes up again and again. And now on the left, you have people saying kick off everybody from Twitter or Facebook or YouTube, who I disagree with. And because we have the rights of voluntary association, and I don't want to have to listen to Alex Jones. I don't want to have to know he's on the platform with me. Millennials care a lot about, you know, the rights, you know, kind of gestalt in a place. Libertarians, how do we how do we make the argument that voluntary association is good, even when it, you know, empowers people to make decisions we don't want? Well, I think we don't agree with. Yeah. And I think technology helps with that. You know, we live in a world where if someone is racist, if someone discriminates, if someone does something wrong, it's going to be out there for everyone to see. It's not hidden the way it might have been 40 or 50 years ago where where some business could be very racist, very discriminatory, and no one would would really know much about it, other than the people maybe who are in that particular community or very close to the business. So we have the ability today now with technology to to embrace voluntary association in a much greater way than in the past. Actually, technology makes a stronger case for libertarianism than at any time in history. Because now no matter what you do, someone can talk about it, someone can write about it. There is a market mechanism now for addressing injustices. If you think that a particular bakery was wrong for not serving you, you can talk about it, you can write about it, you can boycott that place if you want. That's all voluntary. You're allowed to do that. But we should allow people to make decisions in their own lives. So when I look at something like the bakery example, look, this is the kind of thing where you're talking about something that specialty made. If it's not off the rack, there's a big difference between going to a grocery store and there's a cake that you buy off the rack and then they tell you, hey, you can't buy it because you are XY or Z characteristic versus a specialty baker who's making things specially for people feeling uncomfortable about making a certain thing. Those are different things. I don't know why we have to pretend they're the same thing and why we need to pretend that the same rules or principles should apply to them. I don't think that's the case. In the case of things like grocery stores or off the rack retailers, I don't think there's any harm done to anyone by having rules in place that say, look, you serve anyone who comes in. I don't think there's no harm to libertarians in that rule because there's basically no place that's going to discriminate in that way for off the rack sort of stuff. And if they do, again, you can talk about it online. Whereas for something that is a specialty service, those people are discriminating in the soft sense of the word all the time. They have their own schedule. They're deciding whether they're going to take customers every week. It becomes a fact problem. Did they not make the cake because they're just tired that week or did they not make the cake because they don't like that person? So you'd run into all sorts of fact issues which make it more reasonable to have a rule that, look, if they don't want to serve something, they don't serve something because that's a private business specialty service. Yeah. If it's one thing to say, if this person says, I want to business with you, then you cannot get this good or service anywhere versus you can just go down the street and find somebody who will provide a similar service. Well, that matters. So I think all those things have to be taken into account. But this is, again, why it's best not to have one broad rule at a very high level of government, say, at the national level, and why we need to let communities make decisions with states serving as backstabs for protection. How do you feel? And it's kind of related. And again, surveys routinely show that younger Americans, people under 40, are much more comfortable with restricting speech rights if hate speeches involved, if people feel like certain types of speech is offensive or causes psychological harm to people. Libertarians are the most kind of balls out in favor of unrestricted speech. Technology, broadly speaking, has really enabled that. We're now witnessing where social media platforms, whether it's Twitter before the election, banning, linking to New York Post stories, Facebook and Twitter after the election kicking Donald Trump off their platforms, you have Democrats who are trying to break up social media companies for being too powerful, right wingers saying, this is the DeSantis law where you can't actually decide who's on your platform or not. As a business, you have to accept everyone. What's the best libertarian case to skeptical younger people that it's better to have more speech rather than less speech? Well, the best case is that you never know when they're going to come for your speech. When someone is going to say, your speech is hate speech, because it's speech they disagree with. I think there are some speech that we all think of as pretty hateful and we all abhor it. But when that's the case, then we say so. We speak out against it. But there's a lot of other speech that's on a line. It's on the edge. And I think we need to be careful about trampling on ideas simply because we think it's hateful, because we think it's in opposition to our worldview. And look, the First Amendment is there to protect things you don't like. That's why it exists. There's no reason to have a First