Tribalism, Edgelords, and the Death of the Libertarian Party | Part 1
The libertarian movement has always wrestled with a contingent of illiberal individuals who warp libertarian principles to promote bigotry and prejudice. Now, they're in control.
Note: This three part is essay is meant as a primer explanation, mainly for outsiders, on what is happening in the Libertarian Party that provides a basic, albeit incomplete, understanding of some of the main ideas driving current party leadership.
How did an obscure think tank in Auburn, Alabama lead to the current chair of the Libertarian Party giving an anti-war speech in front of waving Russian flags?
*Record Scratch*
Narrator: “You’re probably wondering how I got here.”
That current chair of the national party is named Angela McArdle, and during a debate at the 2022 Libertarian National Convention, she told party members, "I hate to sound like a scumbag politician…but we are going to move heaven and earth to make this [party] functional and not embarrassing for you. We are going to change the country."
It was a bold promise, but the party has done nothing but embarrass itself under its new leadership, the Mises Caucus.
One of its first moves was to remove from the party platform the statement: “we condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant.”
In 2021, the Mises Caucus of California invited Bryan Sharpe, a known anti-Semite, to speak at its state convention. McArdle defended the position, saying, “I don’t actually think that someone who is trying to be a truth-seeker and understand what’s going on—and asked the question about whether or not Jews run Hollywood is an antisemite.”
The Libertarian Party of New Hampshire, home to prominent Mises Caucus members, has tweeted its fair share of racist, anti-LGBTQ+ and other types of repugnant statements.
On Martin Luther King Day in 2022, the NH party account tweeted:
Jeremy Kauffman, Mises Caucus and NH state party member who also runs the NH LP account, tweeted:
The NH LP has also on numerous occasions compared Ukrainian President Zelensky to Hitler:
As one of its primary messages, the party has been calling for a “National Divorce,” or the idea that liberal and conservative states should essentially split into different countries or territories. This same rhetoric has recently been used by Donald Trump allies like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
In one hilarious and embarrassing episode last September, the national LP’s Twitter account was hacked and reformatted to look like a user named Tyler Hobbs:
As a result of the never-ending controversies, fumbling mismanagement, and messaging overlap with the alt-right, anti-woke segments of the Republican Party, the national LP is facing mass defections and is suing state affiliates while splinter groups have emerged to oppose party leadership. The Libertarian Party of Virginia voted to dissolve itself entirely. The national party is also losing membership dues and active donors left and right.
The Libertarian Party has always been a bit of a clown car, attracting and elevating some weird characters. You might remember the infamously hilarious 2016 LP presidential primary debate where candidates rejected the idea of drivers’ licenses and Gary Johnson was booed for saying, “I’d like to see some competency exhibited by people before they drive.” The party has also never been and probably never will be politically viable, at least as long as our electoral system centers around two major parties.
But at its core, it has tended to be the most liberal -- in the classical sense -- of the three main parties. The party platform and its members embraced liberal values like open discourse, freedom of speech, pluralism, cosmopolitanism, toleration of dissent, free scientific inquiry, the rule of law, religious freedom, due process, equality under the law, and the free movement of goods and people across borders. And it has championed and arguably pushed the needle on major policy changes well before they became mainstream, including advocating for gay marriage, criminal justice reform, and marijuana legalization.
So what happened? Why are the current leaders of the party refusing to push for open immigration, spewing bigoted rhetoric, and holding anti-war rallies with Russian flags in the background?
As I will explore in this two-part essay, the libertarian movement has always wrestled with a contingent of illiberal individuals and contrarians who have warped certain libertarian principles to promote bigotry and prejudice.
But now, that segment has bubbled to the surface to seize power.
Understanding the “Mises” in Mises Caucus
In May 2022, the Mises Caucus took control of the Libertarian Party. The namesake comes from the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises and many of the caucus’ members have a strong affinity for the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a center based in Auburn, Alabama and founded by Llewellyn “Lew” H. Rockwell, Jr.
So what is the Mises Institute? In short, it’s a sort of pseudo think tank for self-described radical libertarians who promote Austrian Economics and anarcho-capitalism. It publishes periodicals, houses an online library of works by libertarian scholars, provides student fellowships and graduate programs, and holds seminars and academic meetings on Austrian Economics. Lew Rockwell serves as Chairman and Jeff Deist, previously chief of staff to former Congressman Ron Paul, is the institute’s president.
You may recognize the name Lew Rockwell as one of the likely authors of the infamous Ron Paul newsletters that contained racially-charged language, although Rockwell denied the claims. The newsletters included statements like “[b]lack men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers.”
These newsletters were part of the “paleo strategy,” devised by Mises’ student Murray Rothbard and executed by Rockwell and other writers affiliated with the Mises Institute to increase the appeal of libertarian ideas among voters, specifically Southern conservatives who were disenfranchised with efforts to promote racial equality. This 2008 piece from Reason magazine summarizes the paleolibertarian strategy behind the newsletters:
The newsletters' obsession with blacks and gays was of a piece with a conscious political strategy adopted at that same time by Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard. After breaking with the Libertarian Party following the 1988 presidential election, Rockwell and Rothbard formed a schismatic "paleolibertarian" movement, which rejected what they saw as the social libertinism and leftist tendencies of mainstream libertarians. In 1990, they launched the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, where they crafted a plan they hoped would midwife a broad new "paleo" coalition.
