Opinion: End of an Era by Tom Rowlette

On the End of an Era

Hello Libertarians.  This is the fifteenth and last of a series of opinion articles I have been 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.

You set the tone.

At the upcoming convention, starting in only a few days, there will be a changing of the guard.  The Mises Caucus, which lost dominance in July of last year but has maintained a significant presence in the national Libertarian Party, will be a minority in Grand Rapids and will be mostly swept from power.  I know they are saying that they are saving their money and effort for a big push to re-take the party at the 2028 convention, but that’s what I would say too if I was part of a faction that was doomed.

The most likely scenario in the medium-term is that the Mises Caucus will make that effort in 2028, be defeated again, and then make one more half-hearted try in 2030 before finally disintegrating.  They will continue to be disruptive, but we’re mostly beyond the point where they will be dangerous.

The non-Mises parts of the Libertarian Party now have to decide how we will behave, both towards them and towards each other.  That begins with how we behave at the convention.

We can adopt the same tone that the Mises Caucus did in 2022 and 2024.  We can be generally loud and rude.  We can act like every vote that doesn’t go our way is unfair, and we can ignore the rules when they’re inconvenient for us.  We also can twist the knife in ways designed more to upset our opponents than to advance the well-being of the LP.  They have done all of those things to us in previous years, and to some degree we would be justified in repaying them in kind.

But instead of that, we could signal that times have changed in a fundamental way.  We could be courteous during our victories, and magnanimous during our defeats.  When someone says something we don’t like, we could choose to not shout them down.

At this point we’ve learned a few lessons.  We shouldn’t give positions of trust to people who don’t deserve them, and we don’t have to give consideration to proposals designed solely to irritate us.  We can be firm in not tolerating the bad behavior we will inevitably encounter, and yet not adopt that behavior ourselves.

If we achieve that level of grace, we can walk away from the convention having demonstrated that once again the adults are in charge.  We’ll also walk away with a feeling that most of us are worthy of each other’s respect and support, and that will be a good start to what I suspect will be a period of recovery and growth.

Thank you all for reading these opinions and engaging in the comments and in your own articles over the last fifteen months.  I hope they’ve focused and improved our thinking on whatever the topic of the moment has been.

At this point, you all know I like lists.  I’m going to leave you with one last set of things to consider.  This is everything we have discussed, and some conclusions I hope people have drawn from those discussions:

1.  We should do what we can to avoid fracturing the LP into several smaller parties.

2.  Expulsion is not a good tool for the national LP to begin using.

3.  We should only disaffiliate a state party if we’re willing for that party to be mostly non-functional for about ten years.

4.  The Mises Caucus had some good strategic ideas, but it has been mostly a negative influence on the LP.

5.  We should sue Angela McArdle.

6.  Focusing on the internal strife of the LP is appropriate right now, but soon the focus will need to shift outward.

7.  To be successful in the very long run, we need to consistently run candidates who are better than their opponents in ways voters care about.

8.  We tend to go through 10-year periods of good and then bad times, and the greatest strength of the LP is that there are those who stick with it through the tougher years.

9.  Ballot access is very important, but we should not go into debt for it.

10.  Todd Hagopian is right.  LNC members must put in the effort to balance the budget.

11.  Good LNC members know the budget well, have good meeting attendance, recruit new members, and serve on at least 2 subcommittees.

12.  The Mises Caucus cannot win now, so we need to focus on the good we can do going forward instead of focusing on how ridiculous they continue to be.

13.  There are many options for how to disaffiliate from New Hampshire, with pros and cons for each one.

14. We should make the LNC smaller, not larger.  Even if we go the wrong direction on that issue, the LP will survive.

15.  We should be gracious to each other during the convention.