We return to the year 2003, as covered in the January 2003 issue of Let Freedom Ring! Let Freedom Ring’s report reads:
LNC Out of Cash
Budget Slashed 60%
Staff Downsizing Under Way
LNC Misses UMP Payments
The LNC has responded positively to the Party’s financial crisis. Faced with massive debt and its de facto default on Unified Membership Plan payments, the Libertarian National Committee adopted an austerity budget for 2003.
According to our usually reliable sources: The pet projects of various LNC members, e.g., the Strategic Plan and the Political Advisory Committee, were all eliminated from the current budget. LNC members will devote 100% of their LP time to fund raising to refloat the ship. The $1.4 million budget for 2003 is 60% less than the nominal 2002 budget, and marks a 1/3 reduction in spending relative to actual spending in 2002.
The Staff budget line was cut 50%, from approximately $600,000 to approximately $300,000; over-runs are forbidden except by LNC permission. There will be no new hires, no new computers, and no substantial amounts of new software. The Major Donors Budget line was eliminated. Future major donations will be used exclusively to pay off the Party’s debts, not to enhance the current budget.
Under the Unified Membership Plan, for the past six years the LNC collected dues for many though not all states. The LNC then forwarded member states a monthly check based on dues and donations. In November 2002 states were sent only half the money they were owed. The remainder of the money may be sent in late December. Apparently there is no expectation that the December payment can be made at all in the immediate future. As was explained to your reporter, there was no money left for payments.
While the Party’s financial condition has been deteriorating for some time, the crisis became apparent after the July 2002 National Convention. LNC Members advise me that the loss on the 2002 National Convention has still not been determined. However, the Party’s financial reports show for January-June 2002 a net worth fluctuating in the range $182,000-$216,000, while at the end of August 2002 the Party’s net worth was precisely -$117,251. While perhaps $100,000 of this change appears to be Auditor—recommended adjustments, it would nonetheless seem that the 2002 NatCon lost more than $200,000. Since August, the Party’s net worth has improved, from minus $117,000 to minus $37,000.
Pat,
I want to repeat this very carefully. Liberal Party USA is not a breakaway party. It is true that a number of people involved were in the libertarian party in the past at some point in time. But quite a lot of people were not.
I was in the Republican party from when I first registered to vote in 1975 until 2005, although I did not become seriously active in party politics until 1989. Although, since I started following party politics watching and discussing the 1964 conventions, it would be more appropriate to say that I was a republican the entire time I grew up. But I never completely agreed with some of the things they said, and discovered later in life that I was actually always a classical liberal. Probably partially hereditary, since my grandfather‘s cousin wrote Tom Swift, and the bookshelves I grew up reading from included everything from mein kampf to every book Rand ever wrote.
I was in the Libertarian party from 2005 until July 4, 2020, when I finally decided it was failing and could not possibly be a home anymore. Many of the others you read about and names you see relating to the Liberal party left the LP more recently. But I have already met quite a few people who were never in the LP. And that number is growing.
Ask a lot of leaders of the LP if they have always been in the party. Most have not. Some came from the Democratic Party, others from the Republican Party. And of course, some were in neither. And a lot of people who have left the LP in recent years, have simply gone to ground and become inactive. Hopefully, they still vote.
So we really need to quash this rumor that this is just a breakaway party. It is not. And to those who say that it will fail, and everyone will just be back in the LP at some point, you are delusional. Quite simply delusional.
I expect that a significant number of people currently in the LP who consider themselves classical liberals will decide to stay and try to restore their party. That’s fine. But they are not an indicator that everyone who left will simply return and bow down and give allegiance to the party that once belonged to Nolan, but that no longer does. I don’t even think he would recognize it more than a decade after his death.
The whole idea of a site like third-party watch is discussion of third parties. Not just one third-party. A lot of discussion over the past 20 years on this website has been about the LP. Occasionally there is news of and about other parties, which I always find interesting to read and wish there was more of.
The Greens have a right to exist. Constitution party has a right. Although it is somewhat ironic, even the communists have a right to have their party — or in their case parties.
So why don’t classic liberals have the same right?
Indeed, this year the Communists elected a candidate.
I’m not a classical liberal but a libertarian. If the LP fails I’m content to do other things and go back to throwing out my ballot in the garage before entering the house. I’m determined for it not to fail. It would have been very easy to walk away. I am not that type.
The classical libetals can certainly have a political party called the Liberal Party.. I do not think they will be successful, even when compared to the Libertarian Party, but you all are certainly welcome to try.
Stewart, you’re focusing on entirely the wrong part of my query. Based on the names I’ve seen floated and the generally similar policy direction, I said breakaway. I haven’t thought of a better shorthand for that, but feel free to suggest one.
