Is a Libertarian, Third-Party Futile and Counterproductive?

[Ed. Note: Making political change is much debated, yet political action might be characterized as similar to the Canadian ice game of curling, which combines aspects of bowling, bocce and shuffleboard. The curling stone – a kind of oversized hockey puck – is slid on the ice, and the players take brooms and sweep around the stone, but never actually touch it. They merely influence the stone, hoping to help it stop as close to the desired spot as possible.

Even if one agrees on a political destination, or even just a direction, means are just as important as ends in any game, including politics. Two noted strategists in libertarian circles – Carl Milsted and Brian Holtz – offer different takes on the question of whether a libertarian third party is futile and counterproductive.]

PRO: Time to Kill the Libertarian Party?

By Carl Milsted, Jr.

Last month, anarchist Brad Spangler declared that “The Libertarian Party Must Die.” For him, the Libertarian Party is en route to becoming a “sad parody” of the ideals that his branch of the party had in mind.

Even though I am one of the people responsible for the “evisceration the LP platform” I agree with his current diagnosis.

In theory, the Libertarian Party could be an effective umbrella organization for a variety of freedom lovers – libertarians, free liberals, small-government conservatives, etc. – to elect freedom-oriented candidates for partisan public office. I launched the Libertarian Reform Caucus to attempt to move the LP in that direction.

Or, the Libertarian Party could be a Leninist cadre of hardcore libertarians, radical and motivated. Such an organization could get its message out, and infiltrate other organizations applying the transmission-belt theory to magnify its impact.

Unfortunately, the LP attempts to do both, and in the process does neither.

Electoral politics requires putting together big coalitions. It takes a majority to win a two-way race. Even in a three-way race, it takes around 40% of the vote to win in practice. Such coalitions can only be bound by the loosest of ideologies. Tight, coherent ideologies are for the factions that make up such coalitions.

And yes, such broad coalition building involves significant compromise. The founders of the LP feared such compromise and created rules designed to prevent the LP from becoming yet another squishy mainstream party.

And it isn’t. But it still tries to win elections. So it is continuously driven to bring in more members, more donors. The result is a bait and switch, where moderate freedom lovers are told they are libertarians to bring them in, and then told they are not real libertarians once they try to participate in party business. Rancor is the rule. The Libertarian Party is a gigantic time and money waster for those who love liberty.

At the 2006 LP Convention in Portland, I had hoped to either win big or lose big. The LP has the infrastructure in place to become a real political party. But it needs to widen its membership criteria and moderate its platform. The latter sort of happened. But the Leninist membership oath remains. The LP remains useless.

Conversely had the radicals won definitively, those of us who wish to do electoral politics could be shown the door and properly encouraged to either start a new party or work within other political parties.

I took a shot at moving the LP in the moderate direction as I thought it made more sense to show the recalcitrant purists the door. Purism mixed with electoral politics is inefficient. A purist libertarian organization would be far better off not being a political party. Message to radicals: Dispense with the FEC reports, campaign finance limitations and ballot access drives. Model yourself after PETA, Greenpeace or the anti-WTO groups. You’ll have far more fun, and get ten times the publicity for ort of effort.

But upon further reflection, I am now glad my side didn’t win. Even though a political party should be in the hands of those willing to do real politics, it would be bad for us to inherit the Libertarian Party. The Libertarian Party has a serious branding problem. It would take decades to live down the radical branding done by the Rothbardians. It would be far cheaper to start off from scratch.

And as I said above, the radicals are also better off without inheriting the LP. The infrastructure of an FEC recognized party is a serious handicap to their efforts.

And so, here’s to deadlock in Denver. May the Libertarian Party wither away.

And let me second Mr. Spangler’s call for “true libertarians” to focus their efforts on counter-economics. Counter-economics does not require majorities to practice. Nor does it require ideological coherence. Radicals and moderates can productively work together on counter-economics projects while disagreeing on many finer points of politics. For example, I am contemplating focusing my own efforts on school privatization via creating better private schools.

