There's also just the fact that the LP's leadership and nominees are decided by a vote of "whoever wants to show up to the LP convention, in person", which means that these decisions tend to get made by the people who are... let's say "particularly dedicated".
Imagine if the Democratic Party chose their nominees this way. We'd probably have a ticket headed by, like, Rashida Tlaib.
(This is also how the Mises Caucus took over a couple of years ago; they just made a coordinated effort to show up in force, despite the fact that libertarians in general tend to think they're scum.)
Afroman is somewhat of an LP favorite not because of his early 2k hit, but because of his 2023 song, "Will You Help Me Repair My Door" which is all about the Winston, OH police breaking into his house w/ a search warrant alleging he was involved in drugs and kidnapping. He has a security system in his house which recorded the whole incident and he released a song using that footage. Afroman is currently being sued by the police because they think the song and video have humiliated them.
A major problem is is that the party hardly represents the majority of libertarians (small l) or their positions. But it gets all the tv time.
Another major problem is the “no true scotsman” fallacy and how libertarians are notorious for 1. Living freedom and 2. Living freedoms so much they refuse to be strictly defined. Getting almost any 5 libertarians to sit down and agree is like herding cats. But they will agree on one things. Anyone can pretty much call themselves a libertarian and there is no mechanism to tell them to fuck off.
To be fair the far left and the far right are just as if not more crazy than the fringe libertarians. And there is numerically more of them. But because the crazies make up such a large portion of the Libertarian party it kind of poisons the well more so than in the big two parties that have a large enough base to absorb the crazies.
Then there’s the “home for misfit toys” issue where everyone disaffected by the two major parties will just kind of become libertarian because they still just NEED a group to belong to. Mostly this is republicans who think their party has gone soft. But an also a few democrats fed up with woke shit but certainly don’t want to be republican.
Also they’re appealing to some people as literally the only party worried even a little about the deficit.
The herding cats thing is dead-on. I was a pretty doctrinaire libertarian from high school through college. My views have shifted slightly and while I still use the label and have voted L 3 times in a row for President, the Mises caucus would probably call me a communist, or a fascist, it’s hard to tell what flavor of authoritarian you’ll get accused of with them.
Most small ‘l’ libertarians are perfectly reasonable people, but there’s a certain psychology that attracts people to the philosophy, and it’s not conducive whatsoever to actually getting people together to do the work of politics. If you’re an extreme individualist by nature, group action is pretty tricky. Myself, I was the guy who joked to my friends in fraternities in college that they had joined cults. Larger than a bowling team and all that. I also wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near actual politics.
A good portion of my friends at least lean libertarian, with good careers, and none of them would get within 1,000 miles of political organizing for anything, so what happens is the party itself is run by the most bizarre of the ideology, types that will loudly boo the idea that we shouldn’t get rid of driver’s licenses.
I don’t think they’ll do too well this year, because the go-to protest vote is probably going to be RFK. I worked in tech, and anecdotally, the tech-libertarian types I know, especially those not in swing states, are going for RFK for various reasons.
I don’t see them getting back to the high water mark of 2016 any time soon, especially with the Mises Caucus fanatics in charge. But hey, who knows? Javier Milei is President of Argentina.
Kind of my situation. The term libertarian is become a bit toxic so I’ve stopped using it because if you say it to the wrong person it just conjures up images of doomsday prospers.
I’m what I think might be called by like Matt Welch or Andrew Heston a metropolitan libertarian. I like cities. I like being around people. Too many of the hardliners are the crazy “I want a cabin 20 miles from every other single person in the world” types.
Some do. It’s the horseshoe theory of politics again. The extremes of both sides seem to want to return to the farm. The far right because it’s manly, and rugged, and you can be the king of your own little fief. And the far left because modernity is bad, farm fresh is good!, pollution and roads are bad! But they both believe deep down that People should stay in their own culture!
That there were people in that room who nominated CHRIS CHAN shows how unserious this is.
