Why Can't the Libertarian Party Be Normal?

‘Cause they’re not

Above: A scene from the Libertarian Party convention. (photo from Jim Watson via Getty)

The Libertarian Party just had their convention. They chose a presidential nominee — Chase Oliver — who called Israel’s war in Gaza “genocide”, wants to abolish the Federal Reserve, and refers to taxation as “thieving”. Oliver’s closest challenger was Michael Rectenwald, who took a weed edible shortly before he addressed the convention, which may have hurt his chances (or may have helped them). Donald Trump addressed the convention in person, and RFK, Jr. addressed it via video, but on the first ballot, both barely outpaced candidates including Stormy Daniels, early 2000s one-hit wonder Afroman, and that perennial candidate for all offices: Ben Dover. On the seventh ballot, Oliver finally beat “no candidate”, with “no candidate” getting a respectable 40 percent of the vote. Which means that Libertarians came within a stone’s throw of basically having Ben Dover be their standard bearer this fall.

Easy to miss: Donald Trump was beaten by a candidate who just goes by “Toad”. (photo from Dave Weigel)

Why are libertarians like this? I see no reason why people who value liberty in the social and economic sphere must also be weirdos who probably eat the silica packet in a beef jerky pouch because it says “DO NOT EAT” and they don’t like being bossed around. I have some sympathy for libertarian positions: I’m socially more liberal than basically every Republican, and I like markets more than most Democrats. But I also know a fully stuffed clown car when I see one, and the Libertarian Party is very much that. And lest you think that this week’s convention was a rare foray into Crazytown, here are some events that establish the Libertarian Party as a tenth-generation Crazytown family whose antecedents are featured on the city crest.

• One of their top issues is clemency for Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who is serving a life sentence for drug trafficking, computer hacking, and money laundering, and who may have attempted to hire a hitman to kill six people (though that was never charged). In his speech, Trump promised to pardon Ulbricht.

• They also want clemency for likely Russian assets Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.

• The Indiana Libertarian Party tried to eliminate all income taxes and replace them with nothing, which would have caused perhaps a third of all schools in the state to close.

• In recent years, the party has been heavily influenced by a group called the Mises Caucus, whose platform calls for ending the Federal Reserve, scrapping the U.S. Dollar, closing at least all foreign military bases (shocked italics mine), and nullifying “political units all the way down to the individual,” which would seem to rule out any form of government whatsoever.

The Mises Caucus platform is exceptionally strange. It extrapolates a universe of not-at-all-clear rights from the “non-aggression principle” — which is referenced six times but never defined — and basically views any collection of people larger than a bowling team as handmaidens for fascism. Viewing the world through this cracked lens is probably why, when the Mises Caucus took over the New Hampshire Libertarian Party, they tweeted things like “legalize child labor” and “arrest all living presidents”. So, to be clear: The Mises Caucus thinks that the guy who enabled hundreds of millions of dollars worth of illegal commerce should be free. And they think that 99 year-old Jimmy Carter should be handcuffed and tossed in a dungeon.

Still, the nomination of Chase Oliver was something of a rebellion against the Mises Caucus, whose preferred candidate was Michael “got stoned before the biggest speech of his life” Rectenwald. So, the people in power didn’t get their way, which seems like a fait accompli for a libertarian convention. This is, after all, the party that decorated its stage with the words “BECOME UNGOVERNABLE”, and the “a” in “ungovernable” was the anarchy “a”. Their whole vibe is basically “Thomas Paine if he was in The Sex Pistols,” so having the backing of party big-shots was probably a hindrance.

Above: Trump gives a gesture associated with military authority at the Libertarian Party convention. He was not well-received. (Photo from Chip Somodevilla via Getty)

Polls show that voters are about as jazzed for this election as they would be for a live action Scrappy Doo movie. The door would appear to be open for an appealing third-party candidate, but we don’t have any appealing third party candidates. Instead, we have: An unserious conspiracy theorist with a famous name'; a woman who should be running an organic sex toy shop in Eugene, Oregon; a lady who has inherited Ralph Nader’s mantle as the person working tirelessly to achieve the opposite of what they say they want; and a guy who looks like an actor playing a college professor in a movie who has the beliefs of an actor playing a college professor in a movie. And now we also have Chase Oliver, whose campaign “about” page contains no mention of employment in any capacity at any time in his life.

Probably the biggest barrier to third party normalcy is America’s single-member congressional districts and winner-take-all elections. Because third parties basically never win, it’s probably true that people who see politics as a results-oriented project focus their efforts on influencing one of the two parties. That makes third-party politics the domain of people who are…let’s say “highly principled”. And I do think “highly principled” probably describes most of the attendees at the Libertarian convention — those folks really, really, really like freedom! I mean they REALLY like it, and for what it’s worth, so do I. Of course, I also like pizza, though I know that if I placed no limits on my pizza enjoyment, and made pizza the Alpha and Omega of my existence, and decided that the guiding principle of my life would be “more pizza = always good”, that would not be healthy.

My second guess as to why the Libertarian Party is so goofy is that inter-factional fights matter. We sometimes think of a party’s character as an inevitable product of larger forces; this is why there’s a whole body of literature theorizing that Trumpism will outlast Trump. But when a party hits a fork in the road, it surely matters which way they go. The GOP maybe could have stopped Trump in 2016, but it didn’t happen, and now they’re The Trump Party. Poorly-written rules allowed Jeremy Corbyn to slide through the side door to lead the Labour Party, and they spent five years in the wilderness as a result. These things aren’t written in the stars; parties make choices. The fact that the Mises Caucus has gained power probably made some up-in-arms-about-occupational-licencing types — who have a legitimate point about occupational licensing! — decide: “This isn’t my scene.”

I won’t move to Canada if Chase Oliver becomes president. I will move to Jerusalem, because if Oliver wins, clearly the end times are upon us and I need to get religious real fast. My hope for the Libertarian Party is the same as my hope for the Democratic and Republican parties: I hope that they veer towards sanity. Which seems like an outside-the-box strategy that just might be worth a try.

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