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| The Global Freedom Institute |
| Spoiling for a Fight: A Reply to Chuck Muth by Thomas L. Knapp 02/28/01 I can't help but like Chuck Muth. He's an experienced political consultant with a record of reeling in victories. He's also chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus, and seems to be dedicated to making that organization an effective tool to change the direction of the GOP. For thirty years, the Republican Party has alternated between ignoring and making fun of the challenge to its claims of being the party of "small government" by the Libertarian Party. In his quest to reform the GOP, Muth is among the first to take up that challenge and declare his intention to fight. It would be easy to make hay of that. As Gandhi said, "First they ignore you; then they laugh at you; then they fight you; then you win." That, however, is an over-simplification in this case. Muth is a worthy opponent, and can avail himself of a history of 140 years of Republican electoral successes in challenging the Libertarians for the support of voters and political activists. The RLC, under his new leadership, has already racked up an impressive record: Terry Savage (a Nevada cabinet official) and J.J. Johnson (former militia leader, former LP Senate candidate, and publisher of the Sierra Times) have left the LP for the RLC. A prominent Libertarian activist has become chief of staff for a prominent Libertarian-leaning GOP congressman -- supposedly under the auspices of RLC persuasion on both sides. The challenge has, indeed, been taken up, and Muth speaks to that challenge in his "GOP News and Views" e-newsletter of March 26, 2001 (to subscribe, send an e-mail to [email protected]). If it's going to come down to a fight -- and we always knew it would -- there's no time like the present to take a look at the erstwhile enemies, what they're after, and what they're doing.. "For the better part of three decades now, the Libertarian Party has been taking potshots at the Republican Party and using the GOP's shortcomings to fundraise for its operations," says Muth. "And during that time, the Libertarian Party's electoral success has pretty much been: squat. ...In THIRTY YEARS, they've never elected a single individual to Congress under their party's banner, and I think less than a dozen individuals TOTAL to state legislatures around the country. What little ballot box success they've had has been in non-partisan, down-ballot races." This is the first area in which I have to disagree with Chuck. The last time I looked (a few seconds ago), there were 410 Libertarians serving in those "non-partisan, down-ballot" offices. While that falls well short of political "arrival," it is certainly more than the "squat" Muth credits us with. And the LP, at least in some areas, shows signs of a developing political acumen -- as in Pennsylvania, which ran 74 Libertarian candidates for office in 1998, and elected 38 of them. I have to wonder if the GOP has a 50% victory ratio in, say, Massachusetts? Keep in mind that while the GOP is the minority party in some states, the LP is far behind them in popularity and party infrastructure in every state. And yet, 38 of 74 Libertarians won their races in a state where the LP got practical and started doing politics instead of discussing philosophy. It's easy to point out that, in three decades, the LP has not achieved the political success that the Republicans achieved in less than a decade. What's not so easy is to look objectively at the reasons why, and to make an objective comparison between the LP of today and the GOP of yesterday. The Republican Party was not a "new" party. It arose from two specific issues -- tariffs and slavery -- and it immediately attracted the affiliation of sitting public officials who fled the Whigs due to that party's inability to reach agreement on them. It nominated its first presidential candidate (John Fremont) in 1856, and elected its first president (Abraham Lincoln) in 1860. Abraham Lincoln was elected not because the Republican Party took the nation by storm, but because the Democratic Party was also in disarray. It split into two conventions and ran two presidential candidates (Douglas and Breckenridge); and a significant portion of its adherents and voters defected to a new party, the Constitutional Union, and its candidate (Bell). The Republicans started at the top, because the electorate was so fragmented that it was possible to. The Republicans started with the benefit of a shattered Whig movement, many of whose public officials simply changed their designation. The fallout from that process resulted in more than half a million deaths, too. I don't offer this as an excuse for the LP's slow political progress. We do have our problems. Nonetheless, it's worth noting that the GOP didn't do what Chuck seems to expect the LP to have done in order to merit respect as a political party. The LP needs to learn how to conduct effective political campaigns. It needs to learn how to elect people to office at every level. It needs to pull itself up by its bootstraps. If it does, it will be the first political party to have managed that. The wreckage of the Populist, Progressive, Dixiecrat and Reform parties (among many others) show that it's not easy; and there is no analogous history of the Democratic or Republican parties having done so (each of those parties rose out of the shattered remains of previous parties, right back to the Federalist/Democratic Republican duopoly that came into existence when Jefferson and Adams went at it.) Pages 1 2 3 |
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