Libertarian Renaissance

By George Phillies

For the past decade and a half, the national Libertarian Party has been in decline. Membership and donations have fallen; activism has decreased.

In the non-fiction essay Libertarian Renaissance, George Phillies presents a detailed plan, including timelines, recruiting targets, and organization changes, to set the Libertarian Party on the path to political majority status.

George Phillies is a former Libertarian Presidential Presidential candidate (on the ballot in New Hampshire, 2008) and former chair of the Massachusetts Libertarian Party.

• Language: English
• Publisher: George Phillies
• Release date: Jul 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301441228

George Phillies

George Phillies is a retired Professor of Physics. He also taught in Biochemistry and in Game Design. His scientific research is focused on polymer dynamics. He also writes science fiction novels and books on politics. Books by George Phillies include:FictionThis Shining SeaNine GeesMinutegirlsThe One WorldMistress of the WavesAgainst Three LandsEclipse, The Girl Who Saved the WorldAiry Castles All AblazeStand Against the LightInpreparation: Practical ExerciseBooks on Game Design SeriesContemporary Perspectives in Game Design (with Tom Vasel)Design Elements of Contemporary Strategy Games(with Tom Vasel)Stalingrad for Beginners - How to PlayStalingrad for Beginners - Basic TacticsDesigning Board Wargames - IntroductionBooks on PoliticsStand Up for Liberty!Funding LibertyLibertarian RenaissanceSurely We Can Do Better?Books on PhysicsPhysics OneElementary Lectures in Statistical MechanicsPhenomenology of Polymer Solution DynamicsComplete Tables for ‘Phenomenology of Polymer Solution Dynamics’

Book preview

Libertarian Renaissance

A Plan for Fixing

Our Libertarian Party

by George Phillies

Smashwords Edition Copyright 2013 by George Phillies

All Rights Reserved

Cover Photograph Public Domain from the National Parks Service, which does not endorse this volume or set of proposals.

For other books by George Phillies, see Smashwords.com.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is the Second Edition of the New Path Plan for reviving the Libertarian Party. I thank my collaborators on the First Edition for encouraging me to rewrite and publish this study, and for giving me permission to use their analyses herein.

Preface

In 2010, the New Path Team, running for LNC, made a series of proposals for improving our party. Many of those proposals were in a book, a first draft of the book you see here. Fair parts of that book were taken from my earlier books Stand Up for Liberty and Funding Liberty, also to be republished in this format. A few of the historical references are now four years older, but the proposals for the party are still fresh.

Introduction

Our Libertarian Party faces an incredible opportunity. Our Republican opponents have discredited themselves, and the Democrats are little better off. On issue after issue the American people support our stands, not our opponents'.

Alas, our party is in great difficulty. Over the past decade and a half, membership and income have crashed. Many state parties have faltered. If our national party continues on its present course, it will cease to exist.

It's time for a change. It's time to focus national party resources on doing real politics. It's time to do outreach, support candidates, support volunteers and state parties, and set our party on the road for political majority status.

This book proposes a Libertarian Renaissance to fix our Libertarian Party. It you want to put it into effect, you need to elect a new National Committee, one that will carry out this plan. This volume describes a particular set of proposals. I hope that you like these ideas. More important, I welcome your suggestions for improvements. Our party is in real trouble, and we need everyone's good ideas if we are to recover.

The LP has been in existence for nearly 40 years. Early in the 2010 LNC campaign, the original New Path team wrote that our party is facing an existential crisis. I still believe that. Either we fix our party’s problems and begin the Libertarian Renaissance, or we face the beginning of our Party's end.

This book offers a Libertarian Renaissance for the Libertarian Party. This is a plan to revive the party. When you run a group for the National Committee, ask their opponents to tell you about their plan.

Chapter One: Our Present Situation

The Opportunity

We Libertarians face a golden political moment. A half-decade ago, I said: We simply need to take advantage of the situation we have been handed. One of our political opponents, the Republican Party, launched a war of conquest. No, not the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. The Republicans invaded and conquered a new corner of the Nolan Chart. That’s right, they marched down from their traditional conservative position to conquer the old authoritarian quadrant. Their erstwhile foes, the Democrats, are following in their footsteps.

Now, thanks to that great patriot Edward Snowden and his equally heroic predecessors, we have been presented with a second opportunity, The War on America. That’s an electronic war, waged by the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Fusion Centers across America, and many more against the people of America. The War on America is the war against our Constitution and its Bill of Rights. That’s the war on all of us, waged by the American political establishment, Democrat and Republican.

That war is a huge opportunity for us. On issue after issue, the other two political parties have taken clear stands. Those stands are the opposite or ours. Those stands are the opposite from the considered beliefs of the American people.

The Republicans are earning their reward for their efforts. Most Americans know that the Republican Party is the party of overage white male bigots whose thoughtful approach to the every issue is pounding on their chests. Young people reject the Republican Party by two-to-one or more. Persons of color and recently arrived ethnic minorities reject Republicans by up to 15-to-1. Now many of those people are starting to notice that while they loathe Republicanism, they don’t like Democrats that much, either.

Republicans are the opposite of Libertarian. They talk Libertarian, but only while their donation envelopes are near our wallets. Democrats lag behind the Republicans. They talk Libertarian on a few issues, but only rarely ask us for money.

The opposite of Libertarian?

Consider the characters of that sometimes-read-by-libertarians novel Atlas Shrugged. The heroine of the piece is an engineering CEO. Her boyfriend is a materials scientist and industrialist. Another hero invents a cloaking ray. Even a major villain is a physicist. Yes, they have some severe character flaws, but all these people are deeply engaged with science, engineering, and physical reality.

Compare those heroes with that Republican paladinette, Sarah Palin, a woman who rejects evolution and global warming. She claims that abstinence works as birth control for teenagers, her own family notwithstanding. Her stands are immensely popular with her many supporters, the legions of the belligerently ignorant who reject science, engineering, and reality in favor of delusion and conspiracy theory.

Republicans have ceased to be conservative, too.

A half-century ago, conservatives believed that the Constitution was a functional document with working checks and balances. It was a Republican Attorney General who dragged American citizen Jose Padilla from the streets and locked him up in a military prison without trial or access to lawyers. It was a Democratic President who denied Bradley Manning a speedy trial for year after year, and who holds in Guantanamo man after man who are agreed to be innocent. Republicans wiretapped every phone call in America, without a warrant. The Democrats did nothing to protest.

That near-extinct species, the conservative, believes in smaller government. When the Cold War ended, Republicans drove military spending up to a trillion dollars a year. President Obama campaigned to enlarge the Army and Marine Corps even farther. That’s the Republicans and Democrats, hard at