 The 2020 presidential election gave libertarian voters few good options, a serially dishonest and incompetent leader who bungled the COVID pandemic and imposed trade and immigration restrictions, and a career Democrat promising $11 trillion in new spending who played a role in many of the greatest policy failures of the last 30 years, such as the war on Iraq, the Patriot Act, and the expansion of the drug war. And then there was the libertarian party, America's third largest. After nominating a pair of popular former governors to run in 2016 who pulled just over 3% of the popular vote, the party backed Joe Jorgensen, a Clemson University psychology lecturer who was featured on the LP ticket in the 1990s but remains largely unknown outside of libertarian circles. So is the party still a worthwhile project? I am here in favor of dissolving the libertarian party. The best thing that you can do if you want to spread liberty would not be to run for the libertarian party. The best thing that you could do would be to run locally as either a Republican or a Democrat. Reasons spoke to several party insiders about what they think went right and wrong in 2020, the LP's internal divisions, and the party's strategy for the future. You had something in the Jorgensen Cohen ticket that appealed to anybody no matter where you were in the party, whether you were sort of on the more radical side of things and the more pragmatic side of things, there was something you can latch behind. Alex Merced is the former vice chair of the libertarian party. He thinks that even though Jorgensen fell short of Johnson's vote share, the unifying effect it had among libertarians was positive for the movement. The last few months have probably been some of the least amount of inner party conflict that I've seen in a long time. But also for the most part, when I take a look at Jorgensen and Spike, when they do their media appearances, they generally present a positive message. We need to put the decision-making power back into your hands because you can spend your money better than the politicians and special intros. I think that when you try to water down your messaging to appeal to everyone, you sort of appeal to no one. Angela McCartle is the chair of the Los Angeles Libertarian party, who plans to run for chair of the national party in 2022. She's affiliated with the Mises Caucus, which believes libertarians have been far too willing to compromise their principles and water down their rhetoric to make alliances with the political left or right. They reject the need to make Faustian bargains in the interest of gaining mainstream acceptance. She thinks Jorgensen began the necessary process of recalibrating the party, which she says should be Les Geary Johnson and more Ron Paul. When you look at the general composition of the liberty movement, not just the Libertarian party, it looks a lot more like Ron Paul than it does Gary Johnson. And I don't know a lot of libertarians who tell me that they were inspired by Gary Johnson. Did he let people know the party exists? Yes. But did he light a fire in anyone's heart? No. McCartle believes the best use of the national party is to inspire activists to get involved with the state and local parties, where candidates have a better shot of actually winning. You need to think about realistically, what are the chances that we're going to just jump up rapidly and get a third of the vote? It's not likely. I think that it's much more likely that you would run a principled campaign and see over the span of 20 years the grassroots organizations that support libertarians, libertarian county parties and state parties build up their voter base while relying on national presidential campaigns to help them. The Libertarian party does currently hold more than 200 elected seats, mostly local positions like treasurer, city council member, school board member, or small town mayor, according to its website. The most powerful members of the party holding office are Jeff Hewitt, Riverside County supervisor who ran in a nonpartisan race, and congressman Justin Amash, who wasn't elected as a libertarian but switched party affiliations. But Amash opted not to run for reelection in 2020. In the most recent election, the party secured 11 electoral victories so far. The highest office by a libertarian party candidate in 2020 was won by Marshall Burt, who will join the Wyoming State House in January. Current Libertarian party chair, Joe Bishop-Henchman, agrees with McCartle that electoral success begins at the local level. Just imagine how different the national political discussion would be if there was a caucus of 8 or 10 or 12 libertarian senators could really be significantly changing what's happening in Washington, D.C. So how do you get to that? Well, we've got to elect more libertarian house members. In order to get that, we've got to build up a deep bench of elected officials at the state and local level. And so how do we get there? Well, it's building up the infrastructure of the party. So we have people who know how to elect and re-elect people. He says that while Jorgensen did worse than Johnson in 2016, the party has grown its registration role significantly, which is now at a record 650,000. We've got lots of market liberals who are fed up with the AOC direction of the Democratic Party and the Bernie Sanders direction that they're going. And we've got a lot of small government conservatives who are fed up with the anti-trade, anti-immigration, Trumpist direction of that party. So there's a lot of people who are politically homeless right now. Are you hoping that the party will draw mostly from disaffected Democrats, disaffected Republicans, people who don't vote at all? I'm going to let the data lead us to the answer. Act as the party for people who are individualistically minded. Just recently in New Zealand, our counterpart party over there, the ACT Party, had a very good election result, got a whole bunch more seats in parliament. A lot of other countries, the libertarian party or the classical liberal party, ends up being the center force mitigating the excesses of the other two parties. Libertarians aren't centrists. It's a very different proposition. But I think it's going to be around that far. And then what's going to happen is that it's going to be sort of the far left and far right where we don't kind of hit. But for members of the Mises Caucus, like McCartle, the more effective strategy is to lean into radicalism, even if it means potentially alienating centrists. We need someone at the front of the National Party who is not afraid to talk about issues that are controversial. We need someone who is going to make libertarian statements and not worry about offending the left. Because why do we waste our time pandering and begging for votes from a group of people who ultimately aren't going to like us? For instance, McCartle believes the Libertarian Party should have differentiated itself from the Democrats and the GOP by taking a strong stance against the COVID lockdowns by holding an in-person convention. We're not going to get there if we run candidates who are afraid to talk about the issues. If we run candidates who are afraid to oppose the lockdown or candidates who are constantly parroting the virtue signaling of the left, afraid of sounding too anti-authoritarian, that's not going to get us there. We've got to speak boldly. Several libertarians, including McCartle, also criticized the Jorgensen Campaign's adoption of Black Lives Matter rhetoric. In a tweet telling her followers, it's not enough to be not racist, but necessary to be actively anti-racist. Oh, did they click like on a Joe Jorgensen tweet about Black Lives Matter? Did they show up to the polls? No. Did they change their voter registration? No. Are they really joining the Libertarian Party? No. The Libertarian Party needs to disregard PC politics. If there's a situation that comes up that we could talk about the value of individual Black Lives, we should absolutely do it. It doesn't mean that we need to co-opt their language and be afraid of offending them when we talk about the ramifications of the drug war. We can just speak the truth because that's what we should be doing. Henchman disagrees with the notion that the Libertarian Party has ever had a problem speaking on popular truths. We never really pulled our punches. I mean, we were for the decriminalization of marijuana back when less than 10% of the American people supported that. We were for equality for gay and sexual minorities back when way less than 10% of the American people supported that. We were for the abolition of the draft way before it happened. Almost any Libertarian would be considered politically radical by the conventional definition of the terms. For Henchman, the focus of the next four years is getting Libertarian Party candidates elected at the state and local level. Our goal is to be a political force and to try to make that happen in the political environment. And the way we do that is by electing people. And the way we elect people is by building up a party that can deliver the door-to-door canvassers and the donations and the activists who are text banking and phone banking in order to make all of that happen. While mainstream political commentators might mostly view Joe Jorgensen's campaign as fielding the candidate who was a spoiler in several close swing states in 2020, party officials hope the influx of new members it brought in portends a new era for an ascendant political party. It's time that we get out of startup mood and that we prove that we can do it.