Lincoln Chafee drops out and Justin Amash jumps in, but is there any neutral ground in our culture war?

I’ve long had a soft spot for Lincoln Chafee. The earnest WASP from Rhode Island whose nickname is Linc and whose middle name is Davenport (the same as his corgi, presumably), Chafee is best remembered for an ill-fated presidential bid in 2016 where he endorsed the metric system and stammered his way through the debates. But before that, he was the lone Republican in the Senate to vote against the war in Iraq. In a speech beforehand, he echoed then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak: “If you strike Iraq, not one Arab leader will be able to control the angry outburst of the masses.” He was proven right about that, though it wasn’t enough to save his Senate seat. He lost it in 2006 to a pompous windbag named Sheldon Whitehouse, as Democrats capitalized on George W. Bush’s tanking popularity.

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Since then, Chafee has tried on a number of political coats without ever seeming to find one that fits. He quit the GOP after leaving the Senate and was elected governor of Rhode Island as an independent. He endorsed Barack Obama, then became a Democrat. And earlier this year, he underwent yet another wardrobe change, this time announcing he was seeking the Libertarian Party nomination for president. Chafee admitted he was new to the Libertarian cause, though he noted his record of fiscal responsibility and opposing stupid wars. LP members were nonetheless skeptical of Linc’s awakening, and Chafee ultimately ended his campaign in April. He told Reason, “To be honest, I wasn’t getting good traction even before coronavirus.”

Chafee’s terminal difficulties might be blamed on any number of things: the rise of rank partisanship, the death of GOP “moderates,” his own shortcomings, the persistence of the inch against the centimeter. Yet now another former Republican has launched a Libertarian presidential bid and his candidacy is raising similar questions. Congressman Justin Amash threw his hat in the ring last week. And whereas Chafee garnered little attention, Amash immediately touched off a Twitter tantrum, as both Democrats and Republicans shrieked that he could play spoiler.

Amash was first elected to Congress with the Tea Party class of 2010. Among political watchers, he’s best remembered for three things. The first was his legislation in 2013 that would have ended the NSA’s blanket collection of metadata, which had recently been exposed by Edward Snowden. The amendment narrowly failed in a 205 to 217 vote that mashed up Congress’s usual partisan certainties, with libertarian Republicans joining with liberal Democrats to support the measure, while GOP leadership and the Obama White House condemned it. Speaker John Boehner, who was then engaged in delicate political brinksmanship with his Tea Party members, allowed a vote in the hopes of pacifying his right flank. Instead he ended up granting Amash a national profile.

The second thing Amash is known for is delivering the most glorious victory speech in recent memory. In 2014, he was primaried in his Michigan district by a Chamber of Commerce tool named Brian Ellis. The race quickly turned vicious, with Ellis airing a commercial that called Amash “al-Qaeda’s best friend in Congress.” Amash went on to win handily, and when Ellis called him to concede, he sent him to voicemail. Then, speaking to supporters, he unloaded: “To Brian Ellis, you owe my family and this community an apology for your disgusting, despicable smear campaign.” He added, “I ran for office to stop people like you.”

The third thing Amash is known for is by far the most relevant: his vote to impeach Donald Trump. In explaining this decision, Amash drew a distinction: the House votes for impeachment, which has a lower standard than even probable cause, while the Senate holds the actual trial and then decides whether to convict. In other words, Amash wasn’t voting to remove Trump, just to indict him and allow the process to move forward. Still, such procedural nitty-gritty isn’t the stuff of a 30-second ad. Amash’s impeachment vote had already attracted a host of Republican challengers in his congressional race. Expect it now to be treated as a placeholder in the culture war and continue to elicit controversy.

Amash will prefer to talk about other things: his opposition to America’s interventions in the Middle East, his desire to balance the budget, his respect for constitutional rights, perhaps even his more progressive social views (Amash endorsed allowing gays to marry and told Forbes, “I would protect transgender Americans under the protections that exist for sex”). Ideologically he’s a libertarian, which puts him in an interesting position. On one hand, per Michael Brendan Dougherty, libertarians are having a moment right now, as governors overstep with quarantine restrictions and the bureaucracy’s ineptitude regarding the coronavirus becomes evident. Gay marriage and marijuana legalization are also gaining acceptance, even among Republicans, while Donald Trump has embraced libertarian hobbyhorses like criminal justice reform and right-to-try.

On the other hand, string together all the supposed libertarian moments and you’ve got yourself half an hour for a vape break. Libertarianism is curious in that it tends to be more popular piecemeal, issue by issue, than it is swallowed whole. That’s especially true right now, when the broader political narratives are more about identity than liberty. The culture war has lined up poorer rural deplorables behind Trump and wealthier urban secularites behind the Democrats. “Crush the left in the public square” is in; “protect the rights of both right and left” is out. Given that libertarians like to eschew cultural skirmishes in favor of economics, given that they don’t easily fit into a bipolar model, that could prove a tough sell.

Amash is wagering that such a read of the political landscape is wrong. His hope is that there’s room between two lecherous geriatrics for a younger problem-solving reformer with no history of scandal. It’s that question, not the finer points of Hayek and Rothbard, that will determine whether he catches on. Is there neutral ground, even the possibility of armistice, in the culture war? Have the two sides alienated enough voters to give a third party a chance? Is there bandwidth in America’s political imagination for an Emmanuel Macron-ish figure? Or will Amash find himself trapped between two stilts falling in opposite directions?

Polls suggest the challenge is daunting. According to Gallup, 93 percent of Republicans like the job Trump is doing, which has locked the president’s overall approval rating in the 40s. Meanwhile, hefty majorities of Democratic primary voters say defeating Trump is their number one priority. Does that leave any space? Amash’s best chance is likely to be with voters similar to those in his congressional district: suburban, educated, once red but trending blue. Neither deplorables nor Davenports, in other words. Speaking of Linc, it’s worth pointing out that Amash still needs to make it through the Libertarian Party’s primary contests, scheduled tentatively for late May. He’ll be up against current frontrunners Jacob Hornberger and Jo Jorgensen, established presences in the LP (Jorgensen was the Libertarian veep candidate in 1996), both of whom are already attacking him as an interloper and opportunist.

The LP has a habit of nominating ex-Republicans for president—think Bob Barr in 2008 and Gary Johnson in 2016. Yet those tickets also went nowhere, which is reportedly why so many of their activists were lukewarm to Chafee this time around. Now they have Justin Amash, formerly of the GOP himself. Can we be sure what will happen? Not by a country kilometer.