“if you have either no fellow-feeling for the misfortunes I have met with, or none that bears any proportion to the grief which distracts me; or if you have either no indignation at the injuries I have suffered, or none that bears any proportion to the resentment which transports me, we can no longer converse upon these subjects. We become intolerable to one another. I can neither support your company, nor you mine. You are confounded at my violence and passion, and I am enraged at your cold insensibility and want of feeling”
-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
In my last post, I had just summed up the dilemma of America’s downward-spiral political system thus: “We’re screwed either way. If you hate woke socialism and political correctness, your only choice is the Republican Party, which means submitting to the even more smothering political correctness of their made-up theocracy and Trump worship. If you don’t want to be ruled by Trump and his wannabe fascists, your only choice is the Democratic Party, which on one hand advocates for woke socialism and political correctness and on the other hand does a piss-poor job of implementing them.”
For years, I had advocated alternatives to this political trap, specifically advocating the Libertarian Party as a party of free minds and free markets.
Yeah, that was fun while it lasted.
The Libertarian National Convention for the 2022 midterms was held on Memorial Day weekend in Reno, Nevada, which should have been a bad omen right there. It was notable in that the “real” libertarians who call themselves the Von Mises Caucus decisively took over control of the Libertarian Party and immediately started changing the platform to their liking.
I didn’t say much about this at the time cause frankly, it wasn’t worth the effort. Much like this Party is now.
On Wikipedia, the Von Mises Caucus is described as promoting paleolibertarianism and positions itself in opposition to the more moderate positions of 2016 presidential candidate Gary Johnson and former chairman Nicholas Sarwark, apparently because Sarwark wasn’t confrontational enough. (Note for the uninitiated: That was sarcasm) Prominent members include comedian Dave Smith and podcast hosts Tom Woods and Scott Horton. The kind of performers who appeal to the guys who like Joe Rogan, but think he’s too curious and open-minded. In 2021 Mises board member Andrea McArdle announced her intention to run for Party chair at the LP’s midterm convention and got over 69 percent of the vote in May, cementing the Caucus’ takeover.
The keynote speaker for the Convention on Friday May 27 was Justin Amash, a former US Congressman from Michigan who spent most of his career as a Republican before publicly quitting in 2020 once that institution clearly became the Party of Trump. He made a big show of joining the Libertarian Party and serving as their first federal officeholder for the remainder of his term. He is so far their only office holder, because he refused to run for re-election after his term expired in 2020. Nevertheless, he was thought of as a potential candidate for president, which is probably less likely after his speech to the new Libertarian caucus.
Congressman Amash started his thesis by saying “I’m here because I want libertarian ideas to win in my lifetime.” He established his contrarian credentials by saying he had served with Ron Paul and that while he was in Congress during 10 years he was the lone “No” vote on bills 56 times, with all other Congressmen combined having 76 No votes during that period. And he said that the libertarian philosophy, the philosophy that is popular in America and that the Party can win with, is at its core “liberalism.” And he held up a book by that title- by Ludwig von Mises. Amash said, “liberalism, as Mises talks about, is the philosophy of human cooperation. It’s human cooperation that brings progress and happiness. And I think too often as libertarians, we don’t focus enough on that.” Then he reiterated from his first point: “What is the point of a political party? The point of a political party is to win elections.” Then he said: “That brings up the question- who’s a real libertarian? I’m going to quote from some famous libertarians, and I’ll let you decide.”
