Hello Libertarians. This is the sixth of a series of opinion articles I’ll be privileged to write for you once per month on an “inside baseball” topic for the Libertarian Party. I encourage everyone who has an opinion on whatever we’re talking about this month to comment or send phillies@4liberty.net your longer editorials, which may well be published.
The previous five articles I’ve written in this series have all had a common theme. Those articles were: “On Expulsion” (March 2025), “On Fracturing” (April 2025), “On Disaffiliation” (May 2025), “On Mises Salvage” (June 2025), and “On the McArdle Money” (July 2025). What we’ve considered up until now has been how we should deal with the damage that has been done to the Libertarian Party recently.
This article begins a shift in focus. From here on out, we’re going to be looking at how the Libertarian Party has worked in a more general way over a longer period of time, and how we can get better at what we do over the long haul.
For any volunteer movement, the most effective use of a volunteer’s time and the most fun use of a volunteer’s time should be aligned. If not, people will tend to drift into side projects that are entertaining but not productive.
For most of the last year those two things have been aligned. From the end of the Presidential election in November 2024 until now, the most appropriate and best use of time for many Party activists has been internal fighting. That’s not normal. We had a faction running things that put out terrible messaging while poorly managing Libertarian Party finances, and fixing that problem was both an immediate need and a high-impact activity.
But let’s face it. Internal party politics is more fun than fighting the Democrats and Republicans. Partly that’s because winning a race for state party chairperson seems more achievable than winning a race for mayor of your city, and partly it’s because you might have a better idea of what you’d do as a state chair than as a mayor. Also, for whatever reason, we notice and celebrate our internal officers more than we celebrate Libertarians elected to public office.
But that natural alignment of what’s fun and what’s productive won’t always exist, because internal fighting is only very rarely going to be the most effective use of a dedicated volunteer’s time. Internal politics should be the main focus of a dedicated volunteer only maybe once or twice in a lifetime.
So this is a side quest. The main quest is to get Libertarians elected. After Grand Rapids I, personally, am going to focus on winning election to the St. Louis City Board of Aldermen in April 2027. I encourage all of you to do something similar, even if it’s less fun and more difficult than the internal contests.
Meanwhile though… we get to indulge. Go nuts, but please be ready to pivot your energy back to our main mission after May 2026.
