Both Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Donald Trump addressed the national convention of the Libertarian Party (LP) this weekend. It brought the party vastly more attention than it has enjoyed in its entire history since 1971. All credit goes to LP chair Angela McArdle for issuing the invitations (Joe Biden didn’t answer) and for shepherding the machinery toward achieving this, against a tremendous amount of internal resistance.
Both candidates gave compelling speeches. Kennedy’s speech was of course more intellectual, offering a brief college-level course in the history of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, particularly as it pertained to the COVID response and the fallout including censorship and pharma-based corporatism. He also condemned the forever wars that keep the empire abroad and at home alive to oppress the citizens.
It was actually brilliant and struck all the right notes, even if there is some suspicion among libertarians that he has not entirely discarded his big-government past. There is also the issue with his bid that if the Libertarians are considering going third party, wouldn’t they back their own guy before another? That indeed happened as Kennedy was nominated but did not obtain the nod from the delegates.
The Kennedy campaign began with an earnest belief that there would be a primary in the Democratic Party, given the age and incompetence of the sitting president. He was looking for a fair fight but the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was not even slightly interested. It told its base to take a hike and rigged the system for Biden, not only shutting down the process but even denying Secret Service protection for Kennedy, which comes darn close to issuing a death wish.
Horrible to watch, the experience convinced Kennedy that he needed to take another path. He could easily have given up, but doing so would be like giving up on America itself. He refused to do so, as a matter of family honor and faith in his country. Good for him. It’s unclear whether the delegates of the LP had a clue about any of this, however, nor the fullness of his philosophical journeys, which are trending strongly in a libertarian direction.
Trump opened his speech with a declaration that if he wasn’t a libertarian before, after all that he has been through, he is now. It was his most compelling and actually believable line: anyone who gets mixed up in the criminal justice system sees the state for what it is. The rest of the speech railed against the Deep State and the emerging global government, called for huge tax cuts and agency abolition, promised to stop central bank digital currencies and protect crypto, and even pledged to commute the sentence of jailed digital entrepreneur Ross Ulbricht.
Missing entirely from Trump’s speech was the theme that ended up dominating the Kennedy one: the raw totalitarianism of the COVID regime. There is no getting around the reality that Trump greenlighted the most invasive and comprehensive deletion of the Bill of Rights in U.S. history by far, including the rental moratorium, the banning of travel, the locking of church doors at military bases, and spending and printing money without precedent. That was all part of an egregious vaccine rollout that the following administration turned into injurious mandates.
Trump never mentioned any of this, of course, which follows four years of strange silence on the topic. It’s all a bit of a mystery why he doesn’t just admit that he was rolled by his bureaucracy, if indeed that is what happened. But something stops him from saying this. As Alex Jones has said, this is hurting him.
This all loomed very large in the room, no question. However, Trump made a very strong pitch that he was the best hope that libertarians have for rolling back the total state. He appealed to the voting logic: any vote not for Trump is a vote for Biden. That way of thinking surely convinced many in the room that he was correct, despite the record of 2020.
For vast numbers of people, this was their first introduction to the Libertarian Party. What they observed was not exactly what one might expect of a political convention. Rather than listening respectfully to major national figures addressing libertarian concerns, they screamed and yelled, booed and hissed, cheered and jeered, creating a spectacle of seeming chaos and fanaticism. I’m unsure if that is good or bad. It just is what the party is.
From the outset, there was confusion over what the LP was supposed to be, a problem that afflicts every third party in a winner-take-all system that strategic voting always pushes toward two main parties only. Somehow the LP has survived but only through regular waves of upheavals that pit the managers (who believe the party should be about winning elections) against the ideologues (who believe the party’s primary role is as a cultural influencer).
The year in which they could have shined was 2020. Instead, the LP candidate and the party generally slogged through the entire year without much if any commentary on the totalitarian calamity that had befallen the country and the world. The libertarians in general (in and out of the party) threw away the best chance they had in generations to make an impact. The fury grew from within the grass roots and the whole of the party machine was tossed out and replaced by people determined to at least get the messaging right.
When the idea of forming the party was first pitched to Murray Rothbard in 1970, the reigning philosopher of libertarian ideas at the time, he was very much against it. He pointed out that Americans tend to evaluate the popularity of political ideology based on election outcomes. Knowing the LP candidates couldn’t actually win, he dreaded a losing plebiscite every four years that essentially broadcast the idea that people don’t like what the libertarians are selling.
The party went ahead anyway, and Rothbard himself threw his energies into at least making the party stand for something visionary, even if doing so would doom its political prospects. Ever since then, the debates within have revolved around this question. The savvy election and ballot-access managers try to keep the ideologues at bay, while the harder-core types agitate for the purest-possible statement of what is true.
Four years ago, the polished managers ruled the party and look what happened! It stands to reason, then, that the pendulum of control shifted but this still leaves the question: what precisely should the Libertarian Party do?
The current chair had the brilliant idea of inviting the other main candidates to address the convention. It was a historic first. But it also points to a possible role of the LP in the future of American politics, as a cultural, social, and intellectual arbiter of concerns over liberty and rights. This decision is already bearing fruit: the experience clearly pushed both Kennedy and Trump in libertarian directions.
There is a genuine question right now about whether and to what extent the word libertarian can survive that calamitous betrayal of 2020, when nearly all the leading intellectuals and institutions in this idea space could not somehow figure out what should be done about a respiratory virus.
All such issues aside, the core concern of the libertarian tradition is also at the very root of the idea of America itself, from Colonial times to the present. The Declaration of Independence is the most mighty statement in history in defense of the right of a people to change the regime under which they live. Government must serve the public interest rather than sending “hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”
That was the message of both Trump and Kennedy. That’s progress.