The LP has these conventions that look like the Star Wars bar, makes these quixotic tilts at the presidency, and never gets anywhere. Can't even take credit for weed legalization.
A party with actual goals (rather than a loose coalition of pornographers, pot heads and bitcoin nerds) would start from the bottom. Start by winning races for city council spots, get into some statehouses, work up to getting a few members of congress. But that would require a strategy.
They aren’t allowed. Libertarians, Greens, Independents—are denied access to the ballot in most counties, municipalities, and state houses.. specifically designed to prevent the establishment and growth of 3rd parties.
Ten years ago, many people saw them as whistle blowers, but now they’re widely believed to have connections to Russian intelligence and making immunity for them a top-line issue is, I’d argue, pretty bonkers.
The more I think about it, the more I think I’m being harsh calling that “crazy”. I should call it “an extremely odd top-line priority given all the other issues in the country and how difficult it would be given that Russia is not exactly popular right now.”
Don’t forget that the Mises Caucus geniuses signed the LP up to take part in an “anti-war” rally where there were Russian flags behind the speaker’s podium.
Yes, widely believed by those who dislike what they've leaked. The original leaks were directed at the Bush administration but when they then took place under Obama, many of those who were sympathetic to them then turned hostile (and vice versa, in all fairness). I've seen no evidence given of these connections to Russian intelligence. The claim that someone is a Russian asset is our new Cold War 2.0 phrase to discredit someone. We've seen these claims debunked again and again but they keep being redeployed. I do see what you're saying, Jeff, under your framework, but if you believe, as I do, that these are individuals (and in Assange's case, journalists) who have exposed crimes of their governments at great risk to themselves and are consequently being persecuted for it it, then it makes sense as a top-line issue for free speech advocates
Snowden's story about how he ended up in Russia has been proven to be a lie and Putin has hosted him for a decade now. I'd say the Occam's Razor explanation at this point is that Putin sees Snowden as beneficial to Russia, and even the least-nefarious explanation of that result -- that Snowden is simply a nice propaganda piece that makes Western criticism of Putin's police state look like hypocrisy -- is still bad.
The connection between Wikileaks and Russian intelligence is basically beyond dispute at this point.
Not sure which part of his story has been proven wrong. I'm sure Putin sees Snowden as useful, and if US intelligence cared enough they could either drop the charges against him, or allow him to travel to a different county and drop extradition requests.
In other words, having Snowden in Russia doesn't just suit Putin, it suits our domestic intelligence agencies. They're content giving Putin his PR win over there in exchange for painting Snowden as a Russian pawn.
It is implausible that Wikileaks has never released anything incriminating about Russian intelligence by pure chance. The Occam’s razor explanation for their consistent targeting of western intelligence operations is that they are in bed with the KGB one way or another.
I mean. I might be wrong but I was under the impression they were mostly just American in nature. I may be wrong. It seemed to specifically target the idiotic patriot act bullshit.
I mean. If my home country threw me out and threatened prison or worse for exposing their secrets and another country was like “hey. You’re cool wanna live here not in prison?” I’d probably find my allegiance shifting too. Especially over 10 years as you said.
> "Probably the biggest barrier to third party normalcy is America’s single-member congressional districts and winner-take-all elections."
That's exactly it -- if serious people know they can't win on the Libertarian ticket, then only un-serious people will run.
The best thing for the Libertarian Party would be some sort of proportional voting system, where they could capture, say, 2% of the vote, and get 2% of the seats in Congress. (That's 2% more than they usually have!) And that could start reversing the "no serious people..." cycle.
I have some libertarian genes, thinking that people are mainly responsible for themselves and to their family. At the same time I recognize any nation, maybe that's a non-libertarian concept, particularly one with a third of a billion people, will have a large absolute number of people who can't take care and have no family that can. Also there are communal goals which are good and need support. Those things need funding and people to run them and structures to do just that have evolved over many, many years. Those structures are arguably too large and often corrupted by the people who run them. The answer is less of that, not none.
