It would be best if people would stop conflating the compromise that comes with governing a constituency with the decision to dilute the Libertarian message to reach more people and get elected. They are two completely different and distinct concepts. I think most mature members of the LP realize that none of the Libertarian candidates for president, if elected, will have it all their own way. They will have to work with congress, the states, etc. and they will also need to lead Americans towards a Libertarian future, not force them there at gunpoint.
This very real concept is distinct from what is being proposed by the Johnson/Weld ticket and its supporters. They speak of presenting a moderate, diluted message for the purpose of moving to the middle and attracting more potential voters. Here, the compromise isn’t made through negotiations at the seat of government. It is made in advance, for free, and with no concessions necessary. And at the cost of Principle.
By all means advocate for this course if you believe in it. But stop trying to confuse your fellow Libertarians by referencing the nature of governing and the attendant compromises there. Message dilution has nothing to do with governing – it concerns the face of the Libertarian Party and the level of commitment to transparency.
The pivotal question of the 2016 nominating convention now appears to be this: Should the LP present a sanitized and hobbled interpretation of the Libertarian message, apologizing for it while it is delivered, in an effort to attract more voters? Is this appropriate, and consistent with party bylaws and the Statement of Principles? My reading of both tell me no.
The saddest part from my perspective is that it is my prediction (just an opinion – I will not attempt to prove it) that if this course is adopted it will fail anyway. After such a loss the LP membership would not even have self-respect as a consolation.
These are important concepts for delegates to consider before voting. There are other ways to get elected which haven’t been tried and would not entail diluting the message. And we have candidates that are proposing to try some of them this year in a climate where success is very possible.
Full disclosure: Rob Loggia is involved with the John McAfee campaign. This opinion piece is his alone and NOT a statement from the McAfee Campaign.
Loggia: “It would be best if people would stop conflating the compromise that comes with governing a constituency with the decision to dilute the Libertarian message to reach more people and get elected.”
Yet the opposition to Johnson (and now Weld) is based on entirely on selective interpretations of their records (ie, on ‘the compromise that comes with governing a constituency’), which their opponents have been deliberately conflating with this second claim. Go figure.
I often encounter utter political novices who have no interest whatsoever in politics. (Many of them can’t even state any supposed differences between Republicans and Democrats, or ‘left’ or ‘right.’)
Whenever I’m asked to explain the Libertarian Party to such people, I always say ‘It’s the anti-government party.’
I have NEVER received a negative reaction. Never. The general public is ANTI-GOVERNMENT, and when you explain that the LP is the ‘party of anti-government,’ you get a positive reaction all the time.
It boggles my mind why Libertarians think they’ll get anywhere by watering down the message.
Give it to them straight: “THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY IS THE PARTY OF ANTI-GOVERNMENT.” The strong message wins EVERY TIME.
The “Party of Principle” leadership has clearly sold out to the idea of a coronation on Sunday.
One hour…sixty minutes…thirty six hundred seconds…
That is ALL they put on the agenda of a FOUR DAY CONVENTION for us to select a candidate for President!
I have thoroughly enjoyed many of Melinda’s writings, but readers should also be aware that she stumbles off the reservation quite a bit.
It’s really easy to say women were “chased” out of the LP. However I find your claim of it unpersuasive.
In one state LP about fifteen years ago, there were a pair of women who spent most of their time making false accusations about others. These two women almost wrote the book on making sure no innocent deed went unpunished. They were eventually turned out of their positions (certainly not chased out of the LP, as that’s fairly impossible) because they refused to straighten up and treat others with respect. They succeeded in alienating themselves from their colleagues.
Of course the next thing heard from the sexist bigot chattering class was that they were turned out “because they disturbed the ‘good ole boy network”; “because they were strong women”. In fact the one of those bigots will doubtless chime in shortly.
In reality, the truth was that they were just plain nasty.
And of course, several individuals resigned from the LP as a result of the false accusations and other crap that burbled forth from these individuals’ mouths. But we never hear anyone saying the men (or women) those nasty individuals harassed into leaving “were chased out by the women in the LP”, do we?
