The Libertarian Movement and the Libertarian Party

The largest third party in the United States today is the Libertarian Party.

Though there’s often some confusion on this point, Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org and the Cato Institute are not affiliated with the Libertarian Party. In the jargon of the broader movement, libertarianism as an ideology is often referred to as “lowercase ‘l’” to distinguish it from the third party that runs candidates under the “big ‘L’” Libertarian label. Nonpartisan advocacy of libertarian ideas is something distinct from any particular party or candidate, both as a matter of principle and for the legal barriers between partisan and nonpartisan organizations.

At the same time, the Libertarian Party’s history is closely intertwined with that broader movement. Some libertarians choose to support it and others do not, for a variety of reasons both practical and ideological. So: what is the Libertarian Party, and how does it relate to advocates of libertarianism more generally?

During the Cold War, many libertarians believed the Democratic Party was insufficiently heedful of the threat to human liberty posed by communism—and by the latter months of 1971, libertarians had little reason to be enamored with their prospects in the Republican Party under President Richard Nixon. The Vietnam War dragged on, as did the draft, as the government forced young men to go fight in yet another bloody, unnecessary war. That August, Nixon severed the U.S. dollar’s last links to gold and imposed wage and price controls by executive fiat. In this environment, the nascent libertarian movement produced demands for a new option: the creation of an explicitly libertarian political party to challenge both Republicans and Democrats.

David Nolan was one such libertarian and in 1971 he brought together a small group of eight fellow libertarians in the Committee to Form a Libertarian Party. After months exploring the idea, on December 11, 1971 they announced their party had officially been founded, dedicated to taking libertarian ideas to the electoral arena.

In June 1972, the upstart Libertarian Party (or just “the LP,” as it’s often called) held its first national convention in Denver, with 89 delegates from 23 states participating. It was a small start, to say the least. The convention nominated the first Libertarian presidential ticket: philosophy professor John Hospers for president and radio and television producer Tonie Nathan for vice president. The Hospers/​Nathan ticket appeared on the ballot in just two states, netting less than 4,000 votes. Despite those humble origins, the Libertarian Party would, in time, grow into the nation’s third-​largest political party and the longest-​running alternative to the Republicans and Democrats, eventually earning millions of votes for its presidential candidates.

The party received an early boost from Roger MacBride, co-​creator of the Little House on the Prairie TV series and a Republican member of the Electoral College for Virginia in 1972. Despite being pledged to Republicans Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, MacBride instead cast his vote for Hospers and Nathan, making the latter the first woman and the first Jewish person to receive an electoral vote. MacBride would himself serve as the party’s presidential candidate four years later, achieving ballot access in 32 states and growing the vote total to over 170,000--still just 0.2% of the national popular vote, but a substantial improvement.

By 1980, the party was able to place its presidential ticket on the ballot in all 50 states for the first time. Boosted by millions of dollars in self-​funding offered by vice presidential candidate David Koch, the Ed Clark campaign broke a full one percent, with almost a million votes nationwide. Clark campaigned vigorously across the country and was able to air five-​minute advertisements on network television.

In the aftermath of the 1980 campaign, the party went through its first and, until recently, largest internal schism. At the 1983 convention (at the time the party met the year prior to presidential elections), the more radical wing led by figures including Murray Rothbard succeeded in wresting the presidential nomination from the more pragmatic and moderate wing led by Ed Crane, co-​founder and longtime president of the Cato Institute. The latter group walked out, and Charles and David Koch were never again involved with the Libertarian Party, focusing their subsequent political efforts on the GOP.

Libertarian presidential vote totals fell to around a quarter million in 1984, rising again to around 400,000 in 1988 when former congressman Ron Paul was nominated for president. Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, the party’s presidential nominees continued to receive in the low hundreds of thousands of votes, surpassed by the more prominent third-​party candidates Ross Perot and Ralph Nader.

The party’s fortunes were revived in 2012 with the candidacy of two-​term New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, who joined after an unsuccessful bid for that year’s Republican nomination. With a traditionally credible and qualified candidate—a rarity for minor parties—as well as a somewhat more moderate but still fairly radical policy platform, Johnson became the party’s first national candidate to break a million votes.

In 2016, Johnson ran again, joined by vice presidential candidate Bill Weld, former governor of Massachusetts. The Johnson/​Weld campaign, fueled by the novelty of two governors being on a single party’s ticket for the first time since 1948, attracted defectors from the controversial Republican candidacy of Donald Trump. Johnson went on to achieve a Libertarian high-​water mark: four and a half million votes, or 3.25% of the national total and the best showing by a third party since billionaire Ross Perot’s campaigns in the 1990s. That is of course still a very long way from winning, but it was a substantial increase in support and attention from what the party had achieved in decades past.

But Johnson, as the party’s presidential nominees often have, received pushback for his more moderate “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” framing of libertarian ideology. To some, that’s an unacceptable watering down of the message to appeal to a broader base of voters.

Today, the Libertarian Party is active in all fifty states and boasts hundreds of elected officials. Most are in local office at the city or county level, but in 2020 the party adopted a new strategy of targeting its resources at winnable state legislative seats, producing the first such win in a generation with Rep. Marshall Burt in Wyoming. And that year, the party also obtained its first member of Congress when Michigan Rep. Justin Amash officially became a Libertarian after quitting the GOP. The number of registered Libertarian voters nationwide continues to increase, surpassing 600,000—still far shy of the tens of millions of Republicans and Democrats.

