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David Boaz, a writer and scholar who for nearly half a century was a leading voice of libertarianism, a political philosophy that he labored to move from the margins to the mainstream of American politics, died June 7 at his home in Arlington, Va. He was 70.

His death was announced by the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank in Washington where Mr. Boaz served at the time of his death as a senior fellow and executive vice president. The cause was cancer, said his partner of 30 years, Steve Miller.

Libertarianism does not fit tidily into categorizations such as liberal or conservative, but Mr. Boaz did have a tidy summary of the cause to which he devoted nearly his entire professional life. Libertarianism, he said, stands for the idea that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others.

In practical policy terms, that means small government, low taxes, free enterprise and school choice, among other positions associated with the political right. It also means robust civil liberties, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the repeal of bans on drugs and prostitution, and the rejection of censorship, among stances traditionally taken by the left.

There are only a few rules: You cant hit other people and you cant take their stuff, Mr. Boaz once quipped to The Washington Post. After that, you have to make the important decisions for yourself.

Mr. Boaz said he was drawn to libertarianism during his adolescence in western Kentucky, where he acquired a twang that never fully left him. His mother had studied economics and kept on her bookshelf a copy of Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, a best-selling 1946 volume that articulated in laymans terms the case for an unfettered free market.

The young Mr. Boaz also consumed works such as the 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, a cult classic among libertarians, and The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) by U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican who lost the 1964 presidential election in a landslide but invigorated the conservative movement.

(In his office at the Cato Institute, Mr. Boaz kept a Goldwater poster and two busts of Adam Smith, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher associated with laissez-faire capitalism.)

By the end of his life, Mr. Boaz was one of the writers to whom people of his persuasion turned for their political moorings. He was the author of books including The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom (2015) and The Politics of Freedom (2008) and edited the volume The Libertarian Reader: Classic and Contemporary Writings from Lao-tzu to Milton Friedman (1997).

Mr. Boaz helped shape the course of libertarian thought from his longtime intellectual home at the Cato Institute, which he joined in 1981.

He quickly scaled the leadership ranks and was widely described as one of the key leaders who helped grow Cato from a scrappy operation into a significant presence in the Washington policy world.

Mr. Boaz contributed prolifically to newspapers including The Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He drew wide notice with a 1988 commentary published in the Times in which he argued against the criminal laws, immigration regulations and other policies enforced under the umbrella of what was often described as the war on drugs.

An antiwar song that helped get the Smothers Brothers thrown off network television in the 60s went this way: Were waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool says to push on, Mr. Boaz wrote in the op-ed. Today were waist-deep in another unwinnable war, and many political leaders want to push on. This time its a war on drugs.

In his personal life, said Tom G. Palmer, a longtime friend and colleague at Cato, Mr. Boaz was a teetotaler. He drank no alcohol, smoked no cigarettes, used no pot. His only vice, Palmer said, was Coca-Cola, which he preferred so strongly that he avoided restaurants that offered Pepsi products.

But Mr. Boaz saw anti-drug laws as a violation of civil liberties and the right to privacy. He compared them to Prohibition, which officially banned but failed to actually stop the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the United States from 1920 to 1933. He argued that alcohol and tobacco both legal accounted for many more deaths per year than illegal drugs did.

For libertarians, the growing contemporary movement toward the legalization of marijuana represented a significant victory; the drug is now legal for medicinal purposes in 38 states and the District and for recreational purposes in 24 states and the District.

Mr. Boaz counted another victory in the expansion of rights for same-sex couples most notably the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2015 finding a constitutional right for gay couples to marry, a cause that he had worked toward for decades.

But mainstream American politics, on both sides of the ideological spectrum, remained, in his view, woefully distant from foundational notions of liberty.

He criticized Democrats for seeking to raise taxes and Republicans for attempting to censor books and television. Liberals who oppose school vouchers, as he interpreted their position, would deny parents the right to send their children to the schools of their choice, while conservatives opposed to gay rights would constrain an individuals right to marry and build a family.

He conceded that the Libertarian Party was not a very successful political party but posited that most Americans support at least some libertarian ideals.

Millions and millions of Americans, if you ask them, What do you think about drug laws; what do you think about Social Security; what do you think about taxes? theyre going to come out in a libertarian direction, he said. But theyre not going to call themselves libertarians, because libertarianism really is the basic theme of America.

