Libertarian Party: Bad for Libertarians?
Brian Doherty | December 21, 2006, 3:17pm
In my over 100 lengthy interviews, and close reading of decades worth of libertarian movement literature, done as research for my forthcoming book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, this is an opinion I've come across before. But here is Bruce Bartlett explaining why he thinks that, for the greater good of the larger libertarian cause, the Libertarian Party needs to disappear.
Bartlett is most famous recently for getting bounced from the National Center for Policy Analysis for writing the anti-Bush book Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy , which was excerpted in the June issue of Reason, with a close reading of Bush's terrible record on free trade
tomWright | December 21, 2006, 9:49pm | #
A lot of folks have said that there should be a national libertarian organization, along the lines of the NRA, etal.
Ever hear of:
The Cato Institute?
The Future of Freedom Foundation?
Not to mention a little bunch of radicals based somewhere in a building at 3415 S. Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles, California. I can't recall their name. Something like Rational Basement or Cogitators Collective, or something like that. Whatever.
Those are just some I can think of.
And while Cato has occasionally strayed, as in it's stand on pharmaceutical re-importation from Canada, it has been pretty solid, effective and works with both parties.
The FFF is smaller and less effective, but it is there and Jacob Hornberger a powerful speaker.
That third one has done a couple interesting things as well.
I do agree that, as much fun as it is every couple of years to watch StarChild strut around in fishnets, and whats-her-name-the-abortionLady going around turning every conversation into a polemic on fetus-rights, (what a lead-blanket SHE is!), the convention does little to broadcast an aura of effectiveness. Not to mention the vendor booths have been sorely lacking in interesting chachkas the past few times.
Perhaps evolving into the National Libertarian Association or the Individualist International is a better idea.
James Anderson Merritt | December 22, 2006, 2:41pm | #
Lost_In_Translation | December 21, 2006, 3:44pm | #
Yeah, as the last election showed, the LP is really ONTO something, that something being a losing strategy.
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Eric the .5b | December 21, 2006, 7:44pm | #
That indicates to me that they may be onto something, that "the enemy" is trying a desperate big blitz, and that now is the time to stick to our guns.
Why yes, those "libertarians" like myself who dislike and hope for the end of the LP are really deep-cover agents of a secret, bipartisan cabal fighting against the LP sweep of the national elections our predictions show within the next decade...
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Dismissiveness and over-exaggeration as tools of marginalization. Behold two examples above.
It is a fact that the GOP in California has undertaken several deliberate campaigns to marginalize the Libertarian Party and its candidates here (with my own ears, I've heard their leaders going out of their way to diss the LP in talk radio appearances during campaign seasons), and there are numerous accounts of similar shenanigans elsewhere. So if you want to call the GOP a "cabal," go ahead. In Calfornia, the Republicans are so far under the radar that they might as well be a "secret cabal," for that matter.
As far as what we may be "onto": if we were insignificant, folks like Bartlett couldn't get anywhere criticizing us, the GOP wouldn't be trying to torpedo us, and the Demos wouldn't be trying to poach the libertarian vote. So the question is, what is the threat -- actual or potential -- that we represent? Perhaps GOP losses in elections where the Libertarian candidate garnered more votes than the margin of victory are helping the LP live up to its important function as "big stick," with which to beat pols and parties who promise libertarian results and deliver crap. Whether we win or can only prevent others from winning, either way we are perceived as some kind of threat to the major party status quo. The more that mainstream pols and their a-pol-ogists lay into the LP, the more I suspect that we are being perceived as at least a spoiler threat.
James Anderson Merritt | December 22, 2006, 3:44pm | #
Sam Franklin | December 22, 2006, 6:17am | #
"Before the president risks the life of even one American soldier, he needs a reason, not an excuse," said Steve Dasbach, Libertarian Party executive director. "Unless the United States is at risk of an Iraqi military attack, Bush's proposal to invade that nation should be denounced for what it is: reckless foreign interventionism."
-August 8, 2002
I wasn't hearing that kind of talk from the Republican Party in late 2002. I wasn't hearing that kind of talk from the Democratic Party in late 2002. Even if there were no Libertarian Party, and the entire Libertarian Party was re-allocated between the major parties, I still don't think we would have heard this kind of talk from either of the major parties in 2002. This is proof enough that the Libertarian Party is good. They told the US what the US needed to hear in 2002 (and did not wait for 2006 to start being seriously anti-Iraq-war).
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Thank you Sam. If there were no LP, any pandering to libertarian voters would probably happen only during the primaries. Because there is an LP (whose candidates are turning up in official debates more and more these days), important issues and points of view continue to get coverage, all the way up to election day (and beyond, as some former LP presidential, vice presidential, and gubernatorial candidates have been tapped for comment by news organizations in the years between elections).
The fact is that the LP's detractors, especially on this forum, do not present tenable alternatives to voters and activists who want to increase American liberty. Because libertarian points of view and proponents tend to get swallowed and muzzled within the major party organizations, saying that there should be no LP is tantamount to saying "sit down and shut up." If the LP is, by virtue of its structure or leadership, unable to facilitate the "standing up and speaking out" of its membership, much less their election to higher level office, then the detractors should either 1) work to improve the LP from within, or 2) form a different organization that can be more effective in influencing public policy and getting libertarians elected than the LP. Knock yourselves out, but I won't hold my breath waiting.
I've been hearing the same basic criticisms of the LP for decades, now, and in all that time, none of the naysayers has ever come close to either option 1 or option 2, above. Furthermore, "Sit down and shut up," or "fall in line and get with the program" are unacceptable as options. In the meantime, the LP speaks out, as Sam said, and even inspires and helps people to get elected to at least local office. To me, that sounds like a net balance of positive on the LP's side.
Bartlett and those who duckspeak along with him do not seem to be builders. It is hard for me to accord any respect to the views of non-builders.
James Anderson Merritt | December 22, 2006, 4:11pm | #
Eric the .5b | December 22, 2006, 3:39pm | #
||Dismissiveness and over-exaggeration as tools of marginalization. Behold two examples above.||
We're libertarians - we are marginal. Deal.
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No, we are actively MARGINALIZED. There's a difference.
Eric the .5b | December 22, 2006, 3:39pm | #
But focus on that first point. "We", the people you keep hinting at being the tools of statists trying to keep the LP down (along with the 100 MPG carburetor), are libertarians.
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See, there you go again, with an insulting, marginalizing insinuation. I never said anything about secret cabals, 100 mpg carburetors, or tinfoil hats. Whatever thrill you get out of lobbing insults at people, great. But don't try to convince anyone that you are for actual progress or serious debate, as long as you keep peppering your rhetoric with snide asides like that.
Eric the .5b | December 22, 2006, 3:39pm | #
I'm a libertarian, Bartlett is pretty damn libertarian, and a lot of people here are, to. When libertarians have real problems with the LP and consider it a failed project, it has nothing to do with the GOP trying to fight off a spoiler effect. It has to do with libertarians thinking that the LP sucks.
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The answer to that, as I mentioned above, is get inside and fix it, or go into competition with it. But don't hold out the false hope that, by throwing in with the two major parties, libertarians will get what they want. Perhaps by accident, someday, but the odds are very slim, if history is any indication.
Eric the .5b | December 22, 2006, 3:39pm | #
If people from the LP could learn to deal with that, instead of dismissing anyone not in The Party as ideologically untrustworthy and reacting to any criticism as statist persecution...well, it wouldn't be the same party.
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Give it up. Especially here in this forum, people who try to have serious discussions about how to deal with the LP's shortcomings, and improve its future prosoects, are routinely greeted with snarky one-liners and dismissiveness, simply because their approach DOESN'T play into the "kick/kill the LP" mindset. If they have the temerity to defend themselves or their arguments, or heaven forfend, even go on the OFFENSIVE, then the flying monkeys (or insects), hurling insults involving tinfoil hats, secret cabals, 100 mpg carburetors, etc., come out in force. It's a big piling on game in here.
Libertarian to libertarian, half-bee: suggest a more promising "project" to replace the "failed project" of the LP, and I'll listen respectfully. But "working on the inside," within the GOP and Demo parties is a strategy that has been tried many times, and is also a FAMOUSLY failed project, Dondero and the RLC notwithstanding. So what else ya got?
The fact of the matter is that the LP has fielded credible, respectable candidates on many occasions, especially during the last few election cycles. They tend to do no better than, and often even worse than, our more outrageous and flamboyant candidates. But it is also true that we continue to elect local officeholders, and more and more candidates for higher office are getting a full seat in official debates, where they represent the LP view and positions credibly -- earning the respect and even the applause of audiences.
The only thing that makes me think that the LP's situation could be hopeless is the constant, sometimes vicuous, carping that issues from people who call themselves "libertarians," especially as it is used to justify crucial downplaying or even outright surrender of the principle that motivated us to abandon the two-faced monoparty in the first place. It is said that only we Americans, not the terrorists or any external enemy, can destroy our American way of life. Similarly, only we libertarians can kill the LP. From where I sit, "we" are doing a pretty good job in both cases. That's insane enough to earn a tinfoil hat, if you ask me. If you want to stop the insanity, I certainly do. Perhaps that is sufficient common ground to achieve something worthwhile.
Gordon Mohr | December 22, 2006, 7:07pm | #
The LP has been stuck at the same local-maximum for ~25 years. There is no amount of hard work or cleverness that will lead to a breakout: by constitution and tradition, our politics advances through the competition of two broad-based, only weakly-ideological, ever-shifting coalition parties.
The best an ideological third party can hope for is to be coopted. LP, hurry up and get coopted, already, or try something completely new.
Given the intrinsic two-party nature of American politics, the LP distracts libertarian influence from where it could offer some results -- the major-party primaries. Perhaps just as importantly, it teaches bad habits about electoral activism -- that you should avoid forming large coalitions which include some distasteful allies, that you should be happy with a non-winning gain in votes from 2% to 3%, that some unmeasurable 'outreach' is more important than actual influence. 51% counts in American politics; everything else is navel-gazing.
In their fondest wishes, third-party believers might hope to one day be one of the major parties in a two-party system. But then who would the opponents of such a 'libertarian' major party be? A uniformly progovernment party.
Any vigorous two-party competition will, with shifting events and rising expectations, result in oscillation between the two competitors. And an electoral oscillation between a libertarian party and a progovernment party could easily descend into sticky totalitarianism: one side will be much better at exercising and consolidating unrestrained government power.
An oscillation between two mixed-bags parties, neither wholly libertarian or collectivist, has some chance of remaining competitive, and preserving much liberty, in a stable manner. Or at least metastable, the 200+ year US run being not so bad.
Those wanting a reliably libertarian major party should be careful what they wish for.
