A former state organizer for the Libertarian Party Mises Caucus has launched a new political organization called the Voluntaryist Party of Alabama. According to its founder, the group will focus on education, bold messaging, and grassroots activism rather than electoral politics.
Mike Shaner, who previously organized for the Alabama Mises Caucus, announced the party’s launch on social media Tuesday. In his statement, he described Alabama as an “authoritarian nightmare” and said the Libertarian Party was no longer capable of challenging the state’s political establishment, calling it “impotent” and unwilling to “take the easily accessed medicine that could fix it.”
Shaner described his new group as focused on “deliberate, principled action” supported by strategic organizing and public engagement. The party does not initially plan to register as a political party or PAC and will instead concentrate on local activism and education. While it may support independent candidates when appropriate, elections will not be its central focus.
Though Shaner stated the new organization may collaborate with Mises-affiliated Libertarians where their values align, he stressed that it is otherwise independent from the Libertarian Party. “We are not associated with the Libertarian Party—and we don’t have half a century of infrastructure or resources to draw from,” he said. “But we do have their history to study—and their mistakes to avoid.”
In a follow-up post on his personal Substack, The Sedition Papers, Shaner described the party’s creation as “a long time coming.” He framed it as an effort to build a movement based on “support, charity, education, and activism,” with elections treated as “just a tool—not the mission.”
“We won’t waste time begging for ballot access or collecting signatures,” he wrote. “We’ll show our community there’s a better way by putting our money and labor where our mouth is.”
The group does not recognize the legitimacy of the federal government and will generally avoid state and federal elections with the exception of the rare candidate endorsement. Participation will be limited to local races and only when specific candidates are deemed consistent with the party’s mission. General membership and the selection of candidates will be selective, with Shaner offering to cover first-year dues for qualifying members of the Libertarian Party of Alabama who choose to join.
Political parties and their candidates, along with organized labor, and students (professional groups and religious organizations I think to a somewhat lesser degree) are historically the main focal points of opposition when it comes to peaceful regime change.
Ultimately, I think you either need to win elections, or if the system is too rigged for that, mobilize large numbers of ordinary people to get out in the streets and demand change. Note I say *ultimately* win elections – this should never be the be-all, end-all focus of a party from the get-go. Getting more votes, along with more money and members, and winning more elections, are second-order results that naturally come as a consequence of doing other things right, and inspiring the public to *want* to support you.
Sometimes there’s a tendency among Libertarians to think they can just focus on “winning” – getting more money, more members, more votes, without giving people enough of an underlying motivation to *want* to give Libertarians these things.
Anyway, sympatico people tend to dislike the infighting that is endemic to parties, and I get that, but it pretty much comes with the territory in any kind of bottom-up movement for social or political change. And we need the freedom movement to be bottom-up.
After all, we want a society of empowered individuals, not just people who passively putting their trust in “leaders” to create the change and make the decisions for them. That’s what gave us the statist quo. And empowering individuals means individuals having actual voice in whatever organizations a movement may utilize, which usually engenders a fair amount of politics and infighting and the rest, because people have different opinions on exactly what to do and how it should be done. And there are always bad actors to watch out for.
It takes patience and empathy in dealing with other people, a sense of community and solidarity, and constant vigilance in staying on track with our ideas. But the alternative of putting our faith in “leaders” to do it for us will not ultimately help us build the free society we want.
So I disagree with the dismal assessment of political parties. They seem to have as good a track record of being the vehicles for ¡Afuera! as anyone else.
Correction, Kay Ivey. I don’t know who either Kathy or Kate Ivey are. I hope they’re less clueless than either myself or their elected possible relative.
Is it now against the site’s rules to make predictions that a (supposed) minor party effort will fail or questioning why that prediction – by someone who has worked on building minor parties all over the country for decades, including in Alabama – was removed as well?
I saw the post about allegedly impolite and fact free comments and commented on that one also to this effect, but the questions are being removed as well, both there and here. Let’s see about this one. Is asking what was impolite or fact free about those removed comments itself impolite or fact free? How so?