Proving once again that saying "shit's fucked up!" is the easy part of selling any ideology, which is why most of them lead with that.
This is why when you're introduced to an ideology in the form of, say, a 30-point manifesto, skip points 1-10, which will all be some version of "shit's fucked up" and go directly to points 11-20 ("...and here WHY it's fucked up and WHO is to blame") and pay special attention to points 21-30 ("and here's what we intend to DO about it.")
Unfortunately, both major parties are big-time statists, with different hobby horses. Both have major problems with freedom, although one has a blind spot with abortion and the other has a blind spot with everything else.
Libertarians will remain a protest vote, just like the Greens.
Shutting down the Federal Reserve is not a particularly radical idea. Milton Friedman advocated a 100% reserve banking system for a period, as did Hayek. It's not something you can do just like that without crashing the global economy (as Friedman and Hayek admitted), but as an aspirational goal interest rates should be set by the market.
There's also just the fact that the LP's leadership and nominees are decided by a vote of "whoever wants to show up to the LP convention, in person", which means that these decisions tend to get made by the people who are... let's say "particularly dedicated".
Imagine if the Democratic Party chose their nominees this way. We'd probably have a ticket headed by, like, Rashida Tlaib.
(This is also how the Mises Caucus took over a couple of years ago; they just made a coordinated effort to show up in force, despite the fact that libertarians in general tend to think they're scum.)
Afroman is somewhat of an LP favorite not because of his early 2k hit, but because of his 2023 song, "Will You Help Me Repair My Door" which is all about the Winston, OH police breaking into his house w/ a search warrant alleging he was involved in drugs and kidnapping. He has a security system in his house which recorded the whole incident and he released a song using that footage. Afroman is currently being sued by the police because they think the song and video have humiliated them.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/afroman-pushes-back-cop-lawsuit-recent-music-video/story?id=101520072
LOL I wish I was on that jury.....
A major problem is is that the party hardly represents the majority of libertarians (small l) or their positions. But it gets all the tv time.
Another major problem is the “no true scotsman” fallacy and how libertarians are notorious for 1. Living freedom and 2. Living freedoms so much they refuse to be strictly defined. Getting almost any 5 libertarians to sit down and agree is like herding cats. But they will agree on one things. Anyone can pretty much call themselves a libertarian and there is no mechanism to tell them to fuck off.
To be fair the far left and the far right are just as if not more crazy than the fringe libertarians. And there is numerically more of them. But because the crazies make up such a large portion of the Libertarian party it kind of poisons the well more so than in the big two parties that have a large enough base to absorb the crazies.
Then there’s the “home for misfit toys” issue where everyone disaffected by the two major parties will just kind of become libertarian because they still just NEED a group to belong to. Mostly this is republicans who think their party has gone soft. But an also a few democrats fed up with woke shit but certainly don’t want to be republican.
Also they’re appealing to some people as literally the only party worried even a little about the deficit.
The herding cats thing is dead-on. I was a pretty doctrinaire libertarian from high school through college. My views have shifted slightly and while I still use the label and have voted L 3 times in a row for President, the Mises caucus would probably call me a communist, or a fascist, it’s hard to tell what flavor of authoritarian you’ll get accused of with them.
Most small ‘l’ libertarians are perfectly reasonable people, but there’s a certain psychology that attracts people to the philosophy, and it’s not conducive whatsoever to actually getting people together to do the work of politics. If you’re an extreme individualist by nature, group action is pretty tricky. Myself, I was the guy who joked to my friends in fraternities in college that they had joined cults. Larger than a bowling team and all that. I also wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near actual politics.
A good portion of my friends at least lean libertarian, with good careers, and none of them would get within 1,000 miles of political organizing for anything, so what happens is the party itself is run by the most bizarre of the ideology, types that will loudly boo the idea that we shouldn’t get rid of driver’s licenses.
