A warning for anyone to the left of the far right
Andy Craig was a Libertarian for nearly 10 years. No more, says he in a newsletter. The Liberty-tarians (active membership in the low five figures) have gone illiberal:
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.
As with Democrats and Republicans, it is those who show up — the highly motivated willing to devote the cash and time to attend state and national conventions — who get to vote on the party’s direction.* This makes parties susceptible to takeover by their most extreme elements. In this case, the Mises.
The scenario is familiar, Jonathan Last comments at The Bulwark:
A party, any party, is just a vessel. A brand name with pre-wired infrastructure. There is no reason that the Republican party has to be for lower taxes any more than the Libertarian party has to be for legal weed. There are no ideological commitments. Not really.
What there is, is power. And a party “believes” what the faction currently in control of its power structure believes.
So the Republican party believed in free trade and small government and robust American foreign policy—right up until the moment it didn’t. Because a new owner came in, took control of the apparatus, and had his own set of beliefs.
And rather than the party rank and file rebelling and waving their pocket Constitutions at him and quoting Reagan—well, the party rank and file kept waving their pocket Constitutions and quoting Reagan. But they didn’t rebel. They went along with it.
All of it.
And the Libertarians? “More than a fifth of the national party’s dues-paying members have left in the past year,” Craig explains, and offers this word of caution to anyone “to the left of the far right”:
The same pathology that afflicts the GOP now also afflicts the LP, namely, orienting itself not by reference to its principles but by single-mindedly focusing on its enemy: progressives and anybody else to the left of the far right. This alignment bodes ill for the future of American politics, now that the nation’s largest third party is an adjunct of Trumpism rather than an opponent of it.
“Taking the Libertarian Party out as a competitive force will help consolidate the right-wing vote around the Republican Party,” Jeet Heer warned last month in The Nation.
“What are you prepared to do?” Malone asked Eliot Ness. Lefties had best quite sniping at each other as though each and every policy disagreement is a grounds for divorce, figure out who their proximate adversaries are, and survive to squabble another day.
* Here, it seems mostly people who like to hear themselves talk in what they fancy is a Model Legislature.
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