CON: The LP: Mend It, Don't End It

By Brian Holtz

In any multi-dimensional analysis of Americans' political views, they cluster mostly in the 2-D plane defined by the Nolan chart, and even more so along the left-right diagonal of the Nolan plane. As noted by Duverger's "Law", this in combination with plurality voting laws means that successful third parties cannot arise along that diagonal without being easily co-opted by the two existing major parties already encamped on that line. Too few Americans occupy the totalitarian quadrant of the Nolan plane to support a viable third party there, so the only opportunity for a significant American third party is in the libertarian quadrant. That the Greens do arguably better than the LP despite this situation is a stunning indictment of how badly the LP has botched its opportunity.

Polls show that 16% to 20% of Americans are liberty increasers -- i.e. they agree that America should have both more civil freedom and more economic freedom. The proximate cause for the LP getting nothing like that voting share is of course the wasted-vote syndrome, exhibited by voters who believe that voting is more about tipping the election outcome than about signaling their political beliefs. But underlying that cause is the fundamental problem of the Libertarian Party: its activists tend to care more about exhibiting their ideological purity than about influencing electoral politics in the direction of increased liberty. This hypothesis explains many of the LP's dysfunctional and self-defeating behaviors.

The Bylaws say the LP should "function as a libertarian political entity separate and distinct from all other political parties or movements", should "elect Libertarians to public office", and forbids the endorsement of "any candidate who is a member of another party for public office in any partisan election". The LP acts more interested in using electoral politics to exhibit ideological purity than to "move public policy in a libertarian direction". The Bylaws claims it wants to do the latter, but only "by building a political party that elects Libertarians to public office" -- as if electing Pledge-certified LP members is the only way to move public policy in a libertarian direction.

The purpose of the LP should instead be to use electoral politics to send the policy-making community the largest possible signal of the desire for increased civil and economic liberty. The LP should seek to be the political voice and electoral broker of all eligible voters who want to pull America north on the Nolan Chart. Instead of making the perfect the enemy of the better, the LP should maximize the size of the pro-liberty voting bloc and then see how much increased liberty (if any) it can buy with these votes. We know from public choice theory that politicians will sell favors, and there is no reason that increased liberty can't be such a favor. If a major-party candidate in a race will promise us an acceptable amount of effort for increased liberty, then we should swing our voting bloc her way. We won't be infallible in our judgments about who to support, but the only way to guarantee we won't make such mistakes is to continue our strategy of electoral irrelevance. Of course, the more liberty-increasers that the LP can unite into a voting bloc, the more the major parties will move to co-opt the LP by adopting some of our positions. Good! We care about increasing liberty, not about donkeys vs. elephants vs. torch ladies. (Right?)

There are systemic reasons why the Republicrats win and the LP loses, and there is no combination of strategy and tactics offering a real-world possibility of making the LP a majority or even plurality party in this century. Game-theoretic analysis suggests that the best we can hope for is to incite one of the major parties into co-opting the large territory that we should stake out Nolan-north of the Left-Right equator. The best-case scenario for the LP is to be an electoral (or coalition) partner with a major party that has turned somewhat libertarian to counter our threat, and then to merge with that party and take it over from the inside. Some Libertarian activists are afraid of the LP losing its principles if we unite with those who love liberty a little less than we do. Who should be afraid of who here? If the principles of libertarianism can't win a fair fight in the marketplace of ideas, then our cause is already lost and we should spare ourselves the efforts of activism. Libertarianism is not some fragile flickering candle, liable to be extinguished if impure people breathe too hard near it. Rather, true libertarianism is an intellectual firestorm, that when given half a chance will starve competing ideologies of their oxygen. True libertarianism will surely end up being the most enduringly potent political mind-virus produced in the 20th century, and true libertarians relish any opportunity to terminally infect a political organization with libertarian ideas.