Recently, there has been interest in electing a better Libertarian National Committee in 2026. However, interest does not translate to plan. Here I offer a few general suggestions on what sort of arrangement might yield the desired result.
First, the current group got in successfully because it had an extremely large and well-organized caucus behind it. Indeed, as I pointed out well before they won, you could find the organizational structure of the Mises caucus on the Internet. That organization was much larger and better organized than the national volunteer arrangement of the 2004 Badnarik campaign. I can speak with considerable expertise on this, because in 2004 I was Badnarik’s national volunteer coordinator.
Second, if you are to have any hope of succeeding, you need a large organization. That will not happen overnight. It might happen if you started now. It also might not. The clock is ticking, and the hour is already late. The objective of the organization needs to be to take over state parties, state conventions, and state committees in every state in the union, or at least as many as possible. Rounding up people who are willing to go as delegates to the national convention is a recipe for failure, because if the other side controls the state convention, your delegates will not be elected.
Third, in order for the take over to do any good, you need to elect a full set of candidates for all LNC positions. If someone says they are running for National Chair and don’t have a slate of candidates with them, or worse if they say that they don’t think there should be a slate of candidates, their effort is of negative value towards rescuing the party from the Mises caucus, and they should be encouraged to do something else.
Fourth, in order to be effective at the national convention, you need a strong leadership group that knows what it is doing and is not itself running for office. They should not be candidates, because if they are candidates they are too busy campaigning to do the operations of running a successful campaign. The value of this for the other side was seen at the 2024 convention. There was a seemingly innocent motion to elect the At-Large members in a single ballot, the people who got the most votes being elected. The other side had arranged to have exactly as many candidates as there were openings, so that every member of their caucus would vote for the same people. The other side ran the number of nominees up to seven or so, meaning the votes of the other side were split over too many candidates. The Mises people, having prepared correctly for this eventuality, managed to elect every At-Large member of the national committee. The people who nominated the extra At-Large non-Mises candidates beyond the five strongest candidates should be identified as enemies of the party or, in the words of one of our opposition parties, useful idiots.
Fifth, you should recognize that there are at least two possible attitudes toward parliamentary procedure. One attitude, adopted by most of the non-Mises people, is at the point of the bylaws is to allow meetings to proceed so that the minority can be heard and the majority gets what it wants. The outcome of the meeting is then in the hands of the meeting, the bylaws and rules of order serving only to guide the process. The other position is that the outcome of the meeting is determined in advance, and the correct interpretation of the bylaws and rules of order is the one that leads to the pre—determined desired outcome. If the desired outcome requires that the bylaws rule that black is white, then the bylaws will indeed rule that black is white, because that is their duty. Readers familiar with communist-run organizations will find this latter thought process familiar.
Sixth, the other side is entirely happy to cheat rather than accept that it might lose. If you have enough cheaters in the right positions, they are certain to win. At some point, perhaps after they have cheated themselves into controlling the LNC again, and perhaps well beforehand, you are better to find an alternative that does not involve supporting the cheaters.
It’s always my hope that we can have policy positions determine these things rather than political power. There is no unity in the “anyone but Mises” factions, and as you observed, as long as opposition is diluted it will be hard to win. There’s a simple solution – a primary. It could be held online a couple of weeks before convention. Its integrity would have to be unquestionable, of course, but there a few ways to do that. Best would be raising money for a third party audit, but there might be some acceptable blockchain solutions. I don’t know whether it would be better to limit the electorate to delegates or open it up to membership — maybe even expired members who pledge to return if the vote is successful. Plenty of time (well, if it’s started soon) to discuss *how* to do it.
I don’t think you really need to worry all that much about state level power. I think the allure of the MC has worn thin, and we can count on a few states taking care of the problem themselves. In PA, we managed to revive enough dormant counties and disaffected former members to squash a movement aiming to stop petitioning for Oliver/ter Maat and supporting RFK instead. Concerned members should bolster their convention attendance and whip delegate elections.
Maybe it’s just time for a new party.
The party is merely a means to an end, not an end in itself. Perhaps the ends that some party members seek is just different that the ends that other members seek. Maybe this just needs to be recognized for those with different ends to move on to something new.
The end result of your editorial being that it is likely too late. Remember, the party has to still exist and hold a convention for any overthrow of mises to be attempted.