I believe all of the things you mentioned in all of my other examples. When Marxist parties fragment, when the American and American Independent parties split in 1976, when the Reform Party fragmented in 2000, when the electoral Boston Tea Party was a thing – there were always at least some new people involved who had not been in the party prior to the split, there were always some ideological matters of contention, and all of those splits were permanent except for the BTP.
As you can, see I’m discussing a variety of minor parties, certainly not sticking to only.the libertarians, much less advocating doing so.
I was involved with libertarians in 1987-9 because of Ron Paul and in 2008 because of Bob Barr. I supported both Paul and Barr before and after that when they ran as Republicans. Likewise, I supported George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Pat Buchanan and Virgil Goode regardless of which party they ran with, major or minor.
Had other candidates I supported over the years – Goldwater, Reagan, Perot, Trump since 2016 – switched parties, I would have switched my support with them (for some of those listed above support did not mean vote as I was too young or not in the correct state or district).
I’m making no prediction anything like that everyone in the liberal party who used to be in the libertarian party will switch back. If anything, I expect the rift to deepen and for other parties with a similar general policy direction to form, much as we see with minor parties in other policy directions.
My question was what prior parties with a largely similar policy direction and publicly spearheaded primarily by former libertarian party officers/candidates/activists previously got as far along in as many states as the liberal party already has. If you are reading disparagement into breakaway as shorthand for that, or any predictions that your effort is a temporary or lesser one than whatever remains in the libertarian party, or that you can’t appeal to other people who were never in that party, you are reading things into it which I never implied.
My impression is that the libertarians are currently experiencing more significant fragmentation and diminishment than in the example posted in the original post, and more like the examples from other parties I mentioned. So far, no one has persuaded me otherwise, but I remain open to examples with specific evidence to show how one of their prior rifts was equally bad.
The threading of comments on WordPress is a bit confusing. And the fact that this discussion is going on in several places in pieces makes it even more difficult.
But as far as your question about other parties splintering off, I’m not sure of any that have survived or even how many there may have been over the years, especially before I joined in 2005.
Hopefully someone else here does know and can answer.
There is of course, a somewhat similar path that anarchists and classic liberals travel. They just end at different points. I have read a lot about the Dallas accord, and its intent. And as I have noted here previously, I believe it was a huge mistake.
So while classic liberalism and the mix of philosophy currently found in the libertarian party may have some similar platform positions at present, I would expect to see the libertarian party shift farther toward the philosophy of getting rid of every form of government and putting up toll roads in your neighborhood between houses. That may work well in a philosophical discussion over pizza at a party meeting, but the general public thinks it is crazy.
And even within liberal party USA, there are some differences. I have already had several debates with their national chair over the death penalty. The libertarian party in South Carolina had similar discussions with the national chair of the LP when changes were made a few cycles back regarding the position on death penalty. Several people in the delegation, including myself, considered walking out of the convention at that point in time.
For some strange reason, our state seems to have a disproportionally high percentage of crazy, stupid murderers that wander around killing people. Whether it is just their children, as in the case of Susan Smith, or nine people at a Wednesday night Bible study in a church, who Dylann Roof slaughtered. And of course we have the orange haired murderer (no, not Trump), who slaughtered his wife and son in the next county over from here. And I can’t forget Walter Scott. I met him several times in the local barbershop. Shot in the back by a cop needlessly.
Roof got the death penalty, which his parents should’ve also gotten as accessories since they knew he was insane and they got him the gun anyway. You may have noticed that Biden did not dare to commute his sentence. The backlash from just about every citizen of this state would have been impossible for him to deal with. And of course, Roof would just be executed anyway, eventually, since he received the death penalty in the state trial as well. I believe all of his appeals are exhausted at this point.
So while the national party is vehemently against the death penalty, it is quite likely that our state party will quite vocally officially disagree. But only on that issue.
Anyway… Enough ranting… It is certainly not directed at you in any shape or form and I expect that this response is just as confusing as my prior one! 🙂
Sorry about that last reply. I got an alert about something very strange in the router logs on the ship while I was writing it and lost my train of thought.
One of the edge routers rebooted. They don’t do that. It had only been running a little less than a year since it last had maintenance.
So now I have to scramble this afternoon and figure out what is going on. Everyone in IT has been on vacation all week. All of them. That’s government for you!
No worries, I’ll await responses from others but I’ve done a bit of search engine deployment and am not finding any parties even approximately pointed in a libertarian direction that were competing with the libertarians around 2003 or prior points. The closest I found was that the Arizona Libertarians nominated a different presidential ticket in 2000 and were fighting for control of their state party, but that’s not the nearly the same level of rift as now.
Here are some of my thoughts on the larger questions here :
https://thirdpartywatch.com/2024/10/21/opinion-the-era-of-parties-is-over/
Barn animal feeding time starts in 6 hours and I don’t feel sleepy yet, so I need to go fix that in a manner that won’t make it difficult to start work at 2 am. Wish me luck as I do you with your situation.
