by George J. Dance
On the first day of the U.S. Libertarian Party (LP) Convention, former Libertarian National Committe (LNC) chair Nicholas Sarwark is declaring a "civil war" within the LP. Sarwark, director of the Libertarian Policy Institute and LNC chair from 2014 to 2020, was speaking on the Morning Joe TV show on MSNBC-TV, a Denicrat-loving and Libertarian-bashing program perhaps most notorious for its 2016 "Aleppo ambush" of LP candidate Gary Johnson..
The segment began with the big news story of Donald Trump's addressing the convention. The announcer (whose name I don't know) breathlessley reported only that Trump would be speaking (the predominant media narrative, a dishonest half-truth that I wrote about yesterday), which she called "the first time in U.S. history that a presidential candidate of a rival party will address the convention of a party that is presumably going to nominate its own candidate." She then introduced Sarwark as the obligatory "expert" to give context. Unfortunately, Sarwark's context turned out to contain more than a little dishonest spin of its own.
Sarwark began by blaming his 2022 loss on "a group of hostile takeover actors from outside the party" who "seized control of the convention" and "took control of the entire National Committee". False. In fact, the Mises Caucus who won control in 2022 were LP members increasingly alienated from Sarwark and his team then in control (call them the Old Guard), in particular by their foisting on the LP an "actor from outside the party" as Gary Johnson's 2016 running mate: William Weld, a Never Trumper who ended up "vouching for" Hillary Clinton. They organized and ran against the old guard in 2020, lost, ran again in 2022 and (in conjunction with the long-established LP Radical Caucus) won again in 2022.
Next Sarwark blamed the new chairman, Angela McCardle, for "having taken the party systematically on a hard right, or even alt-right, turn" - his evidence being that "the first thing they did at that convention was eliminate the platform plank against bigotry" and "remove the pro-choice stance". In fact, neither of those acts were done by Ms. McCardle, but were voted on by a majority of convention delegates. And removing both seems more a matter of common sense than "right" anything. "We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant" sounds good, but what was it doing in the platform? A government should not be concerning itself with whether its citizens are "bigots" or not. And the pro-choice plank was a clear handicap, keeping pro-life libertarians out of the LP and in the Repblican Party. (I am not the only one who has said so - 2020 LP candidate Jo Jorgensen has pointed out that same problem.)
Sarwark also mentioned a new party emphasis on border security. Like the dropping of the abortion plank, this looked to me like an ettempt to accommodate the Ron Paul libertarians. But Sarwark has his own conspiracy theory about it:
At the time, we said: This is a MAGA operation - this is an attempt to co-opt and neuter the Libertarian Party, because Donald Trump is afraid of a strong Libertarian candidate.
Which sounds like pure rationalization; Sarwark's Old Guard fell from favor and was eventually replaced, and that could not have been due to their own shortcomings; so it must have been due to some evil force. And, not least because he is pitching this to MSNBC, that evil force just had to be MAGA. Ordinarily, Sarwark's MAGA-mongering would sound as unhinged as Joe Biden's -- but remember the story that led to all this (if you don't, Sarwark will remind you):
Donald Trump is now going to speak and, essentially, have a rally, to a captive audience, of libertarians, is just the end of the movie, is just where we were going to go.
So there we have it; the same disinformation about the convention that I have already debunked is now being used to justify Sarwark's crazy theory: that the Mises Caucus takeover in 2022 was just a conspiracy by "MAGA" to "shove Donald Trump down our throats" as a convention speaker this year.
They want to kneecap the party, and knock us out of the race, and basically force us to have a Trump rally. And I think that this weekend you'll see, the civil war will end, and we will be victorious, and the Libertarian Party will go back to being, a real political party, and Donald Trump will get the reception that he so richly deserves.
A civil war involving MAGA? That was enough to alarm Rev. Al Sharpton, who quickly interjected:
There's a functional question that comes to mind when I hear of the civil war in the Libertarian Party, and that is that third parties like the Libertarian Party usually because the two so-called major parties don't represent all of what they want represented, Isn't it by bringing Trump in, and in many ways trying to combine the parties, doesn't it eliminate even the need for a Libertarian Party? I mean, how does the Libertarian Party, later, justify its being if it is overtaken and perceived to become a merger with the Republican nominee?
One could point out the silliness of that idea by pointing out (again) that Kennedy will have equal speaking rights to Trump at the convention. Does this mean the LP is going to be overtaken and merged with his campaign as well as with Trump's? But, in fairness, Rev. Sharpton does not know that Kennedy will also be speaking; all he knows is what MSNBC and Sarwark have shose to tell him (which is not the whole story). He has swallowed what he was told hook, line, and sinker, and Sarwark can only praise him for that:
You have hit it right on the head, Al. It is going to be an existential fight, because if the Libertarian Party is successfully given to MAGA, and sacrificed on the altar of a Donald Trump re-elect, then it will cease to exist as an independent party that is neither left nor right, but something different.
This is full-bore crazy. The party will not be "overtaken" and will not "cease to exist" by having Trump and Kennedy speak, any more than it was "overtaken" and "ceased to exist," when it ran Bill Weld as a VPOTUS candidate and thereby "merged" with the Clinton campaign. And unlike Weld's "merger," this one will not be happening anywhere near election day. The party will get its 15 minutes of fame, a shot in the arm to its finances, and a place in the history books, and then move on to support its own nominated candidate. That is all.
What does threaten the LP's continued existemce, on the other hand, is this "civil war" Sarwark and his Old Guard allies have been waging against it. When that group controlled the party's national Committee (the LNC), all the other factions - the Mises Caucus, Radical Caucuses, and smaller groups - may have been dissatisfied, but they stayed in, and continued working to support the party and its election efforts. But now when they have lost an internal election, they seem only interested in picking a fight in the middle of the LP's presidential nominating convention, a time when maximum media attention is on the party and it could hurt them most.
When they lose this gambit (and I expect they will, accomplishing nothing but disruption), it will not be the end of them. Who knows what they will try next? All one can predict, with confidence, is that their actions will do nothing but hurt and cripple the party, if not make it "cease to exist" completely. For its own sake, I hope that the party does come together, at the convention, to reach some semblance of unity of purpose, and reject the disrupters utterly. It is time tell them, in the words of Guns 'n' Roses, that "[we] don't need your civil war."
Trump addressing Libertarian convention doesn't sit well with former chairperson | MSNBC | May 24, 2024:
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