Amendment to protect speech that everyone agrees with. It's there precisely to protect speech that is unpopular. That's the point of it. And so it runs completely counter to our ethos as a country to say, look, if something is unpopular, then we should ban it. I mean, that's precisely why the First Amendment exists. It's to protect speech that is unpopular. Why did you not run for the presidential nomination of the LP last year? Well, I explained it before. For me, there was a timing issue. There was a testing the waters that I did. I ran an exploratory committee and tried to see whether I thought it could get off the ground in the way that I wanted. And I decided ultimately that it couldn't. I had been thinking about that for a little while about running. I did not want to make some kind of announcement of a run while all of the impeachment stuff was going on with Donald Trump, because I never wanted to run as the impeachment guy. That wasn't my interest. I didn't want people to think that the run was about impeachment, because it wasn't. I believe libertarians have important ideas that are attractive to millions of Americans, and I wanted to run on those ideas. So I waited there, and then we had a COVID situation. So when COVID hit, I had to make a decision. I decided I would at least, after things had calmed down after the initial outbreak of COVID, when things calmed down, I said, okay, I'll test things by running an exploratory committee. It became clear to me that I was in a solid position to get the nomination. And I felt like I was not in a solid position to make a huge impact on the election. Maybe I could pull 5% or maybe even a little higher than that. But I didn't think it was going to be enough to make the impact that I thought was necessary to change the course of politics. So out of courtesy to the Libertarian Party, and I guess America generally, I said, look, I'm not going to do it this time around. I don't want to be the guy who goes in there and gets 5% in its view to some kind of vanity run. I wasn't interested in that. I was interested in making the Libertarian Party a winner. And I didn't feel I could do that at that time. You have not, obviously, you've not ruled out future runs. I assume it would be as a Libertarian, maybe not. But what are the benchmarks that you're looking for as things move closer, either to midterm elections or 2024, that would get you motivated to throw your hat in the ring for something? Well, I think it matters which party is in control of government, because there's a certain national mood that has to do with whether government is split, like it's divided, or whether all one party has it. The candidates who are in it will matter. I think a lot of people take that for granted. They don't think enough about who are the other candidates. The other candidates are sometimes the most important element, if not the most important element. Who are you running against? If you're running against Joe Biden and Donald Trump for something like the presidency, look, you've got two guys who are about 80 years old. I think there's an opportunity for a young candidate to present some different ideas and present a different way of looking at politics. Now, if you have a different set of candidates, you have to take that in consideration too. There are candidates out there. Some of the ones that pop up, obviously, are Ron DeSantis. Kamala Harris might be a candidate. There are other candidates where you have to then assess the playing field based on what you're seeing. But I think those candidates matter. And I think it matters where the party is. I'm trying to build up the party so that it is a robust, strong party that can get ballot access, that has resources, that has structure throughout the country, where you have people on the ground, you have institutions built up. If you have that kind of party, then, yeah, then you're in a good position to run. If you don't have that kind of party, then you're kind of on your own. That makes the run a lot more difficult. Is there anything about being in Congress? Because you were there for like a decade, right? Yeah. What do you miss, if anything? Honestly, my staff is mostly what I miss. I don't miss being in Congress as much as I thought I would. I actually thought I would miss it a little more. But I don't, honestly. It's become sort of entertainment more than actual legislation. And I didn't run for office to be an entertainer. I ran to be a legislator. And so I got to the point where I didn't see it turning around anytime soon. I considered running again for one more term. Ultimately, I decided it wasn't the right thing. I should spend some time with my family and try to build up the libertarian party on the ground with more time to do so than I would if I were a member of Congress. Because as a member of Congress, you have the responsibility of representing your constituents. So it makes it difficult to at the same time be building up a political party. But I honestly don't miss that much about it. And I see my colleagues on TV and I see their tweets and I don't even recognize them. I mean, they might as well be total strangers in many respects. Not all of them, but for the most part, they might as well be total strangers. Because I honestly don't recognize these people as people I ever knew. I can't relate to them. I don't know what they're talking about in terms of their policies and politics. And honestly, I think most of them are just making it up on the fly just to survive. You know, they want to survive this national conservative era. And so they've