“…a small number of anti-social individuals, i.e., persons who are not willing or able to make the temporary sacrifices that society demands of them could make all society impossible. Without the application of compulsion and coercion against the enemies of society, there could not be any life in society.” Silence. “Here’s another quote: ‘Anarchism misunderstands the real nature of man. It would be practical only in a world of angels and saints. …Libertarianism is NOT anarchism, nor has it anything whatsoever to do with anarchism.” Booing at this point. Amash shrugged and went on: “One must be in the position to compel the person who will not respect the lives, health, personal freedom, or private property of others to acquiesce to the rules of life in society.” “For the libertarian, the state is an absolute necessity” -more booing at that one- “since the most important tasks are incumbent upon it.” “It is not at all shameful for a man to allow himself to be ruled by others.’ …You like that one?” “Libertarianism’s thinking is cosmopolitan and ecumenical.” “It would be really preposterous to propose that the nations turn to imperialistic policies as a favor to the ordnance manufacturers.” Surprisingly little reaction one way or the other. “The libertarian demands that every person have the right to live wherever he wants.” A little cheering there. “The narrow-mindedness which sees nothing beyond one’s own nation, and has no conception of the importance of international cooperation, must be replaced by a cosmopolitan outlook.” “It is manifestly absurd to break up the ever-increasing unity of world economies into a small number of national territories, each as autarkic as possible.” And finally; “The libertarian demands that the political organization of society be extended until it reaches its culmination in a world state that unites all nations on an equal basis.”
Then Amash gave them the punch line: Those were all quotes by Ludwig von Mises. All of them. His point: “Like you, I find a lot of those quotes questionable. … and I think what happens so often with libertarians is we’re quick to judge each other, we’re quick to say someone else is not a real libertarian.. but Von Mises said those things. And if we’re going to be a real political party, forget about being a real libertarian- we need to win over a third of the country- and if Ludwig von Mises, or Justin Amash, or pretty much anyone in this room is not libertarian enough for you, it’s not going to work… just using myself as an example, if Justin Amash is not libertarian enough for you, I’ve got news for you about the rest of the country.”
Apparently a political movement which named themselves after Ludwig von Mises was unaware that he’d said those things.
It’s like seeing somebody with a Pink Floyd T-Shirt and you ask them who their favorite band member is and they go, “Which one’s Pink?”
Which figures. Much like modern “conservatives” do not ponder the details of the Bible or the Hamilton-Madison Constitution, the “Von Mises” “libertarians” do not examine their own source material. Mises, unlike Ayn Rand, did not disdain the libertarian label, but to him liberty referred to a classical-liberal form of government. To liberals like Ludwig Von Mises and F.A. Hayek, the best system was not minarchist or anarcho-capitalist but had some regulation of both society and commerce, as Adam Smith intended. Now, that approach to government is still too pro-capitalist and individualist for the woke Left of today, which is why there’s a distinction between libertarianism and what calls itself “liberalism.” But apparently that’s still too statist for a self-declared Von Mises faction.
But even Amash’s speech wasn’t the biggest joke on the Caucus. The biggest joke was the background of the speech. See, they’d set up cameras to record the events of the day including not only Amash’s speech but the floor proceedings for who got to vote on the platform. This was done through the allocation of delegate tokens. If you look at the YouTube link for the May 27 section of the Convention, someone is asking, around 5 hours and 40 minutes in, someone announces that tokens will be collected in seven minutes for the Party floor debate. Then they started debating while on the mic about whether and in which medium the Party agenda was going to be posted. At 5:41 someone presses on whether, after the 30 minutes time allotted for the keynote speaker, all the debate tokens will actually be counted. He is told “I don’t know. I can’t predict the future.” Amash comes on around 5:42. He starts by saying “This is my first national convention, I think. Do they usually run like this?” He gives the Von Mises quotes after 5:48. But while Amash was speaking you could see a carton of take-out food on camera behind him and as he went on, people were walking around the stage behind him. He had to stop to turn off a ringtone because somebody left their smartphone by the podium. By the time he got to the point of “the point of a political party is to win elections”, you had at least eight people on the stage behind him taking out boxes and counting the tokens, cause apparently that’s how this Party is going to win elections.
I mean, you’re not going to take over the third largest political party in the United States and then set up a camera so that everyone on YouTube can see your organization doesn’t have its shit together, am I right?
