Last updated on July 4, 2023
Opinion: Toward an Organizing Committee for a Classical Liberal Party
Recent changes in the Libertarian Party have gravely damaged its image, organizational soundness, and fundamental platform. One readily finds people saying that the Republican Party could not have done a better job of wrecking the Libertarian Party than the Libertarian National Committee has done to itself. An alternative interpretation of the situation is that the so-called Mises takeover is actually a successful Republican takeover, backed by large amounts of covert Republican money, with the intent of neutering the Libertarian Party. There are people who know the truth of these and other alternatives, but I am not numbered among them. I only note them as alternatives.
However, the practical consequences of the Libertarian National Committee intervening in the internal affairs of state affiliates have been highly destructive. Making a substantial opening to the alt-right, complete with elimination of the party’s abortion plank, support for the Russian fascist invasion of Ukraine, support for the positions of Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul, has failed to increase party membership.
For the national Libertarian party, fund-raising has fallen almost in half, membership is falling respectably rapidly, the national staff has been replaced by doubtless competent people who lack the national party’s institutional memory,… To the extent that Mises Caucus and Rothbardian positions become widely known, the ability of Libertarian candidates to campaign successfully will be significantly reduced, as has already seen in New Hampshire, where some voters turn out to vote against any Libertarian.
So what is to be done?
I propose here the formation of an organizing committee to create a new, classical liberal, political party across the United States. American classical liberals did this in 1971. We can do it again.
The proposal here is to establish a new classical liberal political party. The party would exist to recruit, support, and run candidates for political office, and to advocate for the party’s positions. A classical liberal party stands vigorously for the entire Bill of Rights, including both the first and second amendments, as well as the right to privacy. A classical liberal party advocates for freedom, but stands for a Hayekian classical liberal state that provides to its citizens minimum standards of food, clothing, shelter, and medical care.
A sensible reader will immediately ask how the new party is to avoid the fate of the current Libertarian party, namely being taken over by the alt-right and the like.. Fortunately, the answer to this question has already been found. In Germany, there is a perpetual danger that a new political party will be infiltrated by neo-Nazis and other rabble. Most German political parties therefore have a membership filtration committee. Germans can join German political parties, just as you can join the Libertarian Party in the United States, but in Germany, before your membership application is accepted, you are carefully reviewed for evidence of neo-Nazi tendencies.
For the proposed classical liberal party, an appropriate review is that applicants for party membership have to show a record of sane political activism over an extended period of years, including the non-espousal of either alt-right or radical anarchist points of view. Applicants who want to support Russia against Ukraine or to eliminate the IRS and the Federal Reserve Board would not be suitable for membership.
There are, of course, people who say that to establish a new political party one would need ten or forty million dollars. These are the people who are fixated on running a candidate for President, since putting the candidate for President on the ballot in some states has become inordinately expensive. People wishing to establish a new classical liberal party should not give ear to these false prophets. A new political party can be established for far less in the way of financial resources.
Where are we to begin? The first step is for serious supporters of a new classical liberal political party to come together electronically and constitute themselves as an organizing committee. The committee would then prepare do the things that mark a functioning organization being formed, such as publishing at least an electronic newsletter, filing with the Federal Election Commission, setting up web and social media sites, raising money, and recruiting and supporting candidates.
I believe there is no choice other than to rebuild, retake, restore [however you wish to word it] the LP. Our 50 yrs is nothing to be discarded easily and we don’t have a second 50 yrs to create the success some deny.
I believe that building on existing structure is far easier than starting over from the ground floor.
Is the LP salvageable? I don’t think so. But I hope so.
To that end, I’m still a member, dues-paying to the state LP, and a life member (no longer sending money to) the national party. And at least want to see what happens at the national convention in 2024.
It could very well be that it will be a bookend to my very first national convention in 1998, as both would be in D.C… But I hope not.
Starchild’s observations stir memories of previous factional fights. The “toxic” types tended to leave the party and even if they kept sniping, the Party tended to ignore them and kept to its mission. Other factional rivals stayed and accepted their losses. You could sit down and break bread or have a drink with rivals such as Robert Murphy, Paul Kunburger, or Jim Turney because they were honorable people. LP needs to keep its honorable people and let the others drift away without getting into an endless pissing contest with them.
“LP needs to keep its honorable people and let the others drift away without getting into an endless pissing contest with them.”
AGREED
Well presented, Starchild!
You accurately pointed out many of today’s issues, and as someone who has been in the trenches as an activist for years, you likely have more patience than most. A lot of good and well intentioned people have become disallusioned and have left your party.
Personally, I respectfully disagree with your conclusion that the LP is salvagable and am working with others to build something new. I don’t believe we will be easily taken over. Maybe that will make it a slower start, but we will not be tolerating factions like statists and supremacists or marching in support of Putin and his genocide wars in eastern europe. Maybe that will make us too niche. we plan to avoid that.
But as usual you present a good arument for those still willing to fight internally. But that number is dwindling.
I don’t think giving up on the Libertarian Party is a good idea at this time.
As I see it, the current divisions in the party and libertarian movement are attributable to three main, related factors or circumstances.
A new libertarian party in the United States, if it were to be as successful as the LP – a big “if” – would not be immune to any of these circumstances. They could just as easily come to plague any new party that had the LP’s advantage of being able to appeal to significant and roughly balanced numbers of people on the left and right. And any libertarian party that did not have such a balance would likely drift away from libertarianism and become pigeon-holed as left wing or right wing, similar to what happened to the Occupy and Tea Party movements respectively, grassroots movements which each had the potential for broad-based appeal to a wide number of people across the political spectrum, but became marginalized as media coverage and their own internal dynamics cemented perceptions of them as on the far left and far right.