I don’t think they’ll do too well this year, because the go-to protest vote is probably going to be RFK. I worked in tech, and anecdotally, the tech-libertarian types I know, especially those not in swing states, are going for RFK for various reasons.
I don’t see them getting back to the high water mark of 2016 any time soon, especially with the Mises Caucus fanatics in charge. But hey, who knows? Javier Milei is President of Argentina.
Kind of my situation. The term libertarian is become a bit toxic so I’ve stopped using it because if you say it to the wrong person it just conjures up images of doomsday prospers.
I’m what I think might be called by like Matt Welch or Andrew Heston a metropolitan libertarian. I like cities. I like being around people. Too many of the hardliners are the crazy “I want a cabin 20 miles from every other single person in the world” types.
Cosmotarian was the term I remember from back in the day, and yeah that’s where I land, I’m a suburbs type of guy. I’d get bored in a cabin.
Also as a “libertarian” I love capitalism. There isn’t a lot of capitalism in the woods!
That's what strikes me is that I think they want to return to a "Little House on the Praire" world.
There's no going back.....
Some do. It’s the horseshoe theory of politics again. The extremes of both sides seem to want to return to the farm. The far right because it’s manly, and rugged, and you can be the king of your own little fief. And the far left because modernity is bad, farm fresh is good!, pollution and roads are bad! But they both believe deep down that People should stay in their own culture!
That there were people in that room who nominated CHRIS CHAN shows how unserious this is.
The LP has these conventions that look like the Star Wars bar, makes these quixotic tilts at the presidency, and never gets anywhere. Can't even take credit for weed legalization.
A party with actual goals (rather than a loose coalition of pornographers, pot heads and bitcoin nerds) would start from the bottom. Start by winning races for city council spots, get into some statehouses, work up to getting a few members of congress. But that would require a strategy.
“Start by winning races for city council …”
They aren’t allowed. Libertarians, Greens, Independents—are denied access to the ballot in most counties, municipalities, and state houses.. specifically designed to prevent the establishment and growth of 3rd parties.
That libertarians call for clemency for Edward Snowden and Julian Assange makes them Crazytown...? lol
Ten years ago, many people saw them as whistle blowers, but now they’re widely believed to have connections to Russian intelligence and making immunity for them a top-line issue is, I’d argue, pretty bonkers.
The more I think about it, the more I think I’m being harsh calling that “crazy”. I should call it “an extremely odd top-line priority given all the other issues in the country and how difficult it would be given that Russia is not exactly popular right now.”
Don’t forget that the Mises Caucus geniuses signed the LP up to take part in an “anti-war” rally where there were Russian flags behind the speaker’s podium.
Yes, widely believed by those who dislike what they've leaked. The original leaks were directed at the Bush administration but when they then took place under Obama, many of those who were sympathetic to them then turned hostile (and vice versa, in all fairness). I've seen no evidence given of these connections to Russian intelligence. The claim that someone is a Russian asset is our new Cold War 2.0 phrase to discredit someone. We've seen these claims debunked again and again but they keep being redeployed. I do see what you're saying, Jeff, under your framework, but if you believe, as I do, that these are individuals (and in Assange's case, journalists) who have exposed crimes of their governments at great risk to themselves and are consequently being persecuted for it it, then it makes sense as a top-line issue for free speech advocates
Snowden's story about how he ended up in Russia has been proven to be a lie and Putin has hosted him for a decade now. I'd say the Occam's Razor explanation at this point is that Putin sees Snowden as beneficial to Russia, and even the least-nefarious explanation of that result -- that Snowden is simply a nice propaganda piece that makes Western criticism of Putin's police state look like hypocrisy -- is still bad.
The connection between Wikileaks and Russian intelligence is basically beyond dispute at this point.
Not sure which part of his story has been proven wrong. I'm sure Putin sees Snowden as useful, and if US intelligence cared enough they could either drop the charges against him, or allow him to travel to a different county and drop extradition requests.
