Trans-Libertarians

Not the only guy whose brain got eaten by a worm.

I’ve been catching up in the past week on some big stories, covering the pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses (which have mostly petered out and will disappear as the kids go home for the summer) and the latest news from Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The last of these stories is coming to a head today as the Libertarian Party’s national convention begins.

And their two big guest speakers, the stars of their show? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Donald Trump—two men who are not libertarians, not by even the loosest definition of what is already a very loose term.

How to Be Irrelevant

This is the result of the takeover of the Libertarian Party by the far-right (so-called) “Mises Caucus.” The Libertarian Party no longer represents any kind of ideological alternative to the conservative movement, not even to its religious-nationalist wing. It has been fully absorbed.

The new Libertarian Party chair, Angela McArdle, explained this decision to the Washington Post.

“I can certainly understand that there are a handful of people allergic to relevance, afraid to confront their political opposition, afraid of losing control of the narrative,” she said, “but in 50-plus years, the Libertarian Party has never been on the main stage politically, and this is an incredible opportunity for us to bring someone who grabs the spotlight and put them on our stage.”

The kicker is that “McArdle said the speech will attract attention the party needs as it has seen a recent downturn in its membership rolls and coffers.” What she doesn’t mention is that the recent collapse in membership is the result of people quitting in protest at the Mises Caucus policies and their friendliness toward “alt-right” racism.

But what really caught my attention was the word “relevance.” I commented on this in passing a few years back when I noted that on the right, “the most devastating epithet thrown at anyone who doesn't support Trump is that we are ‘irrelevant,’ which means that we are outside the current groupthink. The irony is that those who conform to the latest dogma are the ones who make themselves intellectually irrelevant.”

That observation came out of my experience at The Federalist, where some of the people running the show were very obsessed with being “relevant” in this sense. Like Aaron Burr (according to a recent popular musical) they long to be in “the room where it happens.” They’re not too particular about what happens in that room, so long as they can say they were there.

So the Libertarian Party gets to have big nationally known figures at its convention, instead of the usual no-namers like Chase Oliver, Lars Mapstead, Jacob Hornberger, Michael Rectenwald, and Mike ter Maat. Who are they? They are actual Libertarian candidates. Which probably no one else will ever know.

It’s obvious that by giving their convention over to the candidate from another party, the Libertarians are showcasing their own party’s irrelevance and delivering their voters to Trump.

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Trans-Libertarians

Cato Institute head Peter Goettler sums it up.

It will be the first time in US history that a presidential candidate of a rival party will address the convention of a party that is presumably gathering to nominate its own candidate. And this strange turn of events has many libertarians scratching their heads….

The party has had its ups and downs and some embarrassing moments throughout its history. [Editor’s Note: He’s talking about stuff like this.] But its problems more often arose from amateurism and fractiousness rather than malice, the inevitable effect of being a small third party in a two-party system.

But today’s party leadership has been taken over by a faction that places it well outside the bounds of libertarianism altogether and appears comfortable with right-wing authoritarianism. Some tweets issued from state libertarian parties and other libertarian operators can only be described as shockingly racist or antisemitic—the Libertarian Party of Michigan, for instance, posted a cartoon portraying Jews as puppet masters of the Democratic and Republican parties—and would be more welcome on the alt-right than among true libertarians.

Given the culture war focus of the new Libertarian leadership, particularly their obsession with transgenderism, I really appreciated this final dig: “[T]he political party pretending to be libertarian has transitioned to a different identity. It should at least have the decency to change its name, too.”

I’ve been following this story for a while, here and at Symposium, where I summed it up this way: “A party of harmless oddballs was taken over by malevolent oddballs.”

What happened? What caused the Libertarian Party crackup?

First, so you get an idea of what’s going on, check out this good run-down at The Bulwark of the “unmitigated disaster” of Mises Caucus leadership of the party.

Shortly after their victory in Reno, the Mises Caucus removed a longstanding plank of the Libertarian party platform that had said, “We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant.” One has to wonder: What kinds of would-be Libertarians were being held back from joining the party by those words—and, more importantly, why did the Mises Caucus want to court them?

The messaging got worse from there. Since the takeover, the official Libertarian party Twitter account has become a hotbed of conspiracy theories, inflammatory rhetoric, and scorn. State affiliates quickly followed in its wake, with the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire recently tweeting a revised version of the “14 words,” a white-supremacist slogan….