they changed their their tune and they are different people. What do you think about Peter Meyer, the person who was elected to your old seat? How was he done? Well, I agree with him on a number of things. I think that he's an honest person. I think he works hard. I have a lot of conversations with him. Is he a libertarian in the, you know, vein of Justin Amash? No, but that's okay. He's Peter Meyer. He's his own person. And I never expected when he ran for Congress that he was going to be like some kind of mirror image of me. And I don't expect that of anyone who runs for office. But I have been pleased that he seems to stand on his own. He's willing to break from the party. There are times I wish he'd break from the party even more. But you know, I understand the stresses, the pressures he faces. He does face a lot of pressures. He faces it from people in the community, faces it from donors. He faces it from the party. And so I get where he's coming from. And so you're not going to hear the criticisms from me about the way he's handled things so far. If I think he's taken a turn for the South, you know, I'll be sure to mention it. But again, it's not about, does he agree with me on everything? And I think that's really important to know. Like I could criticize him on several pieces of legislation where I would have voted differently. But look, if I did that, I could criticize every member of Congress about the same thing. And I frequently criticize people about that stuff. But I think in the environment right now that we have in Congress, just to have someone who seems to be in it for the right reasons, I think is important. And so I want to encourage that. Is, you know, we are coming off two years of record-breaking spending, of record deficits in the peacetime in particular. The national debt seems to have achieved a level that is gigantic and unimaginable during the 1980s when the deficit became like a major issue. And, you know, for the first time in a long time, you know, the government under Joe Biden seems to be interested and muscularized federal government to start, you know, kind of overseeing and regulating virtually every commercial transaction. It seems that's going on at the state level in Democratic and Republican states. You have governors who seem to be, you know, kind of getting their fingers into every pot imaginable. Are you optimistic about the future of limited government in America? I am. In one sense, we have a much more libertarian country than we've ever had. In another sense, we have a less libertarian country. What are the ways in which we're more libertarian? Well, look, on a number of issues, we've made great strides. Actually, even things like the freedom of speech, we are in a much better place today than we were at the founding of the country and certainly for a long time. Even the founding of the century. So things are much better in that respect. When we talk about equality before the law, I mean, we have much better equal treatment under the law than we did in prior generations. So there are many ways in which things have improved. And so I think liberty is on the rise generally. And people have a better understanding of the benefits of markets. And I think that the internet has actually been helpful in that regard while it has also been harmful in other ways, you know, in getting us to turn against each other in many ways. But, you know, at the same time, we're spending more than ever. The debt is rising. The federal government is assuming more and more power that used to belong to the states or local communities. So I think we have a long way to go to turn that around. Because if that continues to go in the direction of centralization, if we continue to have the federal government more empowered, eventually the other stuff will start to fall apart. I mean, you will start to backtrack on things like freedom of speech. You will backtrack on things like equality before the law. Because anytime you have a central government with that much power, you end up, the central government ends up having to cater to particular groups. When you have a very decentralized, diversified system, you have spread out responsibility. When the federal government is in charge of everything, all of a sudden it's like, well, MAGA is in charge of government. So it's going to be all MAGA all the time. Or the progressives are in charge. So it's all progressive all the time. And when one group has total control of everything like that, there is a tendency to then assume extraordinary powers to say, look, so much is being handled at this one level that we can't afford to let it go. We can't afford to let MAGA get back in power. We can't afford to let the Trump people get back. So we're going to put new restrictions in place. We're going to start to put new limits on the freedom of speech. There's a tendency when power is concentrated to try to preserve that power because so much is held at one level. And so I think that presents a real threat to civil liberties down the road. So while we've made so much progress, we do have to be on the lookout. And I'm optimistic because when you look at the totality of the United States over its history, you do see that we're moving in the right direction generally. Like I think we're generally a more libertarian country today than we were 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 150 years ago. And I'm confident that will continue. But we do have to be on the lookout. All right, we're going to leave it there. Thank you so much for talking, Justin Amash. All right, thanks, Nick.