Nicholas Sarwark is the chairman of the Libertarian (sic) Party (LP).
In recent years, the LP has been abandoning the libertarian principles that gave it its name. Libertarianism is a political philosophy that stresses the limitations of government based on the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), a belief that initiating violence against peaceful people is morally wrong, and that human interaction ought to be based on voluntary cooperation instead of coercion.
Libertarianism therefore stresses private property, free trade, non-intervention in foreign policy, and advocates for private sector solutions to social problems versus a reliance on the State. Libertarianism is thus grounded in free markets, and is the antithesis of totalitarianism that manifests itself in various forms of dictatorial Statism, such as Communism (International Socialism) and Nazism (National Socialism). There are degrees of libertarianism, such as the more moderate minarchism, and the more radical anarcho-capitalism.
What is so vexing about the LP in recent years is its tolerance, or even advocacy of, well... Socialism! It's right out of Alice in Wonderland, or worse yet, an Orwellian dystopia.
It has become fashionable for prominent LP members to attack noted successful and influential libertarians like:
- Dr. Ron Paul (who was the party's 1988 candidate for president of the United States, is the founder of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, and was a 12-term U.S. congressman),
- Dr. Tom Woods (libertarianism's most successful podcast presence in hosting the Tom Woods Show),
- Lew Rockwell (who runs the world's most popular libertarian website, LRC),
- Andrew Napolitano (who has promoted libertarianism on Fox News and in his powerfully libertarian best-selling books), and
- Jeff Deist (popular libertarian speaker and president of the world's largest source of free downloadable books on libertarianism and Austrian School Economics: the Ludwig von Mises Institute).
All of the above-mentioned are readers or students of Dr. Murray Rothbard, who was one of the founders of the LP and of the Cato Institute, as well as one of the most prolific libertarian writers in history - but who is now repudiated, if not loathed by many in the current LP leadership.
In recent years, the LP has become a laughable collection of stoners, sexual deviants, celebrity hangers-on, and open Marxists.
After speaking at the 2016 national convention and witnessing the LP's hard turn away from libertarianism, I changed my party affiliation to "independent" as soon as I got back home. The attendees (delegates and candidates) indeed included some solid and serious-minded libertarians, but the party had clearly been hijacked.
The above quote by Chairman Sarwark is a case in point.
Stokely Carmichael was a Marxist black nationalist/supremacist who advocated violence. It's hard to get more antithetical to libertarian principles than that.
In 1981, while I was a 17-year old college freshman, my openly-Socialist professor of Sociology strongly encouraged us to attend a lecture on campus by her hero Stokely Carmichael (who at this time was calling himself Kwame Ture). She was so embarrassingly excited that I though she might wet herself. I attended this event, which was essentially a Hitler rally for militant black nationalists. Carmichael ranted against whites, referring to us as "animals" and called for our extermination. He called for Marxist revolution and railed against "capitalist pigs." Being a slightly built white teenager, I got out of there while the crowd was whipped up into a frenzy. I was appalled by what I had seen.
At the next class, our professor was gushing about Carmichael's performance. She asked for reactions. The class was quiet. After a couple of awkward minutes, I piped up. I did not approve of calls of violence against whites, nor of the endorsement of Marxism. In less than a decade, the Berlin wall and the Iron Curtain would fall, and the USSR would break up. In the early eighties, as the wheels were coming off, we were starting to hear more and more about the cruel Gulag system and the unspeakable repression and poverty that the people of the USSR were suffering - especially as defectors managed to escape the horror.
Other students also expressed their disapproval of Mr. Ture's rhetoric. The professor looked like a deflated tire. Had this happened in the current environment, perhaps I would have been sent to sensitivity training or expelled on account of my criticism.
And this Stokely Carmichael is the kind of person that Nicholas Sarwark quotes as an exemplar of libertarian thought, while at the same time, trashing Rothbard and Woods and others who blazed the trail for libertarian ideas to be promulgated in contemporary America. If libertarians wonder why the LP considers itself successful if it exceeds a mere three percent of the votes, look no further than its tired, Socialist-friendly leadership and weak candidates.
If this is what the LP wishes to be, it will continue to be (at best) nothing more than an option for people to cast a none-of-the-above protest vote, and the LP can continue congratulate itself on its great success. Any similarity to libertarianism is becoming increasingly coincidental.
The good news is that libertarianism is an intellectual tradition, a school of thought, an alternative to Marxism that transcends things like political parties, a political philosophy that is being embraced around the world in spite of the efforts of Sarwark and the LP leadership to undermine the principles of liberty and markets and human flourishing, and in spite of their tarnishing of the term "libertarianism."
Those who are interested in libertarianism would do well to ignore the LP - like the vast majority of Americans already do.
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