David Douglas Boaz was born in Mayfield, Ky., near the Mississippi River, on Aug. 29, 1953. His mother was a homemaker. Mr. Boaz described his father, a circuit court judge, to the Washington Examiner as a Jeffersonian conservative Democrat. Reflecting on his own political evolution, Mr. Boaz said that he was a conservative before he was a libertarian.

Mr. Boaz enrolled at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he received a bachelors degree in history in 1975. He landed one of his first jobs with the Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative youth organization, before working as a campaign staffer for Ed Clark, a libertarian who unsuccessfully ran for California governor in 1978 and for U.S. president in 1980.

Besides Miller, of Arlington, Mr. Boazs survivors include a brother and a sister.

Mr. Boaz did not join the Libertarian Party, telling NPR in 2002 that he preferred to think of himself as an independent.

He found stark flaws in the Democratic Party platform and during the 2016 presidential campaign, in which Democrat Hillary Clinton lost to Republican Donald Trump, remarked that among libertarians, the view was that if someone puts a gun to your head and says you have to choose between Clinton and Trump, the correct answer is, take the bullet.

But in that election, Mr. Boaz also condemned Trump for making racial and religious scapegoating so central to his campaign and for vowing to be an American Mussolini, concentrating power in the Trump White House and governing by fiat.

Mr. Boaz expressed deep distress about Trumps efforts to overturn the 2020 election, in which he lost his reelection bid to Democrat Joe Biden, and opposed the appearance of Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, at the Libertarian Partys 2024 national convention in May.

I have friends who say Biden is the biggest spender ever and hes regulating and hes woke and how can anyone consider voting for him over Trump? Mr. Boaz told CNN in April.

And Ill say that one reason is that Biden has not tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power. Thats a very fundamental issue. You can add up all these [other] issues and weigh them. But the big freedom issue that Biden has over Trump, he continued, is that Trump tried to steal an election.

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David Boaz, leading voice of libertarianism, dies at 70 - The Washington Post

David Boaz in his Cato Institute office in 2008. (Photo by Katherine Frey / Washington Post via Getty Images)

BACK WHEN I WAS STILL LIVING IN THE BAY, the Cato Institutes David Boaz sent me an email out of the blue asking if Id join him for lunch; he happened to be in town for a speech. We had been pen pals for years and seen each other at conferences but somehow never really met, so I was excited for the opportunity to kibitz with somebody whom I respected a great deal.

I was never a libertarian per se, despite having some impulses in that direction. But anytime I read or listened to David I thought that he was the kind of libertarian I would like to be.

He took the liberal part of the ideology seriously. Not prone to wild-eyed notions or conspiratorial thinking, he was not motivated by some Darwinian desire to let societys less fortunate fail. Just the oppositeto me it seemed as if all of his advocacy was motivated primarily by the desire for people to be able to live as they wished, free from discrimination or oppression, free from the unfeeling and capricious power of the state. This was no doubt informed in some ways by his experience as an openly gay man through the crackdowns of the 70s and 80s.

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He was principled but open-minded. Though he was as versed in libertarian philosophy as anyone on the planet, unlike many ideologues he was not blindly chained to dogma or determined to backfill a rationale for his preferred solution. He described himself as a reasonable radicalthe aptness of that label revealed his self-awareness. My husband once lobbied him on a food-labeling policy issue that he thought Cato should support. David instinctively rebuked his position, but listened, read, kicked the idea around, and eventually landed on the other side because he decided his first impulse was wrong. Refreshing!

But on the issues where he was right and righteous from the jump, he was unsparing and often ahead of his time. David wrote about ending the drug war for the New York Times in 1988 (1988!!!). The piece concluded:

We can either escalate the war on drugs, which would have dire implications for civil liberties and the right to privacy, or find a way to gracefully withdraw. Withdrawal should not be viewed as an endorsement of drug use; it would simply be an acknowledgment that the cost of this warbillions of dollars, runaway crime rates and restrictions on our personal freedomis too high.

Show me the lie.

So when I finally got to spend time with him, naturally I was looking forward to the opportunity to engage on these big ideas. I imagined wed have a little debate with a few glasses of white wine and for dessert hed share some stories about 1980s gay San Francisco over Tadich Grills famed rice custard pudding.