According to data compiled from publicly available information by the Classical Liberal Caucus—the main opposition to the Mises Caucus within the party—sustaining memberships (denoting party members who give at least $25 to the cause each year) have significantly declined since the Mises Caucus takeover….

The new leadership has likewise alienated longtime donors, as fundraising more generally has declined alongside membership….

The state parties that remain are growing less enthusiastic about actually electing Libertarian candidates. The Libertarian Party of Colorado announced they would no longer run candidates in races that already have “strong liberty minded” Republicans in them. Likewise, the Libertarian Party of Montana changed its bylaws to allow endorsements of candidates of any political affiliation. In Arizona, the Libertarian candidate for US Senate in 2022 dropped out to endorse Republican Blake Masters.

Reason’s Brian Doherty describes how the convention is beginning in a state of chaos as the Mises Caucus continues its effort to stem a revolt. “Other hot floor action may arise from burgeoning attempts on the part of the Mises faction to disqualify Mises Caucus–averse state delegations.”

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The Crackpot Caucus

Partly, these are the travails of a small party and a small movement. The small size means that it’s relatively easy for a committed faction to flood the party and dominate it, like a cult moving to a small town. But it’s not just a procedural issue. It’s also a cultural issue. When the wider culture of “the right” goes crazy for authoritarian nationalism, it spills over into this much smaller movement and carries it along with the flood.

I see this among some of my own subscribers, people who read my newsletter perhaps a couple times a week but get a firehose of conservative media coming at them all day long. Naturally, they come back with all the usual conservative talking points they heard elsewhere (as you can sometimes see in the comments field). And I will have a limited ability to counteract that influence, because I am only one person.

The libertarian movement is much bigger than my readership—but still small compared to the conservative movement. Ironically, while libertarianism is nominally in competition with conservatism, it seems that libertarianism was doing its best from the Reagan years through the Tea Party movement, when a small-government outlook had a stronger foothold on the right. Now that conservatism has swung toward traditionalism and nationalism, it has carried Libertarianism along with it.

But there is also something else, a source of vulnerability within the libertarian movement itself. In a generally good article published at The UnPopulist just a few hours ago, Andy Craig traces the movement’s problem back to “deep, longstanding philosophical rifts.” He names the most important figures behind the movement as “author Ayn Rand, and economists Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Murray Rothbard.” It is Rothbard’s influence—including a long campaign to a form a “paleolibertarian” alliance with xenophobic “paleoconservatives”—that has won out.

In my experience, though, the weakness in the Libertarian movement was not about which ideas they should hold, but whether they needed ideas at all.

This was the main bone of contention between the (even smaller) Objectivist movement—us Ayn Rand people—and the libertarian movement. The libertarians used to point out that you can’t build a political party while requiring down-the-line adherence to a very particular philosophical viewpoint. I suppose that’s true enough, and perhaps someone ought to remind the current Republican and Democratic parties about this.

Certainly, any large movement is going to have variations and vigorous debates about its philosophical foundations, and it has to be able to accommodate some diversity of views. But many libertarians took this to mean that their movement had no need for any philosophical ideas or foundation.

In practice, this tended to mean that libertarianism became a grab-bag of crackpots holding a variety of contradictory views. And also—well, if you’ve spent much time with libertarians, you know that some of them are just guys who like taking the most outrageously contrarian and socially unacceptable position, for which purpose traditional conservatism was just a bit too stuffy. Now nationalism offers them a better way to troll everyone.

In Doherty’s overview, he lists the challenges libertarians want Trump to address, the place where they feel he most diverges from their views.

Such critiques could include his failures to bring US troops home, reduce spending and inflation, or pardon Julian Assange…. The party has been soliciting (along with donations) potential topics of Libertarian interest for Trump to address, with "End the Fed" and "Peace Not War" starting off in a tie for first place, with 13 percent apiece.

Or consider a statement from the Texas Libertarian Party listing their grievances against Trump. It ends with, “last but in no way least... [Trump] spearheaded Operation Warp Speed, leading to ill-tested vaccines and the lockdown regime.” This is factually wrong (Operation Warp Speed was about approval of the vaccines and had nothing to do with lockdowns) and scientifically wrong (the vaccines were not “ill-tested” or dangerous).

Note that this is not what any reasonable person would list as at the top of Donald Trump’s sins against the cause of liberty. Yet that’s what much of the pre-existing Libertarian Party is focused on. Their main complaints against Trump are that he did not surrender to the Taliban fast enough in Afghanistan (though he made a good effort at it), and he was not a full-fledged antivaxxer.

