The Libertarian Party Crackup
Here’s why Donald Trump—hardly a libertarian—is speaking at their national convention.
THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY, the largest third party in the United States and the self-described “party of principle,” announced last week that former President Donald Trump will be speaking at its national convention on May 25.
In the announcement, the chair of the Libertarian National Committee, Angela McArdle, bills the move as “an incredible opportunity to advance the message of liberty,” and to “make an impact on the policy positions of a past, and possibly future, president.”
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has a different take, saying, “If Libertarians join me and the Republican Party, where we have many Libertarian views, the election won’t even be close. We cannot have another four years of death, destruction, and incompetence. WE WILL WORK TOGETHER AND WIN!”
Despite Trump’s rhetoric, Trumpism has little in common with libertarianism. His hostility to free trade, support for qualified immunity, continuation of overseas military action and drone strikes, and unilateral banning of bump stocks stand in direct opposition to both libertarian principles and the party’s platform.
Trump isn’t the only non-Libertarian candidate the party is courting. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke at the California Libertarian Party’s convention; back in March he was reportedly even mulling running as a Libertarian following discussions with McArdle and party leadership, although it is unclear if he is still considering that possibility. Like Trump, Kennedy is no libertarian, though he appeals to certain populist and conspiratorial elements within the party.
Despite his lack of libertarian policy beliefs, Trump has a clear incentive to siphon votes away from the eventual Libertarian nominee. In the 2020 election, the Libertarian vote share covered the spread between Trump and Biden in several key states, including Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin—all of which broke for Biden. The opportunity to speak at the party’s convention provides Trump a prime opportunity to stop a repeat of 2020 in its tracks.
Ostensibly, the opportunity to speak is a neutral one that was offered to all major candidates (including RFK Jr. and President Biden), though the rabid enthusiasm with which activists and party leadership greeted the news of Trump’s speech calls this into question. Almost immediately after the announcement, the Libertarian National Committee was selling official t-shirts with a silhouette of Trump’s head alongside such libertarian catchphrases as “End the Fed” and “Taxation is Theft.” (These products have since been removed from the website.)
As McArdle put it, “My loyalty has to be to the Libertarian party . . . but Donald Trump is a much better person and president than Joe Biden. There’s no contest.” Her clear admiration for Trump in spite of his platform and his promises to be a “Day One” dictator signal that the years-long transformation of the Libertarian party is now complete.
IN 2016, THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY was handed a ripe opportunity for unprecedented success. With two widely disliked major-party candidates, many Americans were desperate for a viable alternative. Enter Gary Johnson, former Republican governor of New Mexico turned Libertarian and the 2012 Libertarian presidential nominee. He selected the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, Bill Weld, as his running mate, despite Weld’s lack of history with the party and concerns from some members about his political beliefs.
Some early polls suggested the campaign was not far from the elusive 5 percent electoral threshold that would trigger automatic ballot access in subsequent elections in many states. But missteps, from Johnson forgetting the name of the Syrian city where a fierce battle was causing mass atrocities (“What is Aleppo?”) to Weld’s near-endorsement of Hillary Clinton (“I’m not sure anyone’s more qualified to be president of the United States than Hillary Clinton”) diminished libertarians’ enthusiasm for Johnson.
Still, the Johnson/Weld campaign by far was the most successful Libertarian ticket in history, earning 4.5 million votes (3.3 percent of the total votes cast). For the first time since 2000, the ticket was on the ballot in all fifty states. The future of the party looked bright.
LIKE ANY POLITICAL PARTY, the Libertarian party has always been fraught with division. Whether on particular policy issues like abortion and immigration or tactical questions of messaging and political strategy, intraparty conflict has long been the norm.
Broadly speaking, the party can be divided between two branches: pragmatists and radicals. Pragmatists focus on marginal movements toward liberty and winning elections. Radicals yearn for the libertarian revolution, and see the party as a vehicle for promoting libertarianism even to the detriment of the party’s electoral chances.