In other words, having Snowden in Russia doesn't just suit Putin, it suits our domestic intelligence agencies. They're content giving Putin his PR win over there in exchange for painting Snowden as a Russian pawn.
How strictly are we defining “connection”?
Broadly doesn’t every intelligence agency on the planet have a connection to Wikileaks?
Much in the same way I have a “connection” to Wikipedia.
It is implausible that Wikileaks has never released anything incriminating about Russian intelligence by pure chance. The Occam’s razor explanation for their consistent targeting of western intelligence operations is that they are in bed with the KGB one way or another.
I mean. I might be wrong but I was under the impression they were mostly just American in nature. I may be wrong. It seemed to specifically target the idiotic patriot act bullshit.
> Snowden's story about how he ended up in Russia has been proven to be a lie
No it hasn’t.
> The connection between Wikileaks and Russian intelligence is basically beyond dispute at this point
No it isn’t. What’s happening to you? Where are you getting your info from? You’re becoming more of a Democratic establishment hack by the day lately.
I mean. If my home country threw me out and threatened prison or worse for exposing their secrets and another country was like “hey. You’re cool wanna live here not in prison?” I’d probably find my allegiance shifting too. Especially over 10 years as you said.
Do you think they had connections to Russian intelligence then?
I thought Bofa Deeznutz was polling better than his 0 votes showed. Ah well. Wait ‘till next year.
> "Probably the biggest barrier to third party normalcy is America’s single-member congressional districts and winner-take-all elections."
That's exactly it -- if serious people know they can't win on the Libertarian ticket, then only un-serious people will run.
The best thing for the Libertarian Party would be some sort of proportional voting system, where they could capture, say, 2% of the vote, and get 2% of the seats in Congress. (That's 2% more than they usually have!) And that could start reversing the "no serious people..." cycle.
I have some libertarian genes, thinking that people are mainly responsible for themselves and to their family. At the same time I recognize any nation, maybe that's a non-libertarian concept, particularly one with a third of a billion people, will have a large absolute number of people who can't take care and have no family that can. Also there are communal goals which are good and need support. Those things need funding and people to run them and structures to do just that have evolved over many, many years. Those structures are arguably too large and often corrupted by the people who run them. The answer is less of that, not none.
The whole premise of libertarians is that they wish they didn't have to do politics. So they don't.
Lyndon LaRouche. I haven't seen evidence they've gotten any less batshit crazy since his time.
Wasn't he the dude that published a book calling Milton Friedman a fascist?
Wow. Just wow. That picture says it all.
I can't believe Trump showed up for this.
I know thinking is not his strong suit but why?
Because a lot of disaffected republicans started calling themselves libertarian about 10 years ago and the number keeps growing.
Trump is a salesman. He always wants the chance to get in front of potential voters.
The Libertarian Party is that comic relief side-character that all the fans love but the writers are wary of overusing.
Proving once again that saying "shit's fucked up!" is the easy part of selling any ideology, which is why most of them lead with that.
This is why when you're introduced to an ideology in the form of, say, a 30-point manifesto, skip points 1-10, which will all be some version of "shit's fucked up" and go directly to points 11-20 ("...and here WHY it's fucked up and WHO is to blame") and pay special attention to points 21-30 ("and here's what we intend to DO about it.")
Unfortunately, both major parties are big-time statists, with different hobby horses. Both have major problems with freedom, although one has a blind spot with abortion and the other has a blind spot with everything else.
Libertarians will remain a protest vote, just like the Greens.
I think intra-party factional battles are particularly frequent and fierce in third parties because they are the only fights they can win.
Shutting down the Federal Reserve is not a particularly radical idea. Milton Friedman advocated a 100% reserve banking system for a period, as did Hayek. It's not something you can do just like that without crashing the global economy (as Friedman and Hayek admitted), but as an aspirational goal interest rates should be set by the market.