The Libertarian Party's biennial national convention in Washington, D.C., last month was a snapshot of a minor political party in the midst of a major identity crisis.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and independent challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr. each spoke on stage, the former landing a coveted prime-time keynote slot. Fourth-place GOP presidential finisher Vivek Ramaswamy, who keeps trying to make a "libertarian-nationalist alliance" a thing, also gave a speech.
Michael Rectenwald, the favored presidential candidate of the Mises Caucus faction currently running the party, failed to secure the nomination after making a bumbling, post-Trump speech on stage while stoned, having made a spur-of-the-moment decision beforehand to pop an edible.
Longtime party activist Starchild was dragged out by security for heckling the Republican headliner.[Complete lack of context. - B4L] In short, it was exactly what you might have expected had you been following L.P. drama over the past few years.
The fractured party reelected the Mises Caucus' Angela McArdle as chair but also selected as its presidential standard-bearer Chase Oliver, a gay 38-year-old antiwar activist and former Democrat who had pushed the most recent U.S. Georgia Senate race into a runoff election eventually won by a Democrat.
In the past three presidential elections, the Libertarian candidate appeared on all 50 state ballots plus the District of Columbia, finished in third place, and was backed by every state L.P. affiliate. None of that seems likely to happen this year.
The Montana L.P. after the convention immediately declared that it would not be placing Oliver's name on the ballot.
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Oliver's critics say he's culturally woke and was insufficiently opposed to the COVID regime of lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and masking. "I've been against vaccine or mask mandates from government," he countered to me and Zach Weissmueller on our show, Just Asking Questions. "If the COVID messaging was so good—this divisive messaging saying, If you wore a mask, if you ever took a vaccine, you're just an idiot and you're stupid or whatever—that's what [the Mises Caucus is] putting out there. And guess what? We're bleeding members and donors because people want to make decisions for themselves and not be shamed that they made a decision differently than their neighbor."
Meanwhile McArdle, against a pre-convention backdrop of declining party membership, fundraising, and ballot access, has portrayed last month's gathering as a triumph, while positing Oliver as a tool for siphoning away votes from President Joe Biden.
"Donald Trump says he's going to put a Libertarian in a Cabinet position. He came out and spoke to us. He said he's a Libertarian. He has basically endorsed us," McArdle said in a June 3 video address. "And so in return, I endorse Chase Oliver as the best way to beat Joe Biden. Get in loser, we are stopping Biden. That's what I think. That's what I think this campaign is about."
How did the party get here, to a place where its chair is openly cheering on victory for the decidedly nonlibertarian Trump?
The modern-day fracture of the L.P. started in 2017, when a small bloc formed the Mises Caucus, lionizing such figures as Ron Paul and Murray Rothbard. Generally young and extremely online, culturally right of center, attracted to sharp-elbowed podcasters like Smith and Tom Woods, the Mises crew exudes visceral hostility toward the state, the Fed, the war machine, and what they see as the philosophically compromised D.C. libertarian think-tankers (pejoratively termed "Beltwaytarians") who they believe enable rather than meaningfully oppose the "regime."
The Mises Caucus arose in revulsion toward the Gary Johnson/Bill Weld 2016 ticket, which they saw as having watered down the libertarian message to the point of being unrecognizable. They were further disappointed by 2020 nominee Jo Jorgensen and downright repulsed by the L.P.'s messaging on Black Lives Matter and COVID lockdowns.
In 2022, the Mises Caucus succeeded in a self-styled "takeover" of the party at its convention in Reno, after which the victors wasted little time inflaming the sensibilities of what they saw as the losing libertines. No more overemphasizing the importance of sex work, abortion, or free-flowing immigration, positions the new guard either disagreed with or felt needlessly alienated potential allies.
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Many of the disgruntled Libertarians point their ire at McArdle.* Former L.P. employee Michelle MacCutcheon, who had been in charge of onboarding all new volunteers (a "labor of love," as she described it), said the new regime carried out a purge of staffers, with little respect given to coalition building or professionalism. (McArdle, for instance, hired her own romantic partner as a contractor to help with fundraising). "We were on a great trajectory" before, MacCutcheon says. "All of that was just wiped clean."
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The fractures within the Libertarian Party are likely to deepen over the final 20 weeks of the presidential campaign. But the overall picture remains mixed—for instance, L.P. Communications Director Brian McWilliams tells Reason that fundraising is up 16 percent post-convention. ...
"I'm not even comfortable using the word 'libertarian' to describe myself, after all the damage the [Mises Caucus], LP, and MAGA have done to the word and scene," Bradley says. "At best, members of Mises Caucus are willing to tolerate and associate with known white supremacists, antisemites, Holocaust deniers….At worst, they are those people."
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More:
https://reason.com/2024/06/25/how-the-libertarian-party-lost-its-way/
