The Libertarian Party in the Current Political Environment

Yesterday I received an e-mail request for money from the Libertarian Party to support their current initiatives. I contributed a small amount, and wrote a short note in the online payment form. The party's executive director responded with a short note of his own right away. Here is my response to his message:

I wasn't even sure anyone would read my note. I didn't expect to get a prompt response from the guy in charge!

So, since you wrote that quick note, let me open the gates just a little and write some thoughts back to you. They may or may not be useful to you, depending on how you take them.

First, good work on the letter you sent to solicit donations. The penultimate sentence - "If you have made it this far, I'm relying on you to make a donation of $10 or more" - didn't grab me and make me think, "I have to contribute right now." The small amount requested was a positive factor, and so were your comments about the Democrats. In the middle of the letter, you said they're spineless, and used other severe language. Here's why that language is appropriate, admirable, and motivating, at least in my case.

I've been interested in politics for a long time, and I've been an independent for a long time. I admire Ronald Reagan because I've been a libertarian with a small _l_. I don't admire the Republican party, though. In fact, the Iraq war has made me angrier than I've ever been about our leadership. It's effect on me has been similar to the effect the Missouri Compromise had on Lincoln: it made him want to get involved with politics after attending to his law practice for some years. I sense I'm not the only voter who thinks that way.

The Democrats don't bear the same burden of blame right now that the Republicans do, but their behavior as the opposition party fits your description. How they could fail so miserably in the face of the leadership we have is so strange. It's interesting to see the contrasting reactions people have had to Howard Dean and John Murtha. The stands they've taken are so rare, they easily stand out against the timid backdrop the rest of the Democrats have created.

So what am I getting at here? Like a lot of other voters, I don't feel well represented by either party. Independents and minority party members make up thirty-five percent or more of the electorate, but they don't feel that they have any voice at all. I've been skeptical that the Libertarian party can give people that voice. It's not because I think their ideas are bad, or that they can't overcome some of the real obstacles that minority parties have to face in our political system. I think that the Libertarian party's image is such that not so many people will vote for Libertarian candidates.

My main perspective comes from Massachusetts. It's not my native state, but it's where I live now. (I come from the Upper Midwest, a region that actually has a two-party system.) The two-party system in Massachusetts is not healthy, to say the least. Many, many Democrats, incumbents and new office seekers alike, run unopposed on election day. The Republicans win the governor's race, and that's about it. The latest tally shows that almost fifty percent of the voters in the state are independents - they don't enroll in either party when they register to vote. Yet the Libertarian party lost its ballot access a few years ago because they didn't win 3% of the votes cast.

Why don't the Libertarians win more votes in a state that doesn't feel that comfortable with one-party governance? Well it could be that most voters really are Democrats at heart, and they elect a Republican governor entirely to exercise some restraint on the legislature. Perhaps the Libertarians seem to be extreme here because, given the Democratic sympathies of the electorate, they really are outliers in the state's political belief system.

I keep thinking, though, of the party's tag line - the party of principle - and the message that line conveys to ordinary voters. Its subtext is that Libertarians don't care about winning elections. Or, to put it more precisely: if we have to make a choice between winning votes and sticking with our principles, we'll stick with our principles. We'd rather be right and defeated than wrong and victorious. Well naturally the goal is to be right and victorious, but that's not the message that comes across, either in the tag line or in the rest of the state party's communications.

The Libertarian Party of Massachusetts is only one of fifty state organizations, and I know the flavor of party politics in the other forty-nine states is just as quirky and unique as it is here. You have a hard job, trying to promote the party in a political landscape that's so varied. I much admire the determination the national party has shown over the last several months, to transform itself from a group on the margins of politics into an organization that can compete in elections across the land. I want to believe that it'll be successful, and that the Libertarian party will emerge from the coming political turmoil in a strong position.

To do that, though, I think it has to change the image I've described above. It has to convey that it's open to more than one belief system. The Democrats and Republicans both try to stress, at election time, that their parties are like big tents. They want to welcome as many people as they can. They're right to do that, because in a country that's so pluralistic, and that's bound to have just two major parties because of its election rules, the two major parties have to embrace divergent beliefs and belief systems.

Well, that welcoming attitude only goes so far. A political party is going to have opponents no matter what it does. But the Reagan elections show that people do respond to a well articulated vision. No other president has ever won forty-nine of fifty states, as Reagan did in 1984. That shows that people can be loyal to a certain vision of themselves, and to certain core principles built into our Constitution. It shows that when the circumstances are right, a pluralistic people can achieve a certain degree of unity.

Your remark that the Democratic party is in a panic because it feels so threatened is interesting. The contrasting question is what will happen to the Republicans when people realize what has happened since 9/11 - when the damage the Republicans have done truly sinks in. I said that we're in for a period of turmoil. The grounds for that prediction lie in a pattern of change that's clear from a long view of history. States that lose wars don't survive the loss without going through painful and substantial changes. We've clearly not achieved our aims in Iraq, and we are on the way to losing the other war we should be fighting instead - the war against Al Qaeda that started on September 11.

When these losses begin to have their effects, we'll see changes in our current political system that we can't predict. These changes are already underway, but we can't see their direction yet. The Libertarian party is right to prepare for them, and to see if it can't strengthen itself during the conflict to come. The parties in Washington won't stop sniping at each other, while citizens who aren't part of either party's base get more and more fed up with their representation and leadership. The two parties are so focused on scoring advantages, on finding weaknesses they can exploit, I don’t think they recognize how unhappy their constituents are.

Shortly before the 2000 election, I wrote an article called "Where's a Candidate People Want?" Even then, it seemed to me, the parties had failed in their primary function in national politics, which is to recruit and nominate presidential candidates who can serve and lead Americans well. We have never had leadership as bad as President Bush's has been. Although Gore and Kerry had some strengths, they weren't adequate candidates for the times. That the Republicans managed to put Bush in the office, and then to reelect him, says quite a bit about the ability of the current two-party system to perform well. It is clearly not serving the country.

So what do all of these observations amount to? The Libertarian party has to find some way to appeal to more people. Training candidates, campaign managers and other staff to run effective bids for office is an essential start. The most effective campaign ever can't win votes, though, if people are suspicious or skeptical of the party to begin with. They have to have confidence in the character and competence of their leaders, and they also need to know that their leaders share some assumptions with them about the best way to organize a society. Right now, I think a lot of citizens see Libertarians as people who don't share those assumptions.

We know that the United States will always have two major parties while it has winner-take-all elections in each of the fifty states. We also know that the two-party system has evolved in interesting ways over 225 years, with some dramatic transformations in the system at key points. We are on the threshold of one of those transformations. In ten years, during the presidential election of 2016, we'll be past the threshold and perhaps even past the entry way. It's great that the Libertarian party and its leadership is thinking about how it can grow during the difficult changes that have already started. I hope it succeeds.

I also hope that I and others can lay aside skepticism, and work hard for the changes we want to see. We need hope that the obstacles in our current politics won't always be there: obstacles that block independents' voices, frustrate their efforts before they begin, and make voting seem ineffectual. In this environment, the Libertarian party's bold initiatives to have an effect do deserve respect and support.