Now as to your ERA comments…
Given the mess that Title IX is making of the right to be assumed innocent unless proven guilty in court, given the several billions of dollars wasted in Title IX lawsuits over the past ten years, the resistance to the ERA — which would have done the same thing twenty years earlier — was well-founded. I was deeply involved in the ERA fight in Virginia. I often accompanied my mom to N.O.W. events in Richmond and stuffed thousands of envelopes for the ERA, leftist candidates, and the ACLU all through high school.
There are libertarian feminists who support the idea that freedom does not come from the guns of government. Wendy McElroy and her iFeminists group are an example; and of course there are others. I am 100% supportive of their efforts, and have been directly involved in some.
To summarize, actual Libertarians would say that the best way to ensure equality for all individuals is to enforce contracts fairly and otherwise get government out of just about everything — and allow the market to mitigate harms.
Lastly, your comments about the environment.
Only the government could screw up cleaning up the environment. I am not supportive of any “state solution” to environmental damage.
Government science is corrupt science. When alarmists cease stealing money from my pocket to pay scientists who support their political agenda, when alarmists cease refusing to release taxpayer-purchased data, research, and other documentation as Michael Mann did, when alarmists cease whitewashing their own crooks and liars with laughable “investigations”, when alarmist scientists end their refusal to comply with FOIA requests, and when the left ceases its practice of changing historical records with no explanation and no notice they were doing it (it was only discovered when the data they did actually release was archived and run through change detection software)… well, then maybe I might have some confidence in their science.
In particular, the outright, baldfaced lies the left uses to make its points — like the methane from faucets in Pennsylvania being caused by fracking when the Google newspaper archive carried dozens of articles from the teens, thirties, fifties — when people were lighting their well water long before any fracking.
But even then I would not be in favor of any state-mandated solutions that are excused with said government science.
As long as the alarmist agenda is funded with the criminal act of taxation, I will dismiss alarmists as rent-seeking and self-serving liars.
This is kind of the reason why I think mentioning other minor/third parties regularly is important. You already have independents like me (probably closer to the modern whigs or reform party in ideology); and I read on here at least once that a socialist voted for Gary Johnson in the last election, voting libertarian. But that’s people who have given it a lot more thought then the general population. Most people are going to take a while before they figure out where they really fit.
There might be people who sometimes vote for the Constitution party and sometimes for the Libertarian Party Candidate in varying degrees depending on where they fit, what they believe, and the quality of the candidates coming out of each party at any particular time, ect. *Just as an example.*
The Libertarian message has been distorted and ignored substantial issues for decades. It has long since skewed to the Red and allowed the Left to own issues which they have used to build a constituency which, necessarily, looks to government at the Federal level to solve problems caused by ignoring issues where we refused to take a principled stand.
Barry Goldwater knew and enunciated the right of women to control their own bodies and much more.. Barry said,
1. What policy should be followed on gays serving in the military?
“You don’t have to be straight to shoot straight.” – Barry Goldwater
2. If elected, would you support a woman’s right to have an abortion?
“Today’s so-called ‘conservatives’ don’t even know what the word means. They think I’ve turned liberal because I believe a woman has a right to an abortion. That’s a decision that’s up to the pregnant woman, not up to the pope or some do-gooders or the Religious Right. It’s not a conservative issue at all.” ~Barry Goldwater
When Goldwater observed the right trying to use government to enforce private morality he spoke up for women’s right to abortion and gay rights. – The Political Legacies of Barry Goldwater and George McGovern: Shifting … By Jeffrey J. Volle
[http://books.google.com/books?id=SdtdAQAAQBAJ&lpg=PT122&ots=Jfj6oCn64B&dq=Barry%20goldwater%20#v=onepage&q=Barry goldwater]
Goldwater and his wife were founding members of Planned Parenthood in Arizona.
3. Do you support legalization of marijuana?
Goldwater endorsed an Arizona initiative to legalize medical marijuana.
4. Will you support an investigation on the Federal Reserve, the malfeasance which has taken place in banks and financial institutions related to foreclosures, robosigning, and other questionable practices?