Yes, I recall your opinion piece, which initiated some rather extensive and surprisingly civil discussion, considering the subject.
Just imagine you are on Greenwich Mean Time, and it will feel like the afternoon and be much easier to deal with. I have slept with the lights on for more than 30 years. Outages and emergencies almost always happen in the middle of the night. When the lights go out in a citywide power failure, you wake up.
I owe folks some replies in that but I’m still thinking about how to approach it in a manner that would show promise of being productive. My best thought is to expand it to a longer piece with references and more explanation of why I brought certain things up, why they are relevant, why they are more than just opinions etc, but I don’t know off hand who would publish it. I’m not going to presume the editor here would, so maybe I’ll create a WordPress site for self publishing.
As for my schedule, getting up in the middle of the night is normal; I’ve been farming all my life and always get up at a time city folks wouldn’t consider normal. It’s staying up after dark and not feeling tired yet that was a bit abnormal last night, but I was fine this morning.
More relevant to this discussion, can anyone suggest good resources or search terms if someone wants to find the answers to my original question for themselves rather than relying on the answers provided here? I’m not convinced that the yes answer to all my questions which Nolan’s duty provided on Christmas day is accurate – it seems to be wrong at the very least about a breakaway (or whatever term you wish to use) party in 2003 – but I’m not sure off hand of a good way to find the answers other than to ask here.
I’m not saying I necessarily want to put in the time to delve into it that deeply, but I’d like at the least for that option to be as easy as possible in case anyone reading is curious and doesn’t know.
The entire purpose of third-party watch is to watch third parties. I don’t see why a civil discussion of the validity of third parties in today’s world is a topic that the editor would censor. Remember, he published your first article.
I disagree with your premise, but I see no reason it shouldn’t be presented and discussed.
My knowledge of these things is limited, gathered accidentally and solely based on reading this site the last few months. So, this impression could easily be wrong and certainly isn’t based on siding with any factions of your party then or now.
But, I get the impression that the situations are not quite analogous.
Unless – was the party already in decline for several years by 2002 – 2003? Were multiple states fighting over state party leadership in internal as well as external legal proceedings? Were multiple national officers purging each other off the committee and suing each other in court, in addition to others resigning? Was a breakaway party forming in a bunch of states, like the liberal party is now?
I get the impression that what you are going through now is worse than what you went through 22 years ago.
Elsewhere, I did read about your party going through a difficult period when the Koch faction lost and walked off in 1983. But, it didn’t have the elements I mentioned. Those remind me more of what happened to the Reform Party during/after 2000 and the American (Independent) Party during/after 1976.
Pat, YES to all your questions. We’ve been here before and this ups and downs of the fortunes of the LP is as common as the tide.
By 2004, the Executive Director came on with no salary had to fundraise all of it themselves.
There is always infighting in the party.
The War on Global Terror broke the LP in many ways. Apparently, war fever is not good for an anti-war party.
What was the name of the breakaway party 22 years ago and in how many / which states did it form? What happened to it?
Several other parties have “broken away” over the years. Nearly all flamed out. But you have to define breaking away and not confuse it with differences in political philosophy.
For example, while a number of former members of the LP have joined Liberal Party USA, I would not consider it a “breakaway” in any sense of the word. Most of the former members of the LP are classical liberals who gave up on trying to bring the LP back to its original political course as a classical liberal party.
So we consider the current LP to actually be the “breakaway” in the sense that it is no longer a legitimate home for classic liberals.
But we are not the entirety of LPUSA. Many are what some would call Blue Dog Democrats, as well as Rockefeller Republicans. I believe the internal fine for using the word libertarian within the party is currently $.25, $.50 if you are a party leader.
To my knowledge, no libertarian breakaways were ever organized to the extent the liberal party already is. To my knowledge, the Boston Tea Party, not to be confused with the contemporaneous non electoral Greater Boston Tea Party or the historical event, was the one that got the furthest along, and the furthest they ever got was getting on the ballot for president in three states, which they did only once.
I’m also not aware of past libertarian breakaway parties having had as prominent people associated with them as the liberal party has.
As for not being a breakaway, I’ll take your word for it that there are people involved who weren’t libertarians, but all of the ones I’ve heard of mentioned here or on their website were. By comparison, the aforementioned Boston Tea party was less of a Libertarian breakaway – their presidential nominee had no libertarian party history, and neither did several others who sought it.
When minor parties break up, ideological factors are frequently either a factor or an excuse. The reason there are a bevy of Marxist parties is officially what seem from the outside like minor ideological differences but to them seem irreconcilable and in reality are primarily grounded in personal conflicts. The Reform and American parties went the same way, and a similar dynamic is at play in the Constitution Party with several states breaking away on the presidential nominee this year (although otherwise remaining affiliated for now).
I may be not remembering or unaware of some past libertarian breakaway(s). Please help with that, if so.