Ending the Libertarian Civil War

This article, entitled "Where Did the Libertarian Party Go Wrong?" serves nicely as a beginner's primer to the challenges the Libertarian Party must solve before it can move to the next level of public consciousness and become a real player in politics. To wit, the first major challenge is: The party as a whole needs to want to move to the next political level. Believe it or not, there is a large, noisy faction of the party--and more, they're the Libertarian Party's old guard, the original Libertarians, and they aren't shy about telling you about it--really would prefer to remain at the party's present level, best described as Tiny but Vocal Minority. They like the idea, you see, of being the only people who really get it while everyone else just accepts the Matrix.

In addition to that there's a simple philosophical disconnect between what I would call the Progressive Libertarians (represented by Bob Barr, and the group I myself fall into) and the Traditional Libertarians (whose views I do respect): namely, much of the latter group is fundamentally anarchist.

With all of that said, I strongly encourage you to read the article, and I'm going to take some time to fisk it here.

The folks who had dominated the party in those long, lonely pre-Barr years, [Barr staffer Shane Cory] said, “had changed it from a political party into a debating society. It was the church of Libertarianism. I’m not saying that in a condescending way. But we’re turning it around. This is a more pragmatic approach.”

I think he's slightly wrong; the party had always been fundamentally a debating society. Barr is the point man for a movement to turn it into a political party. This is a problem among the traditionals for a simple reason: The whole reason they're Libertarians is their loathing of political parties. Well, it's not quite correct to say the whole reason I'm a Libertarian is I loathe political parties, but it's pretty close, and I can easily grasp where they're coming from.

I do not like the world pragmatic in there; even if it's mostly accurate, it's not a good word to use. That word suggests, you see, that we're changing some things not because it's the right and proper thing to do, but because we have to water down our views to gain public acceptance. Well... that may be true, but we also should water down our views (as it were) because some of them don't work in the real world anyway.

Instead of getting bogged down in specific platform issues--which has been the very thing the Libertarian Party's been internally warring over the past few years--we need to remind both ourselves and the outside world that we are the party that stands for liberty. Everything else in our platform, which should be flexible enough to allow for minor deviations by individual prominent party members, needs to trickle down from that. It's time to put an end, EMPHATICALLY, to the Republican Party's lie that it's the party of individual freedom, and the Democratic Party's even more flagrant lie that it's the party that stands for the little man. We'll never accomplish that while we're bickering over our platform.

Well, for an approach Cory frames as pragmatic, it didn’t really work. It’s all over now, and Barr failed as both fundraiser and candidate to even approach those high early expectations. The total money raised was $1.2 million; total votes came in at 510,000.

Now, the backbiting and, as Barr media consultant Audrey Mullen put it to me last week, the intra-libertarian “circular firing squad” may begin.

It sounds to me like Barr media consultant Audrey Mullen is taking self-defensive shots at the traditionalists in the party through the writer of this article (and other media and quasi-media avenues.) Audrey Mullen: You're wasting your very valuable time and energy at this. If we can't solve our differences without using up our rare and precious media attention to take thinly veiled shots at each other, we're in serious trouble.

I heard plenty of anecdotal evidence describing hardcore LP activists so disgusted by Barr’s right-wing past (and, in their reading, present) that they sat out doing any volunteer work, providing donations, canvassing, or even voting for him; I heard some LP watchers assume that because of these anecdotes, Barr only got about half the straight LP vote that a candidate more congenial to the party's hardcore would have received, and that the rest of his votes must have come from right-wingers disgruntled with McCain.

There's no nice way to put this: If the progressives in the party (the "Barr people") maintain control of the party going forward, it's likely we're going to lose the traditionalists/anarchists, which is half the party. I think the notion that 'half' of registered and voting Libertarians voted for Barr is extremely exaggerated; I don't know the official figure, but I'd guess it's more in the 80% neighborhood (which is still horrifically low). This problem isn't going away; in fact, it's only going to get worse, and we'd better face it and overcome it now if we want to move forward later.

There are some problems with Barr's views, several of which (as we'll see shortly) aren't Libertarian at all. But to refuse to vote for the Libertarian nominee for president at a time when every single vote helps advance the party's core value--liberty--while the Republicrat tyranny is explosively growing is ill-advised and reactionary in the extreme. This infighting will doom not only us, but everyone, as it allows the Republicrats to achieve total domination while we keep bickering.

There's more, but we're going to hold it out for subsequent posts (one of which, as I type this, is already up, so check it out.)