This is the post and thread for discussing the LPVA Board decision to dissolve the organization and return dues owed to the members. The post is on Third Party Watch because some discussion is expected to be heated.
Virginia LP Dissolves… Right or Wrong
If someone captures your child and tortures her until she becomes a monster both inside and outwardly, killing is an act of mercy. The fascists are not just some faction temporarily in control of the party. They are totalitarian enemies of freedom and classical liberalism in all its forms whose express purpose is to destroy the LP. It is time to concede that they have achieved their objective and move on. They now control all relevant committees at the national level and rule top down to ensure no one can remove them at any future convention. They control the organs of communication and have weaponized them to ensure that the word libertarian and the party are irrevocably linked with the most vile forms of hatred and bigotry they can think up in the public mind. It’s past time to concede that there is nothing left to rescue from them except your own reputation, which will be heavily and deeply stained if you keep associating with what they are turning the party and label into. It’s time to get out while you can and ditch the label.
Sounds like your passions are blinding your reason. The LP is not a monster. It’s a political organization, whose temporary leadership is subject to change.
Ditch “They are totalitarian enemies of freedom and classical liberalism in all its forms whose express purpose is to destroy the LP.”
You’re saying their goal is to destroy the LP, so to prevent them from achieving their goal, we must destroy the LP.
Ditch: “They control the organs of communication …”
The LNC is not Facebook, or Twitter, or Viacom, or the CIA. Its control of “organs of communication” is puny.
Every individual libertarian has access to blogs and social media and YouTube, and working together, we can easily counter the LNC’s message, rally supporters, recruit new supporters, and take back the LNC in 2024.
I don’t understand this massive pessimism. The LNC is not Satan or even Hitler, and we’re not helpless mice.
“Every individual libertarian has access to blogs and social media and YouTube, and working together, we can easily counter the LNC’s message, rally supporters, recruit new supporters, and take back the LNC in 2024.”
It’s not quite as simple as that.
Starting from before its takeover of the LNC, the Mises PAC has acted to capture the state parties (which send the delegates who vote on LNC membership at national conventions), and since the LNC takeover, the Mises-occupied LNC has been acting with the obvious intent of ensuring that all its state affiliates are Mises Vichy appendages of the LNC rather than independent parties with the ability to resist perpetual Mises, and LNC, rule.
In response to Root’s Teeth: On one hand, an organized, serious national campaign to counter the Mises Caucus could win. Prior to the last convention, I saw little sign of such an effort. On the other hand, at one point the Mises Caucus did have visible an national state-by-state organizational chart. Now, I was the national volunteer coordinator for the Badnarik Presidential campaign. I know what Badnarik had in late fall. The Mises 2022 campaign — all volunteers — was much larger and better organized than the Badnarik volunteer campaign was. Note that the Mises Caucus took over essentially complete control of three dozen state parties, filled their delegations with their supporters, filled almost the entire LNC and Judicial Committee with their choice of candidates, and is now using the LNC and Roberts to replace or destroy the state organizations they do not already control. It is by no means obvious that electronic media are an adequate weapon. Indeed, having watched Johnson 2016 win, despite his 2012 campaign finance record that was widely known on electronic media, I would say that the smart money is against your claim.
2022 was the culmination of a 5 year effort by the Mises Caucus. It might take 5 years to organize to oust them. Badnarik only had 5 months between the convention and the election.
One can say that it is easier to take back control of your state party than it is to start a new party. Is it true? I have heard the past, closing on two years now, much optimism about the Mises caucus being about to fail, but none of the promised events came to pass. New Hampshire now has a Mises and an antiMises candidate of Governor, both on the ballot in a Libertarian column, but that outcome is indistinguishable from ‘started a new party’ using the same name as the old party.
Maybe because of all the optimism, few took the Mises Caucus’s attempts at control seriously. Its opponents were complacent and asleep at the wheel.
Now that the Mises Caucus is in power, its opponents are suddenly energized.
How about directing all this sudden energy into rallying the troops, calling in new recruits, and taking back control — rather than into self-destruction?
It’s a short-sighted and counter-productive act.
It takes much effort to build a state party and gain ballot access. Surely it’s much easier to regain control at the next state convention than to burn the whole party down?
The pendulum swings. Factions rise and fall. Just because one faction controls a party today, doesn’t mean it will control it after the next convention.
If someone kidnaps your child, you try to recapture your child. Not kill him and say, “Ha, ha, now neither of us has him!”
If the Mises Caucus’s goal is to destroy the LP, then dissolving state LPs only assists in their goal.
This is the right path forward. Every other state LP not already in enemy hands should do the same. Where state parties have been taken over by the fascist evildoers, county and other local groups should dissolve. And regardless of where they live, individual members and former supporters should formally revoke their membership, publicly disavow the party, ask to be removed from all databases and contact lists, and find another name for what they believe besides libertarian, since the evil fascist usurpers will soon make that label a crushing millstone around the neck of every person who fails to heed this advice.