But when I arrived for our lunch I was disappointed to find David a little melancholy. He was excited to chat, of course, and up for some old stories, but rather than wanting to mix it up with me, he wanted mostly to commiserate.

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Two years into the Trump term, many of his libertarian colleagues had followed the same path as my Republican ones. I would have thought the contrarian, powerless, strident, anarchic libertarians would have had more antibodies to resist the MAGA wiles. Its not as if people were angling for jobs or trying to prop up their careers as campaign ad men like my friends were.

But, unfortunately, the siren song of access, the hatred of the progressive left, and the appeal of an imaginary deep-state-destroying strong man was too much for that motley group of weirdos to resist.

David felt like he was on a bit of an island. He, like so many of us Never Trumpers, was devastated and gobsmacked that people he respected and believed in were succumbing to this buffoon. So we ate our comfort pudding and lamented our lost colleagues and friends. And walked out together into the crisp Bay air feeling a little better, having discovered there was another tribe on our isle with which we could break bread.

In the ensuing years David kept speaking out. He wasnt going to leave the movement that he had dedicated his life to. But he also wasnt going to follow them down the orange-bricked road to hell. So he became an outcast among the outcasts. Never wavering. Never backing down.

In what I believe was his last major public address, a speech he delivered in February, David sent a message to his fellow libertarians about resisting the allure of populism:

When you see self-proclaimed freedom advocates talking about blood and soil, or helping a would-be autocrat overturn an election, or talking about LGBT equality as degeneracy, or saying we shouldnt care about government racism against black people, or defending the Confederacy and the cause of the South, or joining right-wing culture wars in supporting politicians who want to use the state to fight their enemies, or posting Holocaust jokes and death threats on Twitter, recognize that for what it is. Speak up. Fight back. Tell people: Thats not America and it's certainly not libertarianism.

Amen to that.

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David Boaz, 19532024 - by Tim Miller - The Bulwark

The Libertarian Party has chosen Chase Oliver as their 2024 presidential nominee ahead of Robert F Kennedy Jr and Donald Trump, who failed to qualify.

The 38-year-old, who has run numerous times for Congress in Georgia, was elected after seven rounds of voting at the partys convention in Washington DC, on Sunday, beating the likes of Michael Rectenwald and Mike ter Maat to the nod.

Mr Oliver told CNN after his victory that speaking to as many people as possible would be key to making an impact in a contest all but certain to be dominated by President Joe Biden and Mr Trump and pledged to be a fly in the ointment of the two-party system.

He added that he believed securing 2 per cent of the national vote in November was a realistic goal, commenting: I got 2.1 per cent of the vote when I ran for the Senate in Georgia. I think thats a definite doable thing, and certainly, we can improve upon that with a hard-run campaign that wakes people up.

Mr Oliver has called for expanded work visas, a smoother pathway to citizenship for immigrants to the United States, the decriminalisation of abortion and denounced American involvement in foreign wars.

He was also vocal in his condemnation of Mr Trump, saying it had been a mistake to invite him to the Libertarians convention and telling the Republican: You are not a libertarian Youre a war criminal and you deserve to be shamed by everyone in this hall.

Embarrassingly, Mr Kennedy who is effectively running a spoiler campaign as an independent against the Democratic and Republican nominees and addressed the convention on Friday was rejected for the nomination in the first round of voting, picking up just 2.07 per cent of the vote from 19 delegates.

That came after he had rowed back his decision not to seek the Libertarian Partys nomination, which would have granted him ballot access in 37 states, telling chair Angela McArdle that he would accept if chosen, only to find he had very little support in the room.

Mr Trump also had a pretty dire time of it in DC, failing to even qualify for voting and picking up just two write-in ballots (a third, a joke at his expense, nominated Stormy Daniels, the adult film star at the center of his ongoing hush money trial in New York), after his speech was resoundingly booed on Saturday night.

The Republican had told the crowd at the Washington Hilton that the Libertarian Party should nominate Trump for president, only for howls of derision to ring out.

Thats nice, he retaliated sarcastically, with a rictus grin.

Maybe you dont want to win. Only do that if you want to win. If you want to lose, dont do that. Keep getting three per cent every four years.

