Requiem for a Dumpster Fire: The 2016 Libertarian National Convention
On May 27-30, the Libertarian Party held its national presidential nominating convention in Orlando, Fla. Over a thousand delegates from all 50 states attended the convention, along with dozens of guest speakers. Much of this was well and good, though some leftist degeneracy has infiltrated most corners of the libertarian community, and the guest seminars and panels were no exception. But none of this matters much to those who are not libertarians and/or have no interest in the inside baseball of the Libertarian Party. Those people were paying attention to the presidential and vice presidential debates, as well as the election processes for the party’s presidential ticket and national party offices. What they saw, at least from the standpoint of this philosophical libertarian, was a raging dumpster fire.
At the vice presidential debate on Friday, the audio quality was unbecoming of an organization seeking to put people into the White House. William Weld was generally lacking in passion and boldness, supported using the United Nations as a check against corrupt governments in third-world countries, and frequently diverged from straight answers in order to attack presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. Larry Sharpe seemed to believe that all punishment should be abolished and misidentified several historical figures as libertarians who were not. Will Coley was a mostly consistent libertarian, but managed to confuse non-aggression with pacifism. Alicia Dearn was more on point, but otherwise unremarkable. All four candidates were soft on the topic of violent revolution.
If the vice presidential debate was bad, then the presidential debate on Saturday was worse. The audio problems continued. Gary Johnson repeated the tired falsehood that libertarianism is social liberalism combined with economic conservatism, supported fixing Social Security rather than phasing it out, claimed that market forces had bankrupted coal companies (and was promptly corrected by Austin Petersen), supported for a consumption tax (which drew a round of boos from the audience), advocated regional banks rather than a free market in currency, declined to condemn the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, had no answer as to whether American involvement in the World Wars was justified, supported government involvement in marriage, favored the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which drew a round of boos from the audience due to parts which violate private property rights and freedom of association), and supported government-issued driver’s licenses (which drew several rounds of boos from the audience). John McAfee defended keeping entitlement programs for older people. Petersen voiced support for a flat tax to fund Social Security, claimed that roads will be unnecessary because we will have jetpacks, and voiced support for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Darryl Perry was wrong on some historical facts, but was generally a strong libertarian. Marc Allan Feldman mistakenly asserted that one cannot fight for one right without fighting for others, claimed that the Islamic religion cannot be blamed for terrorism, failed to realize that political leaders will want to engage in warfare if they perceive it to be in their interest, and was equivocal on the Civil Rights Act concerning private sector discrimination. All five candidates engaged in various degrees of open–borders cuckery and said that there is no lesser evil between Republicans and Democrats.
The nominees were chosen on Sunday, and to the surprise of few, Johnson and Weld won, though neither earned a majority of delegate support on the first ballot. In this decision, the delegates decided to choose nominees with the most name recognition in hopes of reaching out to more voters at the cost of presenting a false message of what libertarianism is. This decision says that the Libertarian Party has forgotten its purpose as an educational tool and is instead trying to play the establishment’s game, thinking that the establishment is sufficiently divided against itself to allow an upstart challenger to the duopoly to have a chance. As such, they chose the most moderate, safe, mainstream, establishment candidates they could find to run with the banner of what is supposed to be an extreme, bold, anti-establishment party. But if history has taught us anything about third parties in America, it is that the two major parties always agree that no other party should be allowed to compete.
It would be bad enough if the heresies of Johnson and Weld were limited to their debate responses listed above, but there is much more. Johnson has a history of supporting military intervention against Joseph Kony, saying that Jews should be forced to do business with Nazis, wanting to ban Muslim women from wearing burqas, and growing state government spending as governor. Weld has a history of supporting affirmative action, eminent domain, environmental regulations, gun control, the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, and most recently, the presidential candidacy of John Kasich.
It is hard to view this as anything other than a culmination of the hostile takeover of the Libertarian Party by cuckservatives and cuckertarians that has been underway for a long time. To quote myself from an earlier article,
“The cuckertarian denounces anarchist libertarians as utopian idealists, preaching instead a form of limited statism that contains obvious contradictions. Cuckertarians prefer to moderate the message of liberty to reach a wider audience, but in the process they corrupt it into something that a consistently principled libertarian would barely recognize. In the Libertarian Party, this results in moderate or even fake libertarians gaining the presidential nomination.”
Some libertarians may say that this election is a test to see whether libertarians can work within the system, but has this experiment not been run repeatedly for the past 40 years, with essentially the same result each time? This many attempts should be enough to convince even the most stalwart party operative that, in the words of Christopher Cantwell,
“Any libertarian who tells you he is trying to win an election is either lying to you about trying to win the election, lying to us about being a libertarian, or terribly misinformed. As far as we are concerned, elections are a bad thing. We are trying to end them, not win them. …Libertarians are anarchists, whether they realize it or not. Even the ones who are delusional enough to think that they are going to get elected and restore the bloody republic, are little more than useful idiots who are repeating anarchist propaganda for us through channels normally reserved for government. The goal is not to win your elections, the goal is to turn a large enough minority against the legitimacy of the State as to make its continued function impossible.”
Unfortunately, the troubles did not end with the presidential nominating process. At a time when the Libertarian Party most needs itself to be taken seriously by the American people, one candidate for party chair decided to perform a striptease on the convention stage during the process to fill that office. But perhaps worst of all, failed presidential candidate John McAfee thought it wise to attack the core demographic of libertarianism. During his concession speech, McAfee said,
“When I first joined the Libertarian Party, two things stood out very starkly. One, 75 percent of you are men. Number two, 99.8 percent of you are white. Shame on you. Shame on you, and shame on me for never having mentioned it before.”
If anything, white men deserve praise for being the demographic group that is intelligent enough to become libertarians to such a disproportionate extent. What McAfee is suggesting is that there is a white man’s burden, that it is the responsibility of white males to make sure that females and non-whites are educated and behaving properly. But rather than denouncing him as a racist and sexist, as would have been proper, the audience applauded him. Even if his intended point was that more outreach should be done to females and non-whites, there are evolutionary reasons to believe that this will be less than fruitful.
The long-term result of the 2016 Libertarian Party National Convention is hard to predict, but it did nothing to help the image of libertarianism while doing much to pollute its message. As such, the best result in the general election may be one of total failure so that libertarians can reject the approach taken by the party. As always, the path to liberty is anti-political.
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