The Spectacular Implosion of the Libertarian Party Eight years ago, America’s third-largest party had its best-ever showing. Then came the fallout. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/the-spectacular-implosion-of-the-libertarian-party/ The war for control of the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire began to escalate in the spring of 2021, when Jeremy Kauffman got the keys to the Twitter account. Kauffman, a tech entrepreneur, had arrived in the state a few years earlier as part of the Free State Project, which proposed to transform New Hampshire by convincing liberty-minded activists to move there en masse. The state was a small-l libertarian success story. It had legalized raw milk, slashed budgets, and elected dozens of Free Staters to the legislature—including the House majority leader. But the state and national Libertarian parties, Kauffman felt, were too passive and too left-wing. They were trying to fit in, instead of trying to stand out. He and his allies made short work of that. In the months that followed, the LPNH account made national headlines with a run of deliberately provocative statements. The party tweeted that “John McCain’s brain tumor saved more lives than Anthony Fauci.” It called for child labor to be legalized and advocated repealing the Civil Rights Act to fight “wokeness.” State party chair Jilletta Jarvis watched this shift with alarm. A group of right-wing activists was attempting a “hostile take-over,” she announced. Jarvis pointed her finger at a new and rapidly growing caucus within the state and national parties that was named for Ludwig von Mises, a 20th century Austrian free-market economist who was one of the intellectual forefathers of libertarianism and who is particularly revered by followers of the former presidential candidate Ron Paul. “Their strategy is, frankly, designed to discredit the Libertarian Party in the state and in our nation,” Jarvis warned. So she and a group of like-minded party members staged a counterrevolution. They seized the Twitter account from Kauffman and his allies and created a new legal entity to house the party’s assets. Then Jarvis made one more announcement: “Out of respect for all of those who have been angered, threatened, or insulted by the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire,” the party’s social media accounts would be going on a brief hiatus. Being the third-largest party in a duopoly can sometimes seem like a dubious distinction, like being the second-deadliest maritime disaster involving an iceberg. The Libertarians are big enough to be ubiquitous, but rarely substantial enough to stand out. For decades their nominees have oscillated between people you’ve never heard of and those you vaguely remember. The Libertarian Party is America’s weakest strong brand. In 2016, the Libertarians had their best-ever presidential election showing by a factor of three. Dissatisfied by two unpopular major-party nominees, nearly 4.5 million people voted for the strange-but-plausible pairing of former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and ex–Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld. Running on a promise of “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” governance, they exceeded the margin of victory in 11 states and raised more than $11 million. It was the best performance by a third party in a presidential election since Ross Perot. Then it all fell apart. Under the auspices of expanding the tent, some within the LP—and a fair number outside of it—began clamoring for a different kind of party: more aggressive, more offensive, and more right-wing. They weren’t interested in third-place showings; it wasn’t entirely clear if they were interested in competing at all. What’s followed has been more than seven years of spectacularly messy infighting. New Hampshire was only one front of many. Across the country the Libertarian Party has been plagued by breakaway factions, leaked chatrooms and conspiracy theories, and bitter struggles over bank accounts and social media handles. The current electoral climate is once again tailor-made for a Libertarian party crasher. From the militarized border to attacks on bodily autonomy, state power and individual liberty are at the foreground of the national debate. Faced with an unpopular incumbent and a challenger charged with 88 felonies, 63 percent of Americans say they’re ready for a third-party alternative. But the largest one bears little resemblance to the party that attracted so many disaffected voters in 2016. Instead, it’s mired in a tussle that’s all too familiar, not just between its left and right flanks, but over the purpose of the party itself. The rise of Trump didn’t just break the Republican Party. It reignited an identity crisis within the LP that has been smoldering since its creation. The Libertarian Party was formed in the 1970s amid backlashes to imperial Republican governance and the Democratic Great Society. Members skirmished over the organization’s purpose from the outset. “There were arguments over ‘Is the point of the Libertarian Party to have a platform to say what you think is true, or is it to actually try to win elections and put libertarians in office?’ and I don’t know that that was ever really settled,” says David Boaz, distinguished senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, who has seen the movement evolve from its inception. Those debates often manifested as fights over candidates. In 1980, some Libertarians accused their nominee, attorney Ed Clark, of watering down their message to win votes. His sin? Defining libertarianism in an interview as simply “low-tax liberalism.” Clark, whose running mate was the oil magnate David Koch (brother Charles co-founded Cato and bankrolled much of the early libertarian movement), won what was then a record number of votes, but the campaign also sparked infighting that led to an exodus from the party. Four years later, the Kochs backed a member of the Council on Foreign Relations for the nomination. When the party chose someone else, it was their turn to walk. “When there have been real serious schisms or fights within the party they have been within roughly the same lines as now,” says Brian Doherty, a senior editor at the libertarian magazine Reason, whose book Radicals for Capitalism chronicled the movement’s rise. “This is not how the Mises Caucus people would put it, but an objective outside observer might say it’s a war between normie pragmatists—that would be the Gary Johnson side—and, you know, radical weirdos.” In 1988, the party’s old guard threw their support behind Ron Paul, hoping that a former Republican congressman might make some noise nationally. Paul, who paid for his lifetime party membership with a gold coin, happened to be both a normie and a weirdo. Compared to his rival, former American Indian Movement leader Russell Means, he was a Beltway insider. But Paul’s cultural conservatism and paranoid style were an imperfect fit. He was not a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; he spread conspiracies about the Council on Foreign Relations. After a disappointing showing, Paul rejoined the GOP and the Libertarian Party fractured again. Two of his most vocal allies, Lew Rockwell (a former Paul chief of staff) and Murray Rothbard (a Cato co-founder who fell out with Charles Koch), retreated to a nonprofit Rockwell had set up called the Mises Institute, where they advocated for something called “Paleolibertarianism”—a fusion of libertarian economics and proto-MAGA politics. In a 1992 essay lamenting former Klan leader David Duke’s defeat in the Louisiana governor’s race, Rothbard outlined a platform of “right-wing populism” that included eliminating the welfare state, abolishing the Federal Reserve, and repealing civil rights laws. The seventh bullet point was “America first.” Still stewing from their LP experience, Rothbard and Rockwell argued that libertarians should abandon their woke cultural liberalism; a racist newsletter published by Paul, which listed Rockwell as an editor, had a recurring feature documenting crimes committed by Black people. It was called “PC Watch.” (More at above url - lengthy article)
The Kansas experiment was associated with the Tea Party portion of the GOP rather than the Libertarians. We have a thread describing the fiasco... How Tea Party tax cuts are turning Kansas into a smoking ruin https://www.elitetrader.com/et/thre...re-turning-kansas-into-a-smoking-ruin.285208/
Libertarians should focus on deregulation and eliminating certain "agencies". I miss Ross Perot, "they" threatened his family.