On the Libertarian National Committee
Hello Libertarians. This is the fourteenth 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.
I’m generally for transparency, so I’m going to start off with my analysis of how this is likely to go before we get into the details of it. At the national convention in a few weeks there will be two proposals for reshaping the structure of the Libertarian National Committee. One of them, which I favor, would reduce the committee to eleven people, with four being officers and seven being elected by the convention without regard to where they live. The other, which I oppose, would enlarge the committee to fifty-six members, four being officers and the rest being from the fifty-one affiliates.
Given the sense of the people I have observed, I don’t think that either of those two proposals will be adopted. To make that kind of change, two-thirds of the delegates voting at the convention would need to be in favor of it, and I don’t think either proposal will have that kind of support.
I’ll write briefly about why I think the smaller committee is preferable, but if it’s not going to happen spending too much time on it wouldn’t make sense. After the short opinion, I’d like to zoom out and look at the bigger picture of where we are and what we can expect in the near and medium-term future, which might be more useful.
The essential argument for shrinking the committee, which has been made by many different people over many decades, is that the national committee does not function well because it is too large. Besides several other problems and inconveniences (expensive meetings, long meetings, burnout, etcetera) the large committee structure we have used for the last thirty-five years is not conducive to careful decision making.
Decisions are the main product of the Libertarian national committee. There are other projects it takes on, and many committee members do try (and sometimes succeed) at being super volunteers. But the main product of the national committee is decisions.
If we want the committee to make generally better decisions than it otherwise would over the next few decades, we should bring it to somewhere between nine and fifteen people. The current proposal of eleven is in line with that.
If the committee is going to be shrunk, we can do it by releasing the officers, by releasing the at-large members, or by releasing the regional members. Saying goodbye to the officers would be foolish, but the other two options remain. When looking over data about how at-large members have historically behaved and comparing it to how regional members have behaved, at-large members tend to do generally better. It stands to reason that we should make an eleven person committee made up of people from any part of the country they happen to be from.
But it’s not going to happen, or at least it’s fairly unlikely. So what now?
Looking ahead, I don’t think we should expect either miracles or disasters. Even if the fifty-six member committee proposal passes, the Libertarian Party generally can function with a fairly dysfunctional LNC. As long as the state parties are healthy, the national party can beclown itself to some degree without dooming us.
After the dust settles on Grand Rapids, people will go home and decide how they want to spend their time and energy. My guess is that they will spend less of it thinking about the national party than they have recently and instead spend time doing something more productive. I, personally, will run for local office. Others will start thinking about the state fair booth, or about ballot access, or about calling old friends and telling them that it’s safe to come back. If I had to guess, I would say that we’re likely to have a lull for a few months after the convention, and then people will reenergize toward building ourselves, once more, into a party we’re happy to be a part of.
There have been worse times than this to be a Libertarian, and we will make our way back to where we were before. Maybe beyond. This decade has had a lot in common with the 1980s for the LP, and September of ‘86 was when the bounceback began. If history is any guide, we will mostly be in a better spot one year from now than we are today.
But finally, because I can’t help myself, here is the full list of reasons I put together for why we should let the regional system go. Yes, the effort seems futile now, but in two or four or six years I hope some of you will remember it when the topic comes up again.
1. If we keep the committee structured the way it is, we’ll keep getting similar results
2. The board is too large for the main thing it’s trying to do. The right size is 9-15 people
3. Region reps produce worse overall results than at large reps
4. Brain drain
5. States within regions don’t necessarily have similar interests with each other
6. We’re not trying to build a legislature. We already have one of those, it’s the convention.
7. Very few people, including delegates, even know who their region rep is now. Their alternate?
8. Saves convention time
9. Shenanigans with region formation
10. Difficult to know ahead of time what regions will be, so how does someone plan for a run?
11. Fewer people who only decide to run while at the national convention. “Well, we gotta pick someone.”
12. Most former region reps will tell you that they didn’t like the job after a little while. It’s a crappy job that gets hyped up every 2 years, so it’s not nice to the people who get tricked into doing it. “We used to look for suckers.”
13. The job selects for people who are extrinsically motivated by going after awards, when what we need are people who are intrinsically motivated by appreciating their own good work.
14. Hard to select for skills.
15. It’s the absolute number of goofballs, not their proportion, that makes meetings difficult
16. Fewer people means shorter meetings. Shorter meetings produce less burnout and better decision making.
17. The LNC is supposed to make decisions about resource deployment, not be a source of entertainment.
18. A smaller committee means more focus on the core objectives. The five core duties get neglected if there’s too much extra attempted.
19. Talent is not distributed evenly geographically
20. Regions guarantee in person meetings are difficult
21. In person meetings are less expensive with a smaller board
22. Region building encourages factionalism
23. Problems get solved with too much effort, without an increase in decision quality
24. Want less leaks out of executive session?
25. Smaller groups build internal trust more easily.
26. Beyond a certain point, there are decreasing returns on investment for decision quality for each additional person you add to a committee. After a while the return becomes negative.
27. A large board with a few chaotic people produces burnout of good, productive people.
28. I have to trust these people with my money, and a smaller board means more accountability.
29. If you were on the LNC, you would want to serve with a smaller, more focused group
30. You should choose a committee structure that can endure, and sometimes thrive, for decades. You should also choose a committee structure for people you haven’t met yet, some of whom might not yet be born.
Be First to Comment