The MAGA Farm Team
I'm not sure what the "paleolibertarians" who've taken over the Libertarian Party hope to accomplish.
This is probably what most of you think about when you hear the words “Libertarian Party”:
By and large, not a group I’d trust anywhere near power, even if they’re likely more fun to hang out with than the people at the DSA convention. I’d rather make toast in my own bathtub than spend five minutes with that neurotic bunch.
Gary Johnson was a reasonably credible Presidential candidate, though, as long as he wasn’t asked any questions about Syria. Had I lived in a deep blue or red state in 2016, in which my vote likely wouldn't have affected the outcome, I likely would have voted for him. Many others agreed - facing off against an uninspiring Democratic candidate and a legitimate crazy person carrying the GOP banner, Johnson won 3.3% of the vote. For a third party candidate in a US Presidential election, that’s actually really good, and a result the party could have built on had they continued nominating credible candidates.
The LP, alas, has decided to go in another direction, writes Andy Craig at Shikha Dalmia’s UnPopulist newsletter:
Aside from Johnson’s candidacy, the party had mostly drawn attention for antics ranging from the mildly amusing to utterly cringe-inducing, such as running an Elvis Presley impersonator as a perennial candidate, nominating someone who accidentally turned his skin blue by drinking colloidal silver, entertaining the presidential aspirations of the mentally unstable alleged murderer John McAfee, and treating C-SPAN viewers to a man stripping nearly naked on the national convention stage. But now, as Ken White, a criminal defense lawyer and respected commentator known by his online moniker Popehat, aptly observed on Twitter, “bigoted shitposters” have now wrested control from these “mostly harmless cranks.”
Under the direction of the so-called Mises Caucus, the LP has become home to those who don’t have qualms about declaring Holocaust-denying racists “fellow travelers” and who don’t think that bigots are necessarily disqualified from the party. They even went out of their way to delete from the party’s platform its nearly 50-year-old language stating: “We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant.” The caucus is also reversing the party’s longstanding commitment to open immigration policies in favor of border enforcement. The new chair, Angela McArdle, proclaims that the party will now be dedicated to fighting “wokeism.” People with pronouns in their Twitter bios aren’t welcome anymore, but, evidently, white nationalists and Holocaust deniers are.
But that’s not all. Various members of the new leadership have averred that: Black folks owe America for affirmative action; Pride Month is a plot by degenerates and child molesters aiming for socialism; and a country with zero taxes but more trans murders would be more morally acceptable than the reverse. Though some Mises Caucus figures insist they want to offer solutions to the culture wars, in practice, that means obsessively weighing in on the side of the far right.
After the Mises Caucus took over the New Hampshire state party, it endorsed the Big Lie, Jan. 6 rioters and Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the election. But in an in-depth report, the Southern Poverty Law Center traced the links between the various LP officeholders and Trump’s aiders and abettors. For example, it reported that Michael Heise, the Mises Caucus chairman who is the leading strategist behind the group's takeover of the national Libertarian Party, has actively courted Patrick Byrne, former Overstock.com CEO, receiving advice and donations from Byrne. Byrne spoke at Trump’s Jan. 6 rally and financed Arizona Maricopa County’s audit. Byrne also wrote a book claiming that election fraud cost Trump the election.
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The Mises Caucus was incensed by the Johnson/Weld candidacy because it regarded the duo, particularly Bill Weld, as too mainstream. So it embarked on a campaign to capture state chapters. Yet, at the time, few party leaders were willing to openly, honestly and forcefully condemn what was happening (with some notable exceptions). Criticism that was offered tended to be subtle, restrained, and often combined with a myopic both-sides-ism that tried to frame itself as above the fray of “infighting.” Many state and national party officers went so far as to insist everyone should just get along. They walked on eggshells, afraid that the notoriously abusive Mises Caucus Twitter mob would come after them (even as the same caucus railed endlessly against leftist cancel culture mobs).
The motives and pattern of behavior—fear, cowardice, cynical political calculation and appeasement to chase votes in internal party elections—that caused the LP to succumb to a reactionary faction replicated in miniature the Trumpist takeover of the GOP. LP incumbents who tried to present themselves as fair and neutral and those who were openly against the Mises Caucus were all swept aside—just like anti-Trump Republicans such as Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois in the GOP. The former has been censured and primaried by the GOP, and the latter has been censured and pushed into early retirement. The current favorite for the next LP presidential candidate is stand-up comic Dave Smith, who, despite his Jewish background, is notorious for praising and defending anti-Semites and white nationalists like Nick Fuentes.