The third-​party effort still has its critics and internal tensions. Indeed, it’s somewhat notorious for its contentious disputes between different factions in the party, not entirely unlike those that often surface within the two major parties. Many question the value of nominating candidates who tend to come in a very distant third place and are often accused of playing spoiler. Others find the party either too ideologically radical to achieve electoral success or else too ideologically moderate to do a good job representing libertarianism.

In recent years the more pragmatic wing associated with Johnson and Amash has been ascendant, electing one of its own as national chair in Joe Bishop-​Henchman, a DC-​based think tank executive and tax policy expert. Party members still debate whether the party should serve primarily as a messaging vehicle to bring attention to libertarian ideas, or try to be a more conventional political party focusing its efforts on winnable elections and thereby changing public policy.

Organized efforts to make the party either more hardline or more mainstream, or to shift its messaging towards either the right or the left, shape its often fractious internal politics. Ideological disputes in the broader movement tend to be represented in miniature within the party.

In the past few years, the most acrimonious of these disputes has surrounded those pushing to adopt a “paleolibertarian” strategy and messaging. This idea goes back to Murray Rothbard, who towards the end of his career proposed a strategy he called “right-​wing populism,” that libertarians can best shrink government by aligning with elements of the far right and aggressively hardline messaging. At the time, that meant figures like Pat Buchanan and David Duke, whose controversial campaigns as major-​party candidates were in the news.

But to pursue this, Rothbard also advocated compromising some traditional libertarian positions, such as immigration and policing and a socially tolerant worldview, in order to make common cause with those seen as the most thoroughly anti-​establishment. Today, that means adopting a friendlier stance than many Libertarians are comfortable with towards figures on the far right, including some organizations widely seen as hate groups. In that debate, other Libertarians have seen this as abandoning important libertarian principles as well as pursuing a strategy unlikely to persuade mainstream voters to elect Libertarians.

Controversies between these different visions for the party’s future, and closely related disagreements in the broader “lowercase l” movement, have been sparked by recent events such as the alt-​right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, and the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to overturn the 2020 election. When the party’s leadership responded to these events by condemning them harshly and portraying them as indicative of the problems with today’s Republican Party, the more paleolibertarian wing was offended by what it perceived as buying into mainstream liberal and progressive narratives.

As with most of American politics in the past few years, these arguments were closely correlated with opinions about Donald Trump and the ideology promoted by his supporters. While some Libertarians saw a dangerous turn toward illiberal authoritarianism and bigotry, others saw exactly the sort of anti-​establishment right-​wing populism that Rothbard wrote about in the early 1990s.

With the party governed not by political and marketing professionals, but rather through a bottom-​up framework of state and local parties run by their grassroots members, these disputes often play out in internal elections for party leadership positions. In each state, the affiliate of the Libertarian Party is run by those who participate in state conventions to elect party officers, nominate candidates, and select delegates to the national convention. These events are sometimes amicable and driven by consensus, but when a faction is attempting to launch a takeover, things can get out of hand with closely disputed votes decided by which group has managed to bring more voting members to participate. These feuds also lend credence to one objection to the Libertarian Party commonly made by libertarians who look askance at it: that the LP is too riven with infighting to be an effective political force.

The Libertarian Party was not (and is not) without its critics among libertarians. Ayn Rand vehemently denounced the effort, levelling what would become a common criticism: that by taking votes from the Republican nominee, it would only serve as a spoiler to help elect socialist-​leaning Democrats. Nobel laureate Milton Friedman preferred to identify as a libertarian Republican. To this day, most in the broader libertarian movement are not involved with the party, variously viewing it as ineffective or ideologically compromised in one way or another, or just choosing to focus their energies elsewhere. Among libertarians who pursue electoral politics at all, some prefer to do so by contesting Republican primary elections in hopes of then winning a general election. While that approach has sometimes worked, supporters of a distinct Libertarian Party tend to recoil from the more conservative-​leaning compromises necessary to appeal to the GOP primary electorate.

While not all libertarians are Libertarians, and many are not convinced the party is a worthwhile use of limited resources, the Libertarian Party continues to be a prominent presence in the movement. For many Americans it offers the only time they encounter the word “libertarian” and explicit advocacy of libertarian ideas. For better and for worse, the party’s successes and mistakes are often taken as representative of the movement, even by those libertarians who are not party members.

Defenders of the party point to the fact that the LP is the only libertarian organization with a grassroots presence nationwide, and the only libertarian organization which anybody can join, not being limited to academics at think tanks or students in youth organizations. Many figures who went on to prominence elsewhere (including the Cato Institute) got their start in the Libertarian Party or have at one time or another been active party members.

The same reasons that motivated Nolan and the party’s other founders continue to motivate Libertarians. The party’s presidential ticket has never performed better than a very distant third place, but Libertarians have been successful in electing members of state legislatures and local officials at the county and municipal level, and in that capacity affected policy on issues ranging from occupational licensing reform to the legalization of marijuana.

Undeniably, high hopes for widespread electoral success have not been met and may never be. The two-​party system remains firmly entrenched and the hurdles to challenging it and building a viable alternative are immense and perhaps insurmountable. But the Libertarian Party will continue to have its place on Americans’ ballots, with candidates advocating a message of limited government, civil liberties, and peace. And libertarians, both within and outside the party, will continue to have a range of diverse opinions on how the party represents libertarian ideas, or whether it should even exist at all.