Here are the three main factors I believe have led to our current divisions:
1) The increasing polarization of American politics between left and right, Republicans and Democrats. Libertarians, even those who are familiar with the Nolan Chart and understand that the real political struggle is libertarian vs. authoritarian, not left vs. right, are not immune to the cultural zeitgeist. As people who actively pay attention to politics, libertarians are susceptible to being drawn into the left/right, R/D squabbles, and the more heated and polarized those squabbles have become, the more this is true.
2) The often toxic culture of online commenting. The tendency of social media platforms to incentivize comments and posts getting “likes” and so forth by being provocative, combative, and “trolling”, combined with the natural willingness of people to be meaner to each other from behind a screen than they would in person, especially when coupled with anonymity*, has led to increasing acrimony among online communities of all political stripes. Again libertarians are not immune to this.
3) Involvement of high-profile movement figures in these online fights between libertarians more sympathetic to the left and libertarians more sympathetic to the right. As people with significant numbers of followers became more ego-invested in these squabbles, their impact snowballed and spilled over into the offline world, causing factional divisions in the LP to solidify and translate into real-world oppositional efforts on both sides, of which the Mises Caucus organizing had the greatest impact.
*This is not an argument against allowing online anonymity, which is part of a long and vital tradition of anonymous free speech that must be upheld – there are many valid reasons why someone might want to say something anonymously, and the more repressive a regime becomes, the more important this freedom also becomes.
So what can be done? We can and should reaffirm our commitment to libertarianism, tone down our attacks on others within the broad scope of the libertarian movement, and focus debates on ideas and strategies, rather than on the people who hold them. Put more energy into outreach and spreading the libertarian message, and less energy into fighting with others who identify as or whose views put them in the category of being broadly libertarian or pro-freedom. Don’t view control of the Libertarian Party as an all-or-nothing affair. Internal divisions will inevitably surface in any faction that gains substantial power in the party. Libertarians tend to be intelligent and free-thinking individuals who are less susceptible than people of other political persuasions to just following marching orders, especially over a period of time.
I understand that TPW is intended as more of a comentary and opinion site as IPR evolves into primarily news, so here is an opinion starting with a question:
Is “retaking” the LP really the best solution?
I have been thinking about this a lot over the past half year or so, and in my opinion it is not.
I attended every national convention from 2006 until 2018, as well as the virtual sessions in 2020, opting to not risk exposure to government cooties (covid) for the in-person portion.
There were skirmishes between internal factions at every one, but the antics at 2016 (a certain presidential candidate no longer with us bragged to me that he paid to get Meeks to strip), followed by dildo waving freaks in 2018, leading to a party ripe for takeover. And it happened.
I left the LP in the summer of 2020, so I did not directly witness the execution, but I have heard many times over about the convention in 2022. I would have probably walked out.
Political executions were swift, and the damage and destruction has continued, with only the attornies profiting.
The media consider the LP to be a joke. That has not changed. But with the loss of so many valuable party members, the only thing left appear to be the invaders. Sure, there are still a number of holdout states still under the control of actual libertarians, but that number is eroding as the political terrorists in charge of the LNC execute their plan.
Yes, a concerted effort could take back the party in 2024, but is the damage already fatal? What is the cost, both in hard dollars and recruitment of new members – not to mention the reconstruction of a lost reputation, and is it worth it?
And what of the state affiliates damaged or destroyed? How many election cycles will it take to turn them around? My own state appears to have avoided takeover, but that may not last.
I have made my own personal decision in this matter, which is why I am now coming out of my self-imposed political retirement. It is time to start over.
I agree that starting a new party from scratch is probably not going to happen unless a mega donor or donors can be found. Such a waste of resources to gain ballot access.
I guess I’m a false prophet. It’s extremely difficult to start a new third party. There have been attempts at alternate “libertarian” parties in the recent past.
In the 2000s there was an Objectivist Party. And a Boston Tea Party. And a Liberty Party or two.
It’s much easier to retake the LNC at the next convention than to create a new third party. I find ironic that the same people who lament the difficulty of retaking the LNC want to take this even more difficult path.
As for “vetting” members. Whatever the benefits, it will also make it that much harder to grow this new party. It’s hard enough getting people to sign up for a new third party, without tossing additional barriers in their way.
How would this be different from Andrew Yang’s Forward Party?
A “state that provides to its citizens minimum standards of food, clothing, shelter, and medical care” sounds a lot Forward Party than libertarian or classical liberal.
“…a state that provides…” is straight out of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom as something a classical liberal state would do.
However, the organizing committee might move in different directions.
During 2020 there was a five month stretch when the LP got 5,300 new signature members. In 2016 it was 9,500 over nine months. In both cases that works out to about 35 people per day. I would think trying to vet 35 people per day, going back several years in each case, would be somewhere between impractical and a sub-optimal use of staff time.
But, I would likely be excluded due to holding anarcho-capitalist beliefs, so I guess my opinion on that doesn’t count for much. How that radical ideology would be weighed against my more mainstream libertarian activism, like being a state director for Gary Johnson’s campaign and working for Peter Schiff’s PAC back in 2011-12, I don’t know.
Your assumption that this would be a review by national office paid staff is perhaps not optimal. 35 a day is one a day from a typical state.