Rockwell explained the thrust of the idea in a 1990 Liberty essay entitled "The Case for Paleo-Libertarianism." To Rockwell, the LP was a "party of the stoned," a halfway house for libertines that had to be "de-loused." To grow, the movement had to embrace older conservative values. "State-enforced segregation," Rockwell wrote, "was wrong, but so is State-enforced integration. State-enforced segregation was not wrong because separateness is wrong, however. Wishing to associate with members of one's own race, nationality, religion, class, sex, or even political party is a natural and normal human impulse."
The most detailed description of the strategy came in an essay Rothbard wrote for the January 1992 Rothbard-Rockwell Report, titled "Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement." Lamenting that mainstream intellectuals and opinion leaders were too invested in the status quo to be brought around to a libertarian view, Rothbard pointed to David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as models for an "Outreach to the Rednecks," which would fashion a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition by targeting the disaffected working and middle classes. (Duke, a former Klansman, was discussed in strikingly similar terms in a 1990 Ron Paul Political Report.) These groups could be mobilized to oppose an expansive state, Rothbard posited, by exposing an "unholy alliance of 'corporate liberal' Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America."
I encourage you to read the full Reason piece since these paleo ideas are critical to understanding the current wave of illiberal libertarians as they continue to champion the ideas of Rothbard, Rockwell, and other Mises-affiliated thinkers.
The Mises Takeover
Mises Caucus and Mises Institute diehards view the pluralistic, cosmopolitan wing of the libertarian movement, who they call DC/Beltway libertarians (i.e., the Cato Institute, Reason magazine types), as sell-outs and regard themselves as the true, principled radical libertarians that are actually committed to the ideas of Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Rothbard. They believe that Beltway libertarians are closeted leftists who are merely engaged in a dishonest smear campaign against their heroes while cozying up to those in power.
They also derogatorily call DC libertarians leftists or “woke” elitists who are failing at social change because, to them, they ignore regular Americans who care deeply about their country and its history. In July 2017, Jeff Deist gave a talk at “Mises University” in which he argued that “blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance.” Of course, the phrase “blood and soil” is linked to both nationalistic and fascistic ideas of the nation over the world and anti-“globalist” ideologies.
In August 2017, after the Unite the Right rally and the Charlottesville riots, the Libertarian National Committee and Mises Institute leadership began a feud over who was responsible for the violence in Charlottesville. LNC Chairman Nicholas Sarwark criticized Deist for not explicitly blaming Donald Trump. Sarwark also criticized the speech’s reference to blood and soil and called out Mises-affiliated podcaster Tom Woods for defending the paleo strategy. In a post about Deist’s speech, former LP Vice Chair Arvin Vohra also stated:
Mises Institute has been turned into a sales funnel for the White Nationalist branch of the Alt Right. I’m not talking about the troll or general asshole side of the alt right; I’m talking about the white nationalist side. The authoritarian, racist, nazi side. Like any effective cult, Mises will continue to put out useful information as bait. But that will be just the bait to lead unsuspecting people down this path of collectivist, racist lunacy.
Deist’s speech served as the unofficial launching point for the Mises Caucus to begin their campaign to take over the party. The Caucus was officially formed in 2017 by Michael Heise and began endorsing nominees that aligned with their more radical libertarian, anti-woke views.
In 2018, the Mises Caucus candidate for party chair Joshua Smith suffered a resounding loss to Sarwark, but that didn’t stop their momentum. Despite denunciations from LNC leadership and a call for white nationalists to leave the party, Mises Caucus ranks continued to grow while they launched a PAC to raise money for candidates they endorsed. In 2021, the Caucus also took control of the New Hampshire state party.
The Caucus also allegedly received support and advice from those affiliated with Donald Trump. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports how screenshots obtained by former Mises Caucus member John Hudak showed Michael Heise claiming to have received advice and donations from Patrick Byrne, former CEO of Overstock.com and regular visitor to Trump’s White House. The SPLC report also connects other LP Mises Caucus members to those in Trump’s circles.
Regardless, the momentum of the Mises Caucus coupled with some general dissatisfaction for the direction of the national party culminated in their complete takeover in May 2022 with McArdle’s election as the new LNC chair.
Today, the Mises Caucus has not only adopted the paleo strategy by appealing to the alt-right strain of nationalist and populist conservatives, it has allowed them among their rank and file. It has enabled illiberal edgelords, who post controversial takes online to generate outrage and clicks, to run the party’s messaging. And it has placed alt-right sympathizers into positions of power and allowed them to run rampant in elevating bigotry, engaging in anti-woke culture war nonsense, and even spreading pro-Russian propaganda.
In Part 2, I explore the tendency of libertarianism to attract contrarians and how unsavory actors and ideas within the movement influence the alt-right edgelords at the helm.
Justin Hayes is a communications professional and a resident of Nashville, TN.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International.