My guess is this will not go anywhere.
Did the Alabama LP have a state convention or something? I’m guessing they might have because someone is acting like a sore loser in a faction fight and starting a new (non) party, and someone else is saying they’re trying to rebuild themselves after years of problems, which is something that’s been said many times over the past several decades.
I looked on their website some time in the last few months and there was no indication of when or where their state convention might be or if it’s even still annual. The last time I checked before that they had set up a 4 year schedule to rotate it around to different parts of the state after many years of always having it in Birmingham.
They were talking about rebuilding it that time too. And a few years before that. And a few years before that also. You get the picture. I’ll believe it when I see a lot more evidence.
In 2022 they actually somehow got on the state ballot for more than just president or a tiny handful of local races yet still barely made a ripple in the state’s political conversation. Most likely they were too busy cutting each other to pieces and or delusionally self congratulating for whatever crumbs of public attention they did happen to get on social media, mainly facebook.
Since I quit getting on Facebook they pretty much fell off my radar.
So anyway I went to their website and any notice of public meetings, conventions, candidates, accomplishments or anything else that could possibly trick me into getting involved was pretty much lacking. I wouldn’t have been tricked anyway because of past experiences but even if that had not been the case I saw nothing that would cause anyone to get involved.
As far as I could tell from looking at their own site a monthly social club meeting in Huntsville is pretty much their only activity that they consider to be of note. Even the press releases are old, and their website might be the only place they distribute those, or maybe it’s just Facebook now if they do them at all, idk.
Mike Shaner and possibly some other people will do…something. Let’s see if it works out any better. I wouldn’t call it a political party if I was them. Alabama only has one political party, which calls itself Republican in majority white areas and Democrat in majority black areas, and most folks who don’t support that party are smart enough not to come within a country mile of anything which calls itself a “political party.”
Who needs them political party thingamajigs and what for? If you want to deal with crooks, they can usually be found hanging out outside your local convenience store, or down at the local dive bar if you’re not in a dry county. Or if you ever need to go to court for any reason at all you wouldn’t be able to avoid them if you tried. Pretty much everyone in Alabama who’s not a drekpublicancrat knows politicians and political parties are all crooks and you ain’t gonna convince them otherwise.
They may or may not come out to vote for or against Trump, but otherwise you’d be a whole lot better off calling yourself a religious evangelist mission, charity, fraternal brotherhood, or any number of other things – political party is pretty much the worst, and for good reason.
Who’s Kathy Ivey? Is she related to Gov Kate Ivey? And why does Mr. Shaner want to call whatever this idea of his is supposed to be a political party? There are a lot of other things he could call it, and I don’t see any evidence that he wants to do anything that only something called a political party can do.
There are some substantial downsides to the potential success of anything which bills itself as a political party, chiefly tribal loyalty to other existing parties, only some of which he manages to avoid by not doing anything like registration as a party or Pac or even trying to get on the ballot (which is a pretty tall order even for long standing and relatively well known and organized minor parties in that state, so I don’t blame him for not wasting time trying).
But what is it that he does actually hope to accomplish, and how? What part of it if any requires him to call it a “political party”? Does he even actually really hope to get anything at all done besides vent frustration at his former party?
They have armadillos in Northern Louisiana, no reason they wouldn’t be in Alabama as well… They are wide ranging creatures…
Armadillos? Really? In Alabama?
In other words, Shaner is crying because the Mises Caucus didn’t take over the Alabama Libertarian Party, which is actually trying to rebuild itself into something after years of problems.
The Alabama reality is that it has the worst ballot access and some of the strangest election and government administrative laws in the nation, the state is run by a good-old-boy corrupt network in the Republican Party that would make Richard J Daley blush, and the state’s Democrats are a slowly-dying mess. Alabama is deep red and pandemic MAGA, clinging to their bibles with a church every mile next to a Dollar General with kudzu and armadillos in between, while being generally oblivious to the corruption in the government. A tough nut to crack, undoubtedly, but the Alabama LP is trying, even while the MC is crying and leaving.