In short, he was not enough of a crackpot for the crackpots.

The old Objectivist critique of libertarianism is that it is not anti-statism but simply anti-state. It consists of reflexive opposition to anything done by the government. These critiques of Trump sure fit the bill.

This lack of attention to philosophical foundations is also why the Libertarians were susceptible the influence of the racist alt-right. I remember a well-known libertarian—ah, here it is, from Walter Block—who described his ecumenical, big-tent approach to libertarian ideology.

I once ran into some Neo-Nazis at a libertarian conference. Don’t ask, they must have sneaked in under our supposedly united front umbrella. I was in a grandiose mood, thinking that I could convert anyone to libertarianism, and said to them, “Look, we libertarians will give you a better deal than the liberals. We’ll let you goose-step. You can exhibit the swastika on your own property. We’ll let you march any way you wish on your own property. We’ll let you sing Nazi songs. Any Jews that you get on a voluntary basis to go to a concentration camp, fine.”

This was supposed to be a slightly tongue-in-cheek answer to a critique of libertarianism from the Objectivists. But it strikes me that what is currently happening with the Libertarian Party is that finally, after all these years, the Neo-Nazis took him up on the offer.

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From Libertarianism to Liberalism

The Libertarian Party crack-up might not have much impact on the election. Some have pointed out that the Libertarian vote, small as it is, was still large enough that if they had all voted for Trump, he might have closed the gap in 2020 in several swing states. But it’s not clear those people would have voted for Trump. The Libertarian candidate usually polls much better months before the election than on the actual day. This means that a lot of libertarians usually end up defecting to one of the major party candidates when push comes to shove, and those who didn’t do so in previous elections may not be likely to start now.

There will be a significant impact, however, on the strength and health of the pro-liberty movement in general. As I indicated above, the libertarian movement does best when it is embraced to some extent by the wider right-of-center culture. What happens when the wider right turns toward nationalism and authoritarianism?

Here’s one example. If there was one big organization most associated with the Tea Party movement—the high point of libertarian influence on the right—it was FreedomWorks. The Tea Party may have been largely eaten by grifters, but FreedomWorks was the one organization that took people’s money and actually tried to do something with it.

Now, they are closing. And the reason they give is the same guy who is now the headliner at the Libertarian Party convention.

After Trump took control of the conservative movement, [FreedomWorks President Adam] Brandon said, a “huge gap” opened up between the libertarian principles of FreedomWorks leadership and the MAGA-style populism of its members. FreedomWorks leaders, for example, still believed in free trade, small government, and a robust merit-based immigration system. Increasingly, however, those positions clashed with a Trump-aligned membership who called for tariffs on imported goods and a wall to keep immigrants out but were willing, in Brandon’s view, to remain silent as Trump’s administration added $8 trillion to the national debt.

“A lot of our base aged, and so the new activists that have come in [with] Trump, they tend to be much more populist,” Brandon said. “So you look at the base and that just kind of shifted.”

This same split was creating headaches in other parts of the organization as well. “Our staff became divided into MAGA and Never Trump factions,” Brandon said in an internal document reviewed by POLITICO Magazine. It also impacted fundraising.

“Now I think donors are saying, ‘What are you doing for Trump today?’” said Paul Beckner, a member of FreedomWorks’ board. “And we’re not for or against Trump. We’re for Trump if he’s doing what we agree with, and we’re against him if he’s not. And so I think we’ve seen an erosion of conservative donors.”

This reflects the wider trend on the right: Any person or organization that does not have a firm, well-defined ideology is sucked into the Trump cult of personality.

The upshot, though, may not all be bad. Andy Craig ends by observing that the best segment of the wider libertarian movement, the “classical liberals,” may simply be changing banners.

Increasingly, those in this group have returned to the use of the word “liberal.” (The UnPopulist is firmly within that camp.) Hayek himself had grumbled that he preferred this term, and that “libertarian” was an ugly neologism arising out of the confused American terminology that conflates “liberal” with the welfare-state left. But around the world, “liberal” retained its more classical connotation, which has started to seep back into American discourse. If everywhere else the term refers to the sensible, socially tolerant, pro-market bloc, why not in the United States?

Sounds good to me. Like I keep saying, nobody else wants the term “liberal,” and it actually means advocacy of liberty—so we should take it up.

It might be a whole lot easier than trying to reclaim “libertarianism” after this.