It is obvious: there were some winners and losers at the Washington DC LP convention this week. The Party itself wasn’t a winner.
The Libertarian Party US’ latest convention shows the party not only continues to be an ever-increasing political joke: the active members and leaders are revelling in it. Their new standard bearer should have face-paint: he is heading up a clown-show.
Are we being demeaning and rude? Yes, we are – and we apologize for succumbing to the temptation to be so. But the events and results of last weekend’s election-year convention, as reported by many reputable people, is a strong provocation. The spectacle was sickening – as bad and worse than any in the last two decades or more.
We suspect that the results will have virtually no effect on the November rematch between senile, somnolent, old Uncle Joe and The bombastic and hyperactive (and indicted) Donald. The nonentity the LP has made the nominee for 2024 is not even a minarchist: indeed, his words and actions during and since the Beer Flu Pandemic make him out to be a supporter of omnipotent government: perhaps somewhat reluctantly one, but no sworn enemy of the enemies of liberty.
(And yes, we heard the rudeness of the delegates and attendees towards both Robert F Kennedy Jr and Donald Trump. And we consider that to be inexcusable. You may dislike the men, you may despise their politics and their positions and you may think their actions bad – but that is not the decency and courtesy that a truly libertarian person (and society) should show.)
This decay and increasingly irrelevance of the LP is nothing new. Those who remember the 2012 Las Vegas convention thought we’d reached the nadir of scumminess and craziness in the LP then. Oh, how we have been proved wrong. It is no surprise that so many of us have given up on political Libertarianism. The younger of the TPOL staff gave up on the LP first, but his elders have slowly followed his lead. The party – definitely national and many State versions – no longer has any value for the cause of liberty in our time and our nations.
(Tell us if you think we are wrong.)
Some people thought that the little palace coup a while back was the beginning of an effort to return the LP to its foundation: to restore it to an effective advocate of peace and prosperity and liberty. Clearly the Mises faction has failed in that task. Can we compare it to Hercules cleaning the Augean Stables? Or trying to and failing?
When DC was selected, perhaps that should have been a portent of what would happen. But that did not have to happen: the potential for reform was there. If not restoration. It seems we are now shown otherwise.
One member of our TPOL staff raises this point, as we hinted at in opening. It was not the LP nominee who “won” the LP convention: it was The Donald.
The Price of Liberty 
The LP has been on shaky ground for a long time. Somehow they forgot they supported libertarianism and morphed into supporting libertinism. Not that they were ever all that stalwart.
As far back as I can remember them, they were always working to destroy the morality that underpins the culture that Adams referred to — that the Constitution could only work with a moral people, specifically a christian one. Or at least any people willing to abide by christian ethos.
For example, you cannot champion open borders without also championing trespassing, stealing and coveting. You cannot be pro-drug legalization without being in favor of the effects of greater drug use. Libertine sexual mores. Etc.
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Is there not a difference between tolerating actions or denying government the power to prohibit certain actions, and championing such things? It is a difficult line to define many times. We can, for example, encourage people NOT to drink or smoke and help those addicted to such things to give them up, without pushing for government power to prevent the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcohol and tobacco.
Still, you are making a good point. The LP has been attacking, at least for the past few decades, the foundation on which individual liberty and self-government are built. And the result is what we have today.
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At one time I thought that taking a principled stand on, say, free migration was valid, that no one has any legitimate cause to prevent them from so doing, other than onto his own property.
But then I realized that there is no such thing as public property. As commons. What we think of as public property is simply private property that is managed for the whole citizenry.
I don’t see that allowing migrants to poop on the sidewalks or take part in a conspiracy to rob the taxpayers as best management practices, let alone anything a libertarian should consider non-aggression.
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Another irony here is that Kennedy’s speech focused on Scamdemic abuses of power by both parties and he got booed and fewer votes than Trump. It’s hard to believe that just a few years ago, LP candidates were people like Ron Paul and Harry Browne—Walter Williams was floated as a candidate once.
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“(Tell us if you think we are wrong.)”
While I myself don’t agree with the sexual orientation prejudices implied, I am reminded of something I heard an NCO tell a private once:
“You’re wrong. You’re wrong as two guys f***ing.”
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Replying, Tom, language aside, why do you think we are wrong? Presumably about the LP?
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“The nonentity the LP has made the nominee for 2024 is not even a minarchist”
He’s absolutely a minarchist.
He’s also a candidate who has forced a US Senate runoff, campaigned in every state, become the only non-D/R invited to address the public from the Iowa Soapbox, and defeated several other candidates (including Donald Trump and RFK, who were literally given speaking time at the convention) to receive the nomination.
Hardly a “nonentity,” at least by Libertarian Party metrics. As standard-story political “credentials” go, his are better than most past LP presidential nominees.
He was not my candidate of first choice at last weekend’s national convention, but we had several ways of doing worse, and avoided them.
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I am not sure how someone who endorsed the mandatory lockdown, social distancing, masking, and the rest of the Pandemic Panic measures could be described as a minarchist, unless he had renounced his own positions since then (which I have found no evidence of). And to give him some credit, he supports a number of good policies on his website, including ending / preventing gum’t funding of abortions and bringing the boys (and girls) home from 90% of the planet.
In terms of electoral politics, he may be a better candidate than most in the past (which isn’t necessarily saying much, is it?). And yes, there could have been worse, to be sure. It is a tiny glimmer of hope, as is the defeat of The Donald and RFK Jr – if not the rudeness of their reception.
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So far as I can tell, the only place he ever “endorsed the mandatory lockdown, social distancing, masking, and the rest of the Pandemic Panic measures” is in certain people’s imaginations.
He did endorse social distancing and masking as voluntary personal actions. While that might raise questions as to his expertise in epidemiology, it doesn’t cost him his minarchist card.
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Several people have pointed out there are videos of him at meetings stating just that, but all I have seen is a single written report, not the actual video. If he truly was promoting only voluntary personal actions, you are correct.
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