If you leave the government alone in a room with a pair of scissors, it will inevitably find a way to cut its own hair and then bill you for the salon visit. Up in Alaska, our grand administrative apparatus has decided to grace us with a masterclass in unintentional comedy, starring not one, but two men who answer to the name Dan Sullivan. When the New York Times reported that Democratic operatives may have quietly recruited a political decoy sharing a moniker with the state’s incumbent Republican senator, Governor Mike Dunleavy reacted the only way a card-carrying state executive knows how: he ordered an official, taxpayer-funded investigation.
Because naturally, when private political cartels behave like rival fraternity houses pulling homecoming pranks, the immediate remedy is to deploy the sovereign power of the state. One can practically hear the clattering of typewriters and the shuffling of three-ring binders down the halls of the Department of Law. The government, perpetually incapable of paving a road without a three-year environmental review, has suddenly discovered an urgent constitutional interest in policing identity confusion on the ballot. It is the political equivalent of calling the fire department because someone switched the salt and sugar shakers at a diner.
Friedrich Hayek observed in The Constitution of Liberty that the state’s coercive machinery is least dangerous when bound by general, abstract rules applied equally to all. What we have in Juneau, however, is the exact opposite: an exercise in brand protection masquerading as high-minded civic defense. The two major parties have spent more than a century erecting legal barricades, restrictive ballot-access laws, and byzantine campaign-finance regulations specifically designed to choke off legitimate third-party competition. Having successfully engineered a cozy political duopoly that outlaws genuine consumer choice, they are now utterly shocked to discover that actors within their rigged marketplace have resorted to cheap, trademark-infringing guerrilla tactics.
The strategy of running a candidate with a familiar surname is not novel; it is the natural byproduct of a political system that treats voters like easily startled livestock. In a free market, a firm that relies on brand confusion to move product—say, selling "Pringles" in an identical can labeled "Prangles"—is handled through standard civil torts, or better yet, laughed out of business by consumers with basic visual acuity. In democratic politics, where the ballot is heavily subsidized and the voters are treated to endless multi-million-dollar advertising bombardments designed to flatter their worst tribal impulses, having a name-double on the roster is treated like an act of electoral biological warfare.
Rather than looking in the mirror and asking why their vaunted platform is so fragile that a duplicate signature could derail an entire federal campaign, the Republican establishment has chosen to reach for the regulatory cudgel. The state will now expend billable hours, assign investigators, and draft memorandums of understanding to determine whether someone somewhere was entirely too clever with voter registration forms. One wonders if the investigators will require the two Dan Sullivans to point at each other like the classic Spider-Man meme before a sworn court reporter.
Meanwhile, the Democratic apparatus, which regularly lectures the nation on the sacred sanctity of democratic norms, reportedly saw fit to indulge in a tactic worthy of a late-night carnival grifter. It exposes the hollow pieties of party apparatchiks on both sides of the aisle. The left seeks to game the voter rolls through slapstick subterfuge; the right seeks to mobilize the state police apparatus to safeguard its electoral market share. Neither faction pauses for a single second to consider the staggering indignity of the whole affair.
Every time the state attempts to manage political outcomes, it simply demonstrates the fatal conceit that Hayek warned about: the absurd belief that human behavior can be neatly corralled by planners who imagine themselves above the fray. When you artificially restrict political entry through thickets of regulatory red tape, you do not get an enlightened, elevated discourse. You get the black market of democracy, complete with knockoff goods, smuggled candidates, and back-alley shell games.
The taxpayers of Alaska, already footing the bill for a sprawling state government whose sheer distance from Washington is its only redeeming feature, will now pay to arbitrate a playground spat between two well-funded political clubs. It would be infinitely cheaper, and far more instructive, to simply print both Dan Sullivans on the ballot in identical type and let the electorate sort it out. If a political brand cannot survive a typo, it hardly deserves the protection of the state's legal cavalry.