Libertarians crash the gates of big government

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 29, 1996 | by Michael Rust, | Susan Crabtree

Having overcome internecine philosophical disputes, ballot-access troubles and financial constraints, Libertarians have united around a presidential nominee and have high hopes for the 1996 elections.

So the Republican revolution seems to have fizzled a bit. Don't worry -- the Libertarian Party, or LP, whose raison d'etre is to end big government, is quite willing to take up the slack.

Founded in 1972, the Libertarian Party has experienced several fissures during the last quarter-century. But party activists hoped they had put that behind them this year as they observed Independence Day by holding their presidential-nominating convention in the lion's den of big government, the nation's capital.

The convention, which tapped Harry Browne, a Tennessee investment adviser, for president and Jo Jorgenson, a South Carolina computer-software entrepreneur, for vice president, coincided with the release of the science-fiction thriller Independence Day in movie theaters around the country. The film, which includes dazzling special effects showing the Capitol and White House being obliterated by extraterrestrials, might seem in keeping with the spirit of eradicating big government. But then, the convention, however boisterous, was much more sedate in its plans for devolving power away from Washington.

While the LP is small in numbers, the influence of libertarian philosophy and policy has been felt widely during the last two years. With the ascendency of House Speaker Newt Gingrich and congressional Republicans, libertarian institutions such as the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank, and Reason, a monthly magazine published by the California-based Reason Institute, gained a larger presence in public-policy debates and the main-stream media. But if libertarianism is more visible in Gingrich's Washington, libertarians are hardly satisfied with the last year-and-a-half.

"Not many Republicans are revolutionaries," Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute tells Insight. Bandow, a syndicated columnist and onetime Reagan White House aide who left in protest of Reagan's endorsement of compulsory draft registration, addressed the Libertarian convention this year on the failure of the much-ballyhooed GOP "revolution." It has failed, Bandow believes, because of the limited nature of the GOP's changes. At the same time, he cautions that his speech does not constitute an endorsement of Browne.

Mike Griffin, director of the Republican Liberty Caucus, or RLC, an organization of libertarians within the GOP, agrees that the LP -- which might seem to be on the opposite side of the antistatist universe from the RLC -- serves a useful function in promoting discussion and circulating ideas.

"I think they focus on issues that are very important to libertarian thought," Griffin explains, "and they've been fighting the battle for years." At the same time, when asked if the Libertarian Party will have any electoral effect this fall, Griffin replies with a flat no.

The party made history in 1972 when a Virginia Republican elector voted in the Electoral College for presidential candidate John Hospers, a philosophy professor from California, and vice-presidential nominee Tonie Nathan, an Oregon journalist. The vote for Nathan was the first cast for a woman in the Electoral College. However, the party quickly foundered on the shoals of philosophical and personal differences.

Many of the original members were followers of novelist Ayn Rand, who advocated a "limited state" with little more than a defense apparatus. They quarreled with "anarcho-capitalists" inspired by economist Murray Rothbard, who had sided with the new left during the 1960s about issues concerning Vietnam and militarism. The mercurial Rand, who tended to pronounce anathemas, soon denounced the Libertarian Party. Rothbard, in turn, broke with the party in 1980, a year that saw high hopes and great disappointment.

That year, the LP received more than 900,000 votes -- its all-time high -- for the ticket of presidential candidate Ed Clark and vice-presidential nominee David Koch. The extensive campaign was amply funded by millionaire industrialist Koch, and Clark finished with 1 percent of the vote.

The party saw a mass exodus of many of its brightest young lights to the Republican Party during the Reagan years. Since then, it has tried to balance the often-opposing views of its members and juggle the sometimes-peculiar resulting alliances. Bandow, an evangelical Christian, points out that the head of Libertarians for Life, the LP's pro-life causus, is a female atheist.

But the LP persists in efforts to become an electoral force. The Libertarians have jumped from 77 office-holders in 1993 to 174 today, and Steve Dasbach, who has chaired the party since 1993, says this trend, while still small, is quite positive. Under Dasbach's leadership the Libertarian Party increased its registered voter base by more than 10 percent, the number of Libertarians serving in public office by 100 percent and the number of contributing members by 30 percent. There are 125,000 registered Libertarians, although the party complains that restrictive ballot-access laws limit the number.