I would call the Libertarian effort objectively impractical.
The 2 major parties control who goes on the ballot and the people have virtually no voice. The Libertarian Party is irrelevant.
imo, the 2 major parties only put up candidates they can control with Trump as the sole exception. Actions over the past 3+ years make it evident that both parties want to replace Trump with someone they can control.
I don't know if Trump will do a "good" job but I think he should be given the chance since he was elected by the people according to the law.
The 2 parties have not done that.
Neither party should be supported if you vote based on principle. Trump, imo, could be supported on principle. There may be other members of the major parties who are principled and are less controlled than the parties believe. Rand Paul is one possible example.
Neither major party supports individual liberty or free markets.

Hi freedomforall,

Thanks for taking time to answer. Some more thoughts of mine:

Irrespective of whether one self-identifies with Libertarian, Republican, Democrat parties there is the on-principle approach that you mentioned. And actually on that basis I agree with you that Trump--based on his team's achievements so far--is a vastly preferred on-principle choice. On a perfectionist approach there's no party in history--nor on the horizon--that passes muster. The system is rigged and the very fact that it is a coercively rigged (ie, government power enforced) especially demands an on-principled approach. And since all the choices are offered by a system that is ratcheting us toward hell, it is ethically appropriate to exploit the best of choices available--if anything to hinder the acceleration of that ratchet to hell (which, for a while to come, is our current situation).

Principles are orthogonal to Political Parties and that means the actions we take require a deconstruction of the messy spectrum of packages offered--some with ingredients far more dominantly toxic than others. Right now, if you've done your homework, the new Radical Socialist Democrats are such an extremely toxic choice that the Republican choices across the board offer at least a delaying action. In the case of Trump his team's actions are demonstrably: an articulated vector backed by actual achievement in an astonishingly pro-liberty direction. None of this logic has anything to do with allegiance to the "marketing" or the demographic of the Republican Party where perhaps a majority of christian conservatives dominate.

Some confused Objectivists/Libertarians have argued that--one a basis of what they think of as ethical purity--even to choose anything offered by the coercive system is to "sanction" it. That is a ludicrous, utopian view. Ask any surviving POW.

By the Way. Here and in my entire document on our current USA political environment my basis is a very precise derived definition of "Liberty". For that definition see:

https://hierweb.com/politics/manifest...

My entire analysis document which has been floating among Republican pro-liberty activists is at:

https://hierweb.com/politics/TrumpTes...