New Yorker -- In 1997, a Libertarian writer named L. Neil Smith encouraged Libertarians to run as spoilers against Republicans who had won elections by five-per-cent margins. Invoking a line from the science-fiction novel “Dune”—“The people who can destroy a thing, they control it”—he hoped to force the Republican Party to adopt libertarian-oriented positions. (In at least five recent Senate races, the Libertarian vote was larger than the Democrats’ margin of victory.)