The Amash speech ended at 6:06 (so he only used 24 of the alloted 30 minutes). The first person to address the podium after the speech described the scene behind Amash as “the height of rudeness” and “we should be ashamed of ourselves.” The chairwoman apologized that the need to assemble the tallies during a speech “was an unfortunate circumstance that was left, um, because of the agenda adoption.” Oh, so they hadn’t hammered that out before everyone got to debate and vote on it. Good to know. They kept going on with the tallies for the better part of thirty minutes. During that time at least one person asked to skip the procedure to vote for chair while the tallying was going on. One person asked if the tokens may have allowed a person to vote both ways on proposals “because I do not see a mechanism to keep that in mind.” Around 6:40, Sarwark came on to say that only a limited list of candidates was fostered despite the number of tokens collected because “shenanigans occurred.” He said “we are not following our own values – we are trying to silence voices because we disagree with them” – at which point the camera veered quickly away from his mic.
Look, we’re Libertarians. We’re used to Party conventions being Amateur Hour. But guys: When people on the floor of the Convention were telling the organizers it was a shitshow, then it was a shitshow.
Well, that was the stuff that was funny to watch, but the end result was ridiculous without being so funny. Previously the Libertarian Party platform had famously included a statement saying “We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant.” But according to coverage in Reason Magazine, “Mises Caucus founder Michael Heise defended the deletion of the language because “libertarianism isn’t about wrongthink. It’s about non-aggression, self-ownership, and property rights,” and said he believes that the anti-bigotry condemnation fed what he calls a “woke,” or “cultural Marxist” agenda.
“What is happening nowadays with the ‘wokeism’ is people are using language as dialectics along cultural lines to push for collectivist ends,” says Heise. “So back in the day…the Marxist revolutions, they had the dialectics of the rich versus the poor and the owner versus the worker. And they were pushing towards collectivist ends. It’s the same ideology that’s happening now, but they’re pitting cis versus straight and male versus female and trans versus whatever.”
Basically they’re saying, “We’re value-neutral on bigotry. Also on being irrational and repugnant.”
Ultimately the statement was removed although at the initiative of former vice-presidential candidate Spike Cohen they added a new line saying the Party would “uphold and defend the rights of every person, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or any other aspect of their identity.”
But it’s kind of telling that a movement which prizes individualism against a collectivist agenda is invoking the junk-food catch phrases of the alt-Right like “woke” and “cultural Marxist”, to justify removing a pro forma statement against bigotry that was in the platform years before “woke” was a thing, and implying that anybody who disagrees with that is guilty of creating “wrongthink.”
Similarly the Caucus got rid of the Party position on abortion. That always had been value-neutral, because many Libertarians are Christians or secular humanists who hold that abortion, like the death penalty, is the ultimate form of coercion. Thus, the platform had read: “Recognizing that abortion is a sensitive issue and that people can hold good-faith views on all sides, we believe that government should be kept out of the matter, leaving the question to each person for their conscientious consideration. ” But apparently even that was too much for the Von Mises Caucus. One pro-life Libertarian site quoted a pro-choice Libertarian who voted to remove the statement, saying: “It was a self-contradictory plank: It claimed to be neutral, but it was clearly pro-choice.”
Well, in the immortal word of Cher Horowitz, “DUH.” Didn’t we used to say we were pro-choice on everything? This attitude assumes that “pro-choice” is the same thing as “pro-abortion.” You can, on libertarian or fiscal conservative grounds, refuse to endorse government funding or facilitating abortions that are morally repugnant to many taxpayers. But this posture defeats the purpose of being conspicuously non-neutral on the matter of bodily autonomy and asserting the right of the individual to make their own health choices, including choices that could kill them or (in the case of a pandemic) people around them who didn’t make that choice. Why are Libertarians demanding an end to mask mandates and vaccine mandates and demanding that state governments not dictate how parents can raise their children when they’re apparently “neutral” on the state dictating whether people should become parents? In removing an actually neutral statement asserting a right to conscience under the pretense of neutrality, the Von Mises Party, like Samuel Alito, has in fact clearly taken a side.