“The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress, and manipulates the credit of the United States, and for that matter, the credit of the entire world.”
~ Warning by Senator Barry Goldwater
5. What is your position on damage to private property and health resulting from oil spills and fracking?
Position on damage to private property and health resulting from oil spills.
“While I am a great believer in the free enterprise system and all that it entails, I am an even stronger believer in the right of our people to live in a clean and pollution-free environment.” ~Barry Goldwater
The Red Blue dichotomy is just a way of dividing us so we do not take effective action.
There was a time when women were a power in the GOP. That was before Ronnie Reagan took the ERA out of the platform, despite the pleas of his daughter, Maureen. That was 1980 when we were being set up for conflict around the world our own agencies were, and are, causing.
Women do not have equal rights under the Constitution. That is a fact.
This generation does not remember when women, focused on local action, were driven out of the LP. I was there. I saw and experienced it. I was told that my decision to give birth at home should be regulated by law by Bruce LaGasse, then, LPC Chairman. He was not the only one.
Midwives faced jail for delivering babies. My midwife knew that and acted on the principle we, as women, had a right to choose. Those were scary times – and not one Libertarian I knew saw these as freedom issues.
Taking issues local and solving real problems is where we should have gone then. That remains true today.
If the LP really had its act together, it would be spending lots of money on voter registrations drives, get out the vote efforts, canvassing, and field organizing/recruiting.
AMcCarrick, that was an idiotic statement for multiple reasons.
First off, I did not get involved with this stuff to make money, I got involved because I thought the country was headed in the wrong direction.
Second of all, I have nothing to do with the ballot access laws, and there are some states where the LP will still have to petition for ballot access regardless of how many votes it gets.
Also, even if the LP does not have to spend money on petition drives to place candidates on the ballot, there is still plenty of work to do. Democrats and Republicans spend millions if dollars on voter registration drives and get out the vote efforts. There are also initiative, referendum, and recall petition drives. The LP is only a very small piece of the ballot access pie.
“There are other ways to get elected which haven’t been tried and would not entail diluting the message. ”
I’m all ears. Please provide them before Sunday. Until then I’ll consider it a crock of sh*t.
And this thinking is what will keep the LP in a perpetual state of below 5% of the vote and needing to petition over and over and over for ballot access. Which of course the petitioners love…. more $$$$ for them.
And… Cue the Magical Thinking Brigade.
TODAY I SENT THIS TO 22 REPORTERS AND EDITORS OF THE GUARDIAN {US}and A SIMILAR MESSAGE TO THE LA TIMES>>
What Do Jill Stein & Gary Johnson have in Common?
The Guardian and other media all but ignore that they are running for president, too. How about more coverage of the two minor parties that will probably be on the ballot in all fifty states?
The two major parties are about to nominate the two most disliked candidates in polling history. Many people will go to the polls in November trying to chose between the lesser of two evils.
A Libertarian ticket of Gary Johnson and Bill Weld {two former GOP governors} has more executive experience than Trump and Clinton has together and Jill Stein of the Green Party speaks to the most important issue of this century. What good is a tax cut if your home is underwater {Literally, not figuratively}.
The American vote has a right to know more about how their presidential options extend beyond the two major parties.
The presidential debate commission run by the two parties since the League of Woman Voters gave up trying to run fair debates have set an almost impossible standard for minor party candidates to achieve for a podium at the debates – 15% in five different national polls to be chosen by the debate commission.
Most news organizations have gone along with this standard as an excuse not to give a reasonable amount of coverage to minor party candidate thereby assuring that it is all but impossible to achieve that polling number.
Two former governors challenging a reality TV star for the presidency is certainly a story that should be covered by the media on at least a weekly basis.
And a champion of the environment and foe of global warming has to be at least as newsworthy as the obstructionist and naysayers who declare that the jury is still out on global warming.
I URGE EVERY READER OF IPR TO SEND SIMILAR NOTES TO EVERY MEDIA SITE THAT THEY FREQUENT.