Weld’s inclusion on the 2016 ticket, and growing internal conflict over strategy, messaging, and culture-war issues related to race and gender, led radical elements within the party to form the Mises Caucus. The caucus sought a more radical realignment of the party’s strategy, messaging, and politics, and quickly began growing in numbers, money, and influence.
The caucus is named for Ludwig von Mises, a twentieth-century Austrian economist who is one of the intellectual godfathers of the modern libertarian movement. Though named for Mises, the caucus owes much of its philosophy to Ron Paul, the former Republican congressman and perennial presidential candidate (alternately as a Republican and a Libertarian).
The Mises Caucus spread like wildfire online, through “celebritarian” Twitter threads and promotion via the extensive network of libertarian podcasts. By the 2022 Libertarian National Convention in Reno, the Mises Caucus was on the verge of taking over the party. Growing grassroots dissatisfaction with party leadership, as well as lingering frustration over what they saw as a lackluster response to pandemic-era policies like lockdowns and mandates for mask-wearing and vaccination, catapulted the Mises Caucus to victory.
McArdle, who was a Mises Caucus board member and was endorsed by the caucus to chair the national committee, summarized the Mises-backed candidates’ goals: “I will move heaven and earth to make this thing functional and not embarrassing for you. We are going to change the country.”
In an interview with Reason shortly before she won the chair—and indeed the entire slate of Mises-backed candidates won their party leadership elections—McArdle offered more concrete goals. She was committed to better messaging from the national party, in contrast with controversial and bigoted remarks from some state parties, like the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire. She said she would seek to broaden the party to encompass “the broader liberty movement,” including all those at odds with what several Mises Caucus proponents described as “woke” and “SJW” elements in the previous leadership. McArdle also pledged to better manage the party’s finances, and to work to grow both membership and donations.
Now, two years later, what has the leadership of the party looked like under the Mises Caucus crew? From messaging to party growth to internal management, the past two years of the Libertarian party have been an unmitigated disaster.
THE FIRST AND MOST OBVIOUS CHANGE that the new crew brought about concerned the party’s messaging. For many in the Mises Caucus, the question of whether the party’s Twitter account was sufficiently “owning the libs” was more important than workaday political-organizational concerns like ballot access or running candidates.
Shortly after their victory in Reno, the Mises Caucus removed a longstanding plank of the Libertarian party platform that had said, “We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant.” One has to wonder: What kinds of would-be Libertarians were being held back from joining the party by those words—and, more importantly, why did the Mises Caucus want to court them?
The messaging got worse from there. Since the takeover, the official Libertarian party Twitter account has become a hotbed of conspiracy theories, inflammatory rhetoric, and scorn. State affiliates quickly followed in its wake, with the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire recently tweeting a revised version of the “14 words,” a white-supremacist slogan.
The Mises Caucus faithful were thrilled by this change in the party’s public stance. Still, beyond this contingent, the party struggled to make inroads to new members.
Contra McArdle’s stated commitment to the broader liberty movement, the Mises Caucus has always been pugnacious toward its intramural competition. One of their prime longstanding targets is “regime libertarians,” shorthand for nonprofits like the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation. Those organizations’ perceived compromise and lack of radicalism, as well as their willingness to accept imperfect and incremental improvements towards libertarian ends, meant they deserved scorn and sanction from the party.
For example, following the publication of a Cato Institute blog post praising the COVID-19 vaccines as a triumph of globalization and international cooperation, McArdle herself wrote that the Cato Institute “should be excommunicated from the liberty movement” and “has nothing to do with our political movement.” If one of the major, long-established national centers of libertarian thought and policy wasn’t aligned with the new Libertarian party, who is? (Besides, apparently, Donald Trump, who supervised the government-led effort to develop the vaccines in the first place.)
