University of Wisconsin-Madison senior Joe Diedrich changed his conservative political views to embrace the independent, Libertarian party in his later high school years, when he said he realized the Bush administration’s continued shipment of U.S. soldiers and supplies to fuel warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan “didn’t make any sense.”
“It didn’t make any sense for myself, didn’t make any sense to our national security, it didn’t make any sense for our economy to be in that war,” Diedrich said.
Former President George Bush’s instituted foreign policy in the Middle East merely served as a “jumping board” for Diedrich, who further embraced a libertarian identity his freshman year at UW-Madison when he joined Young Americans for Liberty.
YAL, an issues-based, nation-wide organization, was founded after the 2008 presidential election by the Students for Ron Paul movement, according to YAL Wisconsin State Chair Jordan Krause. Since then, Krause said the organization has picked up momentum among a large wave of young people across the country.
“People are starting to find out what Libertarianism is," Krause said. “They are attracted to the ideology."
YAL focuses on educational outreach about freedom of speech, peaceful foreign policy, civil rights and economic freedom, according to Diedrich.
Diedrich said young people seek alternatives to traditional republican and democrat dichotomies because they don’t see recent governmental policies concerning foreign policy and the economy as an “effective use of their money, of their time, of themselves.”
“[Young people] realize they are going to have to pay the debt, they are going to be the ones fighting the wars, their children are going to be the ones fighting the wars,” Diedrich said.
Although some people speculate that Libertarian Presidential Candidate Gary Johnson will take away votes from Mitt Romney, Krause said because a lot of people feel betrayed by Obama’s actions and his “reversed promises,” the Johnson voter turnout could take votes away from Obama as well.
But Diedrich said he, along with several members from the UW-Madison chapter of YAL, are not voting in the election, even for the Libertarian Johnson, due to their frustration with the two-party system.
“Even though Gary Johnson is a lot better than Obama or Romney, he is still not good enough,” Diedrich said. “So we really just don’t want to vote.”