But besides the party’s structure, the second reason behind the pusillanimity of the LP in taking on the Mises Caucus is the broader “paleolibertarian” ideology that has haunted the libertarian movement for decades. This worldview has long advocated a strategic alliance with the populist right to fight their mutual enemy: The Establishment. The person who made the most ardent case for such an alliance was anarcho-capitalist polemicist Murray Rothbard, originally a more liberal thinker who took a dark turn in his later years and started inveighing against immigration, anti-discrimination laws and the welfare state. In a sense, Rothbard was the original Flight 93 strategist who believed that there was no more urgent task than to tear down The Establishment by any means necessary, even allying with far-right racists and bigots. He was a precursor of the modern right’s obsession with the leftist enemy.
Aside from the obvious problems with the new LP leaders’ dominant ideology, I can’t see how this makes any sense from a practical perspective. There's already an anti-immigration, isolationist, race-baiting political party on American ballots. It’s one of the big two, in fact.
If a major party that shares your beliefs and can actually win elections is an option, why would you throw away your vote on the fringe group? The Constitution Party has wasted decades trying to be more right-wing-Republican than actual right-wing Republicans, and their election results are barely rounding errors.
Outside of the hyperpartisan echo chambers and social media - though I repeat myself - Americans are absolutely exhausted and disaffected by politics. The GOP is basically an authoritarian cult. The Democratic Party is a much less worse option, but one can’t shake the feeling that it stands at the ready to get you cancelled if you still use language that was considered progressive five years ago but indefensibly racist today.
I guess it’s an exercise in futility to expect the freaking Libertarian Party to be a vehicle for moderation and basic competence. But, My God, there sure is an opening for it if any well-heeled billionaire wants to do a Macron and launch a full-scale assault on the two-party system.
Craig notes that it’s actually not that hard for an insurgent group like the Mises Caucus to take over the party structure:
How did this happen? Why would a party that found its greatest success in offering a sensible classical liberal alternative to Trump’s GOP end up being taken over by Trumpists and worse?
There are two reasons:
The first is the party’s unique structure, an oversimplified emulation of how the Republicans and Democrats operated over 200 years ago, which made it highly susceptible to hostile takeovers, as I explained here. For example, the party’s national delegates are selected at state conventions that are attended by a small number of highly motivated members willing to spend money out of pocket to show up for a weekend at a local Marriott. They generally don’t represent the views of the vast majority of members or libertarian donors, let alone libertarian voters. But just because they show up, their votes on key LP matters carry the day. This means that it was not at all hard for a group like the Mises Caucus to gin up resources to flood state conventions with its members and select national delegates who could then vote in LP officeholders sympathetic to its views.
The Libertarians don’t win many elections outside of a few local races, but they’re usually on the ballot in every state plus DC at Presidential election time. If you’re a Mike Bloomberg or Howard Schultz who wants to get a viable third party up and running, you’d be better off buying LP memberships for anyone who wants one, swamping their events, taking over the party and - as Iowahawk might put it - wearing its carcass as a skin suit.
In the off chance that this West Wing fantasy came true and the Libertarian Party was taken over and turned into a centrist organization, it probably wouldn’t make much sense to keep the name.
Or so you’d think. Around the world there are many political parties whose names don’t accurately reflect their ideology. In Australia, the main right-of-centre party is the Liberal Party. In Portugal, it’s the Partido Social Democrata.
And in Germany, you’d assume a party calling itself “The Greens” would be an environmentalist movement, but you’d be wrong:
The war in Ukraine has finally opened Germany’s eyes to the fact that it Putin who is engaging in blackmail. Last week, Gazprom announced that it would cut gas flows to Germany by reducing supply to 40% of the regular amount. In response, Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck said that the country would turn to coal.
It can’t have been easy for Habeck, a Green politician, to make the decision to safeguard German energy supplies by replacing the missing Russian gas with domestic coal. But that is exactly what Habeck plans to do. Gas, which is used to produce both heat and electricity is to be saved (storage is only at 57% capacity at the moment), while more coal will be used temporarily (until 2024) to make electricity.
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It seems every available domestic energy resource is back on the table. With one exception: Germany’s nuclear industry. The country only has three reactors left but many have argued that switching them off could at least be postponed to help with the crisis. A new survey showed that only 35% of people did not think a return to nuclear energy for electricity production would be helpful.
Yet both Scholz and Habeck remain adamant that Germany’s last reactors must be switched off in six months. It seems the chancellor cannot even bring himself to discuss the issue on an argumentative footing. Instead, his contribution is that the exit had long been decided and the necessary fuel elements could not be procured anyway.
The Bavarian Minister President Markus Söder called this “nonsense”, pointing out that this is an “ideological debate” and amounts to “pure stubbornness at the expense of a lot of people”.
I saw Chernobyl. I know nuclear energy poses its own risks.
But if, as I’m often told, that climate change caused by carbon emissions is the greatest existential threat facing humanity, using an energy source that emits no carbon into the atmosphere should be a no-brainer, right?