The real goal of mises has always been supporting their masters in the party of lincoln’s carcass. Their general membership is mostly clueless of what the goal has been. That goal is best achieved by killing the LP, or reducing it to an unrecoverable state below that of the greens or constitution party.
I take no sides in your party’s faction battles, but it seems unlikely that an effort such as you describe will come together in the <2 year timeframe. I've now read enough between here and a couple of other places to surmise the "Mises Caucus" effort took about 6 years to gain critical takeover mass at the national level. That's before you examine other factors that may have made it easier for them than any would be counterrevolutionaries.
I'd advise spending such considerable amounts of time, money, and energy in myriad types of other ways which seem like they might have better odds of eventually helping to shrink government overreach, but people will allocate their available resources as they see fit regardless of my advice. Two forays into your party in 1987-9 and 2008 leave me disinterested in attempting a third, but I fully understand things like sunk costs, inertia, momentum, chasing good after bad, etc.
Since no-one will heed my advice, even if this is allowed publication (I'm hopeful it will , but not very optimistic), the proof will be in the pudding. My predictions for the more likely.futures direction have been posted previously. They are also based on past experience with various other US minor parties since the 1960s . I've not been involved with any socialist/Marxist parties, but they're an even better example than the ones with which I have direct personal knowledge.
Curious as to what caused you to leave the LP on those two previous occasions.
There’s a lot of ways I can answer that. I found that libertarians are always eager to tell me I’m a libertarian up until the point I start calling myself one, and then aggressively start telling me I’m not. I agree with them in some ways and not others, but they constantly spin their wheels, get stuck in the mud, defeat themselves, have wildly unrealistic expectations and vociferous disagreements over obscure trivia and extremely hypothetical scenarios, attract very incompatible people, succumb endlessly to the tyranny of small differences, etc, etc, etc.
Most of the actual activity once you get involved has nothing at all with making us less oppressed or more free and consists of things I have no interest in – delusional vanity campaigns, horribly botched outreach (or none), bureaucratic and parliamentary morass but without any actual power, gullible kowtowing to passing charlatans, calling each other all sorts of bad things endlessly, gathering and later misusing personal information, acting in embarrassing ways in public, pathetically begging for money without demonstrating success, begging for ballot access apparently for its own sake, terribly mismanaged events, shooting themselves and each other in the feet (and anything in vicinity since most people involved have terrible aim), running each other and everyone else off, total lack of professionalism or grounding in reality, pathetic whining social club sessions masquerading as political events, endless navel gazing at internal trivia, total disconnect on what matters to most folks or what people are likely to know or understand or find credible, and we can go on endlessly.
Whenever they get traction, they manage to totally dynamite it in its tracks. Whenever anyone competent gets anything done, it gets undone and they get chased off or leave in disgust. It’s a constant churn that’s largely or entirely a waste of time, money and energy better employed in many other ways, and increasingly so.
They survive mainly on short term donors who come in with highly unrealistic expectations and get frustrated and leave, usually fairly quickly.
There’s no agreement on what they believe or how to translate beliefs into action or keep efforts from being wasted or backfiring.
There are many other ways of advancing political and ideological goals that are far less frustrating, more effective, don’t suffer from the drawbacks of political parties as such, and are becoming ever more advantageous at accomplishing various pieces of what political parties were in the past the primary or only ways to do.
Most of these things can be said as well of other Minor parties I’ve been involved in at Times – American/American Independent, Reform, Constitution – but there’s something uniquely incompatible in libertarianism and political party in particular. And, it’s only getting worse at an accelerating rate as they have now entered the splintering and diminishing stage.
Tl; Dr there’s nothing there worth engaging in faction fights over – any victory would be pyrrhic and amount to temporary queen of dying ant colony.
Sorry to be so negative, but that was my impression both times. The particulars changed, but not the general trends or systemic problems. Since I offer no hope for their redemption, this may well be talking to myself as it might fail to meet editorial standards, but you asked so I’ve skimmed the surface.
If you wish to organise an outcasts social club or freak parade centered around competition on disagreeing the most disagreeably while pretending to be a political party, I can’t dissuade those hell bent on doing so at all costs, but I would if I could. Maybe some people get something out of it, but many more seem to be stuck in endless sunk cost ruts chasing good effort and resources after bad.
Porcus, thanks for the candor. Much of what you say resembles my experience from the early days of “hope and glory” to the seeming unraveling of the Party’s growth in the late 1990’s.
Support CAH for Chair.