The latent hostility of the party’s messaging and open hostility toward libertarians not aligned with the Mises Caucus started to drive away longtime party members. According to data compiled from publicly available information by the Classical Liberal Caucus—the main opposition to the Mises Caucus within the party—sustaining memberships (denoting party members who give at least $25 to the cause each year) have significantly declined since the Mises Caucus takeover.
The new leadership has likewise alienated longtime donors, as fundraising more generally has declined alongside membership. The party’s financial outlook has become bleak enough that there are plans to cease operations from the party’s Alexandria headquarters in order to rent the building out instead.
This chaos has percolated from the national party to the state level, as state parties have disaffiliated (in New Mexico and Virginia), splintered (in Massachusetts and Michigan), or formed new parties outright (Pennsylvania’s Keystone Party).
The state parties that remain are growing less enthusiastic about actually electing Libertarian candidates. The Libertarian Party of Colorado announced they would no longer run candidates in races that already have “strong liberty minded” Republicans in them. Likewise, the Libertarian Party of Montana changed its bylaws to allow endorsements of candidates of any political affiliation. In Arizona, the Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate in 2022 dropped out to endorse Republican Blake Masters.
The party’s response to its own slow-moving collapse has been mixed. Publicly, McArdle is quick to blame previous leadership. In a blithe and low budget–looking video, she likened the old Libertarian party to “a car that’s been driven by drunken rats” that new leadership needs to fix up before it can run properly again. But never fear, she said: “The era of woke regime libertarianism is never coming back.”
Privately, things are not looking so good. In a leaked internal memo from 2023, McArdle acknowledged that “we are in serious in trouble,” “no one is coming to save us,” and “the takeover is turning into a disaster.” “We need to radically change things if we are going to survive the next year,” she writes.
ALL THIS THRASHING FOR RELEVANCE amid internal chaos helps to explain the Libertarian party’s embrace of bizarre strategies: Its leadership is desperate, out of ideas, and willing to try anything. That’s how the caucus of principle and radicalism has come to court the likes of cracked Democrat-turned-independent RFK Jr. and former Republican president Trump.
In this, the party’s current leadership shows that it is willing to abandon libertarian principles built in the party’s platform—and to do so for the sake of visibility and influence. They’re not minor principles, either, but core principles, such as those expressed in the party’s positions on free trade and migration (“Economic freedom demands the unrestricted movement of human as well as financial capital across national borders”), industrial policy (“We oppose all forms of government subsidies and bailouts to business, labor, or any other special interest”), and justice (“We support the abolition of qualified immunity”). What would DJT or RFK Jr. have to say to a gathering of libertarians on those topics?
But in truth, the Mises Caucus abandoning principles for optics is nothing new. At the 2022 convention, Justin Amash (the first Libertarian congressman in the party’s history) read a string of quotations at odds with Mises Caucus orthodoxy as part of his speech: “Libertarianism is not anarchism, nor has it anything whatsoever to do with anarchism,” he said, and “Libertarianism’s thinking is cosmopolitan and ecumenical.”
In response to a chorus of boos, Amash revealed that every quotation he had just read came from Ludwig von Mises himself (although Amash replaced the word “liberalism” in the original quotations with “libertarianism”). If the Mises Caucus rejects the words and ideas of its namesake, what parts of the libertarian tradition do they support?
Whoever the eventual Libertarian nominee is this year, that person will struggle to reach the heights of 2016, or even the 1.2 percent attained by the party’s 2020 presidential nominee, Jo Jorgensen. Promises that Trump’s appearance will lead to valuable media attention, or that Trump will change his platform after hearing Libertarian concerns, are laughable. The only thing that he will take from Libertarians is votes, and he will give nothing in return.
The Mises Caucus, which formed predominantly in online communities with messaging and growth strategies based almost solely on provocative digital engagement, has failed spectacularly at every one of its promises to the Libertarian party since it took over. Their story is one of compromise, not principle; decline, not growth. And at the end of the month, when the Libertarian party all but endorses Trump for president, they will slide further into irrelevance.
Tyler Groenendal is the manager of foundation relations at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
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