Libertarian Party
Zach Weissmueller | 6.8.2024 11:00 AM
How did the Libertarian Party Convention become a campaign stop for candidates with wildly anti-libertarian views? This year's speakers included Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who once called for jailing so-called climate deniers, and former president Donald Trump, a rabid opponent of free trade who added $8 trillion to the U.S. debt.
It's part of a strategy to transform the Libertarian Party (L.P.) into a major force in American politics that's largely the brainchild of political strategist Michael Heise, who viewed the 2016 presidential candidacy of Gary Johnson and Bill Weld as a colossal failure.
"Gary Johnson, 4.3 million votes, highest vote total ever, no lasting movement, no return on investment on those votes," Heise told Reason in 2022 during the party's convention in Reno. "[Gary Johnson voters] didn't stay because they weren't what you might call 'true believers.' They didn't feel it in their bones. It didn't have that same animation to it [as did] the Ron Paul [movement]."
The primary goal of the new Libertarian Party isn't winning national elections, which Heise considers delusional, but to leverage its ability to draw enough votes to swing the election. Through its "spoiler status," the hope is that the L.P. can extract concessions and gain influence.
This year's convention, held in Washington, D.C., in July, was the first major test of the new strategy.
The change in strategy began when a group called the Mises Caucus took over the leadership of the L.P. at the 2022 convention in Reno, Nevada.
It modeled itself after Ron Paul's presidential campaigns by emphasizing a non-interventionist foreign policy that sets it apart from both major parties, as the podcast host Dave Smith told Reason.
"The priorities of the Mises Caucus have always been, basically, the priorities of the Ron Paul Revolution: being anti-war, being sound on Austrian economics."
The new L.P. invited in social conservatives by removing abortion rights from the party platform and attempting to do the same with open immigration.
"When you put open borders, plus pro-abortion in [the platform]…it kind of forms a cultural hegemony for one side that might not be indicative of the wider libertarian movement," says Heise.
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