It matters now, after Dobbs v. Mississippi, because we have a whole host of unwanted babies that the government (The Supreme Court and the Trump states) expects private citizens to care for, at their expense, we are putting that much more pressure on adoption agencies, and the only “choice” some people have left is hoping they can stretch the cash to drive hundreds of miles out of the way to an abortion clinic, or to move to a state with decent resources for child care. Yet “libertarians” don’t seem to care about the unnecessary costs that “conservative” government has chosen to impose on the individual.
I am again reminded of the Harry Browne joke about how government is like a guy who breaks your leg, throws you a crutch and then brags, “If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be able to walk.” Well, Republicans are that much more laissez-faire than Libertarians, cause they won’t even give you the crutch.
Wouldn’t it be more moral (and more practical) to just stop breaking legs? The Libertarian Party I voted for would say so. But not anymore.
And RE: “small government” –
Just watch this, and then get back to me.
Money quote: “They claim to be for ‘small government’, but that really means that a government that tells them what to do should be as small as possible. But when the Republican Party recognizes it has an opportunity to tell people what to do, the government required for that tends to be large.”
Of course, leftists have been pointing out this issue with the “small government” Right for quite some time, as if it were a problem unique to right-wing psychology, and as if libertarians have not been warning them for quite some time that a government that is big enough to give them abortion rights and “free” healthcare is also big enough to take them away.
Which is why, again, it is simply not enough to base your political agenda on “I don’t want the government telling ME what to do” because at some point that attitude applies to everybody. The billionaire doesn’t want the government telling him to pay more taxes and the teenager doesn’t want the government telling her to bear her relative’s baby. Are these the same thing?
Yeah, “freedom lovers” used passive resistance to effectively kill mask mandates. Good for you. Now take a look at all the other stuff government is doing under our noses. We still have to take off our shoes at the airport when 9-11 was almost 22 years ago, and the Libertarian Party was never so hopped up about that.
So really, the matter should start from a point of ethics: Do I want the government telling everybody ELSE what to do? And why? How do you justify that? Cause right now we’ve got a Supreme Court saying “I don’t want the government telling the government what to do. Wait, we ARE the government? Well, hey!”
Amash, who actually IS a Christian, pro-life Libertarian, had it right. You are not going to catch any new people with an attitude of “I don’t want the government telling ME what to do” and sotto voce, “I’m okay with government telling other people what to do.” Those people already have a party. It is certainly not a position that will appeal to those of us who were already in the LP and thought we were libertarian before the woke Right changed the definition of “libertarian” the same way they changed the definition of “conservative” and “Christian.” And even if you could get more votes with the Von Mises Caucus than you got with the previous agenda who weren’t already going to the Republican Party, further gains would have to assume that the current party organization has the brains and coordination to act on its new recruitment. And right now, the Von Mises Party makes Gary Johnson look as organized and focused as Mitch McConnell or Lyndon Johnson.
And liberals, keep in mind, I do NOT think that going “third” party, in and of itself, is “throwing away your vote.” If I thought that I wouldn’t have been Libertarian for as long as I was. I AM saying that voting for this particular iteration of the Libertarian Party IS throwing away your vote, and it is throwing away your vote BY right-wing standards. Because if you have no idea how government works but still want to run for office anyway, and think the only purpose of being in office is to suck off the government tit while going on social media and making fun of welfare queens and woke socialists, we already HAVE a party for that. It’s called the Republican Party. And at this point, the main difference between them and the LP is that the Republicans can get people elected to federal office. So what we have right now is at best a duplication of effort. Now, if you want a party that actually follows what the Constitution says and does not believe government can spend all the money it wants and do anything it wants to the public just cause it can, that party doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever really did.
I will say this, you will see more pastel-colored hair and tie-dye T-Shirts in a Libertarian Party Convention than you ever will at a Republican convention, or for that matter, a Democratic one. But that just goes to the old right-wing critique about liberals’ “tolerance for diversity”: You can have a myriad variety of appearances, but inside you’re all the same political robot.
Now- if I can’t deal with the Libertarian Party any more, am I still a small-l libertarian? Well, yeah. Because libertarianism means being true to your individual self regardless of what the collective thinks, and if not even other libertarians agree with me, I must be fucking Ultra.