He was subsequently busy on Truth Social attempting to firefight the disaster after a clip of the booing went viral, insisting he could have won the Libertarian nomination if he really wanted to and attacking Mr Kennedy, declaring: Only a FOOL would vote for him!

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Libertarian Party names presidential nominee as RFK Jr crashes out of race and Trump fails to qualify - Yahoo News Canada

The Libertarian Party does not run on flattery. The partys remnant establishment gathered for its national convention at the Washington Hilton on Memorial Day weekend and introduced the mostly foreign-born hotel staff in the underground, sci-fi-themed banquet hall to their resigned sarcasm and attitude of indifference toward success as Americas largest gadfly political party.

According to both the hours of floor time spent contesting delegates whose credentials had been refused and my conversations with delegates, the party seems more interested in ironing out internal disputes than clarifying its external image and message.

Reactions to the presence of President Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. among the delegates varied: Some were disappointed because of their respective campaigns ideological impurity; Amity Pickeral, a Virginia delegate who nominated Joshua Smith for the presidency, said repeatedly, of both big names, Hes not a libertarian! Others were frustrated because of a perception that the invitation to Trump sacrificed the partys priorities on the altar of fundraising and media attention. Others had a free-speech maximalist detachment.

Jacob Luria, who ran for a seat in the Colorado House of Representatives as a Libertarian in 2022, said that he has considered voting for Kennedy but lamented the effect that Kennedys candidacy could have on the Libertarian Partys voter turnout in November. I didnt hate the idea that at one point he was seeking our nomination Part of that is because I imagine what the party would look like if we had Ross Perot run on our ticket [in 1992].

Instead the party ran Andre Marrou, an Alaskan, during that cycle. He picked up 0.28 percent of the national vote while Perot earned almost 19 percent. Perot saw his best performance in Marrous home state, where Perot almost overcame Bill Clinton with 28 percent of voters in the Last Frontier.

Though there is room for speculation about missed opportunities for the 1992 LP, it remains true that the partys presidential nominee has performed better in every cycle since then. Through the decades, the LP has enjoyed marginal growth, even with Perots second go in 1996, Ralph Naders Green run the same year, Pat Buchanans Reform candidacy and Naders heftier returns in 2000, and Naders proof of persistence in 2004 and 2008.

Between 1984 and 2012, the results for the LP cemented its reputation as a less-than-one-percent contingent of the national bloc. The average percentage of Americans who voted for the Libertarian presidential candidate in the 11 races between the partys founding and 2012 is 0.44 percent.

When the 2016 and 2020 races are included, the average jumps to 0.72 percent of the national electorate. In 2016, two former governors, Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, brought home over three percent of the vote, an anomaly from the partys typical performance, with Alaska, Oklahoma, and Johnsons home state of New Mexico getting out the highest vote for the Libertarians.

After that surprise performance, the Trump campaign did not set out to gather the strayed sheep back to the herd at the partys 2020 convention. But, back then, Kennedys candidacy was not a factor. Its unlikely that Trump would have appeared to speak to the Libertarian delegates if Kennedy were not in the race.

Party delegates hadnt gotten to naming their partys candidate by the time Trump arrived on Saturday night. In the end, after seven rounds of voting, by a simple majority vote, they selected Chase Oliver, whose purported homosexuality, desire for an Ellis Island style of processing immigrants, and call for an end to federal mandatory minimum sentencing places him firmly in the partys left wing.

Trumps performance was not for the sake of striking a contrast between himself and the eventual party nominee, but rather between himself and Kennedy. It worked. The crowd size during Trumps speech at the convention was approximately double that of Kennedys. The spirited air in the room came not only from party delegates but also from energized D.C. Young Republicans who arrived to drown out the boos of the partys less inhibited members, who were served drinks before Trumps speech and only after Kennedys.

In his more analytical fashion, Kennedy opened his speech with a claim that Libertarian voters should elect leaders who are inspired by [the Constitution] and who will wield it to inspire others and that neither President Trump nor President Biden pass this critical examination. Kennedy transitioned from his broadside against both major party candidates with more sustained attacks against Trump, mentioning the frontrunners name 12 times throughout his speech versus five references to Biden.

Trump, for his part, did not mention Kennedy but continued to wage an offensive against President Biden along with occasional gibes at the LPs poor performance: Libertarians could win with him or could keep getting your three percent every four years. The latter option of gathering three percent of the nations vote, as the partys historical results prove, is more an indication of Trumps generosity than anything for which the party could reasonably hope in the upcoming election.

But politeness seems to be foreign currency for a party whose delegates boo the frontrunners call for support after he pledged to put a libertarian in his cabinet and to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht to time served on the first day of his administration.

Trumps pledge to free the tech wiz with a cult following is no ancillary concern for the partys delegates. The LPs communications director confirmed to TAC that Free Ross Ulbricht was the policy action that received the highest number of votes from party members for Trump to address, over Free Julian Assange and Defend the Second Amendment. Far and away the most popular sign in the convention hall during Trumps address was one that read, Free Ross.

Voters who align with the partys principled disdain for political prosecutions will be tested on Election Day when the object of the current regimes most flagrant political conviction stands to return as head of state.

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Showdown at the Libertarian Convention - The American Conservative

When the Libertarian Party recently invited Donald Trump to speak at its annual convention later this month, the move sparked plenty of outrage inside the partyand a lot of intrigue outside it.

The idea that I completely wrote the GOP off only to have Trump follow me into the Libertarian Party really upsets me and upsets a lot of people, Jonathan Casey, whose involvement in Libertarian Party politics dates back to 2016, told The Dispatch.

Until the Trump invitation, the Libertarian Party had mostly been an afterthought for outside observers in the 2024 presidential campaign, but it shouldnt have been. Whoever wins the partys nomination for president later this month at the Libertarian National Convention will be on the ballot in at least 37 states, including the battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada. The last two presidential election were decided by a few states where the victor prevailed by less than 1 percentage point, so its plausible the Libertarian candidate could sway the outcomeeven if he falls short of winning the 3.3 percent of the national popular vote won by 2016 Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson or the 1.2 percent of the popular vote garnered by 2020 nominee Jo Jorgenson.

So why, exactly, did a minor party whose raison dtre is to reject the two major parties invite the presumptive GOP nominee to potentially overshadow the convention where Libertarian Party delegates will pick their own presidential nominee? That is a hotly contested question within a Libertarian Party that is deeply divided between two factionsthe Mises Caucus and the Classical Liberal Caucus.

The Mises Caucus is the Libertarian Partys largest faction whose members swept to power at the partys 2022 convention in a backlash against what they saw as an increasingly politically correct party that didnt do enough to stand up to COVID lockdowns and was happy to run Republican Party retreads for president. The Classical Liberal Caucus is filled with, well, self-styled classical liberals who see Mises Caucus types as Trump-adjacent bigots and kooksor at least way too tolerant of bigots and kooks.

Heading into the 2024 convention, the Mises Caucus has endorsed presidential candidate Michael Rectenwald, a former New York University professor who says he converted from Marxism to anarcho-capitalism after he was the victim of a woke mob at NYU. On Friday, the Classical Liberals endorsed Chase Oliver, a former Democrat who was the Libertarian Partys 2022 Senate candidate in Georgia.

The Classical Liberals contend that by turning the convention into a Trump rally, the Mises Caucus leaders of the Libertarian Party are not only trying to help Trump win the general election, theyre also trying to depress turnout of delegates who might oppose the Mises Caucus candidates running for party leadership and the presidential nomination.

The Trump invitation is absolutely designed to discourage anybody who would challenge [the Mises Caucus] from showing up, said Casey, who serves as chair of the Classical Liberal Caucus. Moreover, Joshua Eakle, a classical liberal who served as Tennessee state party chairman until 2021, worries that if Rectenwald wins the Libertarian Party nomination, he could theoretically suspend his campaign, either immediately after being endorsed or, say, before the election and endorse Trump.

Members of the Mises Caucus strongly deny those accusations. Im not going to drop out to support any other candidate. Im gonna run as hard as I can, Rectenwald told The Dispatch. Mises Caucus Chair Aaron Harris said the decision to invite Trump, as well as President Joe Biden and independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was meant to increase interest in the Libertarian Party: The long and short of it is the media wont really cover usthe mainstream media wont cover usthey wont let us in the debate. So lets see what buzz we can create on our own. While Biden declined the invitation, RFK Jr. accepted and challenged Trump to a debate at the convention (something Trump has not agreed to do).

The difference between Trump and Biden is like the difference between stomach cancer and pancreatic cancer. You definitely dont want either one, but one might kill you a little slower, Harris said, before identifying Trump as maybe the less-bad cancer. Were not trying to game this to support Trump. If anything, I think us helping elevate interest in alternative candidates is going to hurt both of them and be a wild card in this election.

How Trump could hurt Trump.

Its not clear what Trumps objective is by showing up at the Libertarian convention, but theres actually a decent chance it could backfire on him. If Trumps presence at the convention does help Rectenwald win the nomination, that would likely hurt Trump in the general election because Rectenwalds anti-woke and anti-abortion stances would almost certainly draw more votes away from Trump than Biden.

On the other hand, Oliver, the candidate backed by the Classical Liberal Caucus, would likely draw more votes from Biden than Trump because Oliver is a former Democratic antiwar activist who favors enacting a federal statutory right to abortion.

So what does Trump have to gain from showing up at the Libertarian Convention? I dont think he cares one way or the other who our presidential nominee is, Casey of the Classical Liberal Caucus told The Dispatch. I think his motivation for coming to speak to the Libertarian Party is that he looks at this as a campaign rally where he can go up on a stage that has Libertarian Party branding, Libertarian Party crowd, and he can create an ad for himself, essentially. That message? I spoke to the Libertarians, and they loved me, as Casey put it.

Indeed, Trump could be competing for the much larger faction of self-identified libertarians who never vote for the Libertarian Party candidate. A recent poll, which has not been publicly released, conducted by YouGov for the libertarian Cato Institute found that 15 percent of Americans self-identified as libertarian, according to Catos director of polling, Emily Ekins. The respondents were evenly split between Trump and Biden at 41 percent apiece. Trump, of course, also needs to be concerned about Kennedy, who is courting libertarians with his record of opposing COVID vaccines.

Michael Rectenwalds play for the populist faction.

While RFK Jr. may win far more votes than the Libertarian Party nominee, Rectenwald seems like exactly the kind of candidate who could shave half a point off of Trumps margin if he is the nominee.

I was a Marxist and a full professor at NYU when the woke mob came for me, when I voiced criticisms of social justice and university policies that had become official dogma of the university, Rectenwald told The Dispatch. When I saw what totalitarians leftists are, I immediately became a civil libertarian. A conversion to full-scale economic and political libertarianism followed shortly thereafter.

Rectenwald characterized the last two Libertarian Party nominees, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and Clemson University professor Jo Jorgenson as milquetoast candidates who did not excite anybody. Rectenwald likened himself to Argentinian President Javier Millei and said his own political philosophy begins with the premise that government is an evil, that it is a thief, and that its a parasiteand it sucks the blood out of the body politic. And so what we need to do is get it out of our lives as much as humanly possible with the ultimate goal of a stateless societyanarcho-capitalist order.

Its Rectenwalds anti-woke record and association with alt-right figures that could hurt Trump come November. Rectenwald says he was pushed toward taking a leave of absence after he revealed that he had been tweeting under the screen name Deplorable NYU Prof in 2016 (though NYU administrators dispute Rectenwalds version of events). In 2016, New York University canceled a scheduled appearance from alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, and Rectenwald invited Yiannopoulos to speak to one of his classes in 2018. The event was again canceled due to threats of violence. Asked what was the academic value of inviting Yiannopoulos to speak in a college classroom, Rectenwald replied: Milo, for whatever his faults, is a very brilliant guy. Asked about Yiannopoulos record of antisemitic rhetoric, Rectenwald said: At the time that I had invited him, there wasnt any indication of that at all. But whatever hes done since is on himlike palling around with Ye, or, you know, Nick Fuentes and all that, I think thats pretty abominable. But Im not here to check him. There was in fact plenty of evidence of Yiannopouloss racist and anti-semitic rhetoric prior to 2018.

Asked to name the worst aspects of the Trump presidency, Recetnwald replied: Operation Warp Speed, the lockdowns, eight-plus trillion dollars in inflationary spending as well as Trumps buffoonish and antagonistic rhetoric. What was wrong with Operation Warp Speed? The vaccine was not properly vetted, Rectenