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Be It Resolved: The Libertarian Party Has Been a Wasted Effort
Be it resolved: the Libertarian Party has been a waste of effort.
I was reflecting on all the effort the LP has gone through to find candidates and get ballot access and raise money. I think that they have accomplished very little. The LP has been around since the 1972 election and, for all their work, they have rarely achieved greater than 1 percent of the popular vote and have never had a candidate elected to Congress.
Historically, “Independent” or “no party affiliation” has had more electoral success than the LP. Besides failure at the ballot box, do you feel freer today? Are your natural rights better protected? Throughout the nation, liberty has suffered during the tenure of the LP. Censorship is on the rise, surveillance is pervasive, and the tyranny of corrupt prosecutions is too common. The ACLU has gone from a champion of civil rights to a proto-fascist legal hit squad, while political dissidents rot in prison.
Contrast the failure of the Libertarian Party with the success of the handful of folks that started BLM Inc. The BLM Inc. folks don’t work that hard as they let the corporate media and celebrities do their work for them. They have huge financial backing (they make profits) and BLM Inc. has influence on everything from what children are taught in schools to national holidays to criminal prosecutions. BLM Inc. even has members of Congress kneeling in their honor! What has the Libertarian Party ever accomplished, besides flipping some close elections to Democrats?
Instead, imagine if the people that worked for the LP had put their 50 years of effort and money into building a liberty movement that focused on affecting culture and influencing both political parties. Perhaps school kids would be starting off the school year with Nathan Hale backpacks and Gadsden lunchboxes proudly reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to teachers wearing flag pins. Rather than the LP dream of creating one free state, the effort should have been put into creating 50 free states.
I hope the next 50 years go better for the cause of liberty and the sooner the LP is abandoned the sooner the real work can begin.
Published in Culture
Pogo’s probably had more success.
I have appreciated the Libertarian Party when the Republican was lacking, and I didn’t want to vote for a Democrat. For example, if Bernie had been nominated by the Democrats in 2020, I would have voted Libertarian against Trump.
I wish I could disagree. Time to replace it with something effective.
Or, just recognize that voting for anything but Republican just helps the Dims win.
Then maybe Republicans should give voters a reason to vote for them. Nobody has an obligation to make a binary choice and those who choose to not vote Republicans are not automatically Democrat voters. Third party voters may just not vote at all if denied that choice.
If you look at the influence the Ls have had on the other two parties, I’m going with them being worse than useless.
Some strange cherry picking without embracing the totality has led to some intensely destructive policy directions in both parties.
That weed wasn’t going to smoke itself!
I’ve always been a libertarian who thought the Libertarian Party was always off the mark.
They’re a puzzling bunch, aren’t they? The party is as libertarian as Republicans are conservative.
Libertarians lost me when they happily supported Obama because to do otherwise would let those icky conservatives take charge.
I know it’s not your point, but my goodness, that kneeling business was about the creepiest damn thing I’ve ever seen.
I think that the Libertarian Party has been a resounding success. This does not make me happy.
What do the Libertarians want, precisely?
I know, they didn’t get everything that they want.
At a glance, though, the Libertarian success rate over the past 30 years or so looks better than the Republican success rate.
They’re not strictly Democrat voters, but they are Democrat ENABLERS. Including those who don’t vote at all.
I think that their success rate can be partly attributed to GOPe invertebrates who, to paraphrase WFB, Jr., stood athwart history quietly begging “not so fast”.
I thought LP stood for Lincoln Project.
The Libertarians would have done better to be an activist group pushing libertarian ideas in the culture, fighting in the courts and supporting sympatico candidates for office.
They might have made sense as a political party if we had a system of proportional representation. In such a system parties get seats in the legislature based on their percentage of the popular vote. Such systems invariably form left/right coalitions after the election. In the US we form the left/right coalition up front with our two main parties, then have an election. The LP ignored this reality.
I’m not going to defend the Libertarian party since as a political entity it probably represents libertarian ideals about as effectively as Republicans and Trumpricans represent conservative ideals. I will push back against the notion that libertarians as part of the conservative coalition do no more than lend “scale tipping influence to pimps and pornographers”…to quote an old member post. I think we need to make a distinction between libertarians who tend to vote Republican versus those that tend to vote Democrat in the same way we do for populists who are Trump supporters and populists who are Bernie Sanders acolytes. In general, I think most of the ire I see here in Ricochet directed at libertarians fails to recognize that distinction.
I toyed with joining the LP in the ’80’s, but they wanted us out of NATO when I thought it still had a function.
If, as in New York if I recall correctly, a candidate’s votes on all party lines are added up to determine the winner of an election, the Libertarian Party or some other 3rd party could gain a proven path to influence.
The LP (which is running an attractive candidate for Mayor of NYC this year) hasn’t used the opportunity of a ballot line to win much there yet, but other 3rd party candidates have. You may recall the Conservative Party and Senator James Buckley in 1970, a three way race he won over Rep. Richard Ottinger (D) and Sen. Charles Goodell (R-L.)
That “L” in 1970 was the Liberal Party, a center left group, which won the Mayoralty riding John Lindsay in 1969. Its cross-endorsement of once-Republican Lindsay helped him win in 1965 over Democrat Mayor Abe Beame, despite Conservative Party candidate Bill Buckley winning 13.4% of the vote. Liberal Party cross-endorsements of Republicans Jacob Javits and later Rudy Giuliani provided a home for long time Democrats who just couldn’t bring themselves to vote directly on the Republican line e.g. in support of Israel with Javits, or to solve the crime problem with Giuliani.
The Liberal Party of New York State is no longer a force today. With such harsh negative branding of both parties, our system could use a viable outlet for voters who hate the opposing party more than they love their own. But pragmatism isn’t really in the vocabulary of the Libertarian Party, which seems to be more about lofty idealism and a love of intellectual debate.
Because Libertarians are so individualistic, it’s difficult to assign uniform policy priorities to the brand. For instance, Ron Paul and now Rand are among the most prominent libertarians in the public eye. Neither is pro-choice on the abortion issue, and to my knowledge the LP has never positioned itself as a refuge for pro-choice fiscal conservatives, a larger voting block than you might think according to polls I’ve seen.
Additionally, LP and many “small L” libertarians are voluble proponents of drug legalization, IMHO the weakest link in the sex-drugs-and-rock’n’roll proposition. While some argue that libertarians “want the elimination of all sexual morality”, they have achieved precious little in policy terms to fight the overrearch of FOSTA-SESTA into first amendment areas. Libertarian efforts to lessen the enforcement of laws against adult sex workers never make it to the national media, leaving that considerable labor and client constituency vulnerable to the seductions of the far Left.
Maybe the Libertarian Party should get realistic, and try harder to win over Democrats by re-branding themselves as “Freedom Democrats.” Couple consistent support for individual liberties with fiscal policies supporting small business incentives for the working poor. The louder Left the local Democrat goes, the noisier the media opportunity for Freedom Dem opposition.
The Party is, be definition, losers.
I disagree with AP that they have been successful on the cultural issues. They were just lined up with the Left on all those things. They have not been successful at all. The left has and the libertarians were along for the ride. Most of the areas where they have failed are on the Right. Other than legal hookers.
Bryan, good point.
Though if the libertarians and “conservatarians” had been consistently conservative on social issues, I suspect that things would look a lot different today.
I would blame the Republican and Democrat parties for the lack of success of the Libertarian party. After all, those two make it extraordinarily difficult for another party to get its foot in the door of electoral politics. Third parties are virtually barred from success by the existing parties. Then to blame all those “successes” on the Libertarian party is also off base–we can thank BOTH the Democrat and Republican Parties. After all, one or the other or both of those have been in charge. As noted in another post today, Republicans are faux Conservatives, are mostly progressives (consider how Mitt Romney, a leftist Republican/Progressive, described himself as a “severe” Conservative–guffaw, guffaw, guffaw–three guffaws for Romney!). The Conservative W gave us “No Child Left Behind” (All Children indoctrinated by CRT and 1619 Project and LGBTQ+) for our public “education”. And the donut hole. And endless wars. And an economic meltdown in 2008–but that was truly a bipartisan effort. And he gave us Obama. And now Biden (the preferred candidate of many of the Republican elite in 2020, including W). Thanks W!
Why don’t we admit that despite whatever electoral success the Republican Party has had, it has been an even more harmful and colossal waste of time than the Libertarian Party. Only the Democratic Party has had consistent electoral success and advanced it’s policies (with a lot of help from Republicans–including ones on the federal bench) leading to a disappearance of the US Constitution and human freedom, and soon prosperity. Which has always been the agenda of Progressives (Democrats). At least we now know that when Joe Biden talks about “saving the soul of America” that he means the Marxist soul of America, but since Marxists don’t have souls, we know he’s just been pulling our leg all along. He just doesn’t remember that any more.
Libertarians have also been advocates of gun freedom. Although there have been setbacks in some states, in most states Americans enjoy greater freedom to own and carry guns than they did 40 years ago. Libertarians have been opponents of civil asset forfeiture and one state at a time, some headway has been made there.
But is the Libertarian “influence” actually responsible for any of that, or do they just happen to agree with things that are happening anyway because of Conservative/Republican efforts?
So are Libertarian’s to be judged by actual policy outcomes (which is what I think the OP’s intent is) or by their influence? Or is it your position that the only areas where Libertarians have been both influential and effective is in driving progressive outcomes?
It seems most likely that the Libertarians haven’t really been effective at all – which seems to be the point of the OP – since all of the often-contradictory goals they seem to have, are supported by other groups with far greater numbers and far more influence. That the Libertarians support them TOO, may be convenient for fundraising etc, but still essentially irrelevant.
In the case of civil asset forfeiture, they are not just riding Republican coat tails. CAF became a widespread practice because of the war on drugs, something that most Republicans politicians have been quite supportive of until fairly recently.
As to the degree of influence, there is no way to know. An individual might not be able to tell you who influenced them to change their mind on a given topic. Most of the time it isn’t just one source. It’s an accumulation of influences over years or maybe decades. Trying to guess who gets how much credit for making people re-think whether government should really operate schools or just pay for education at the parents’ choice of schools is an impossible task. Some credit probably should go to the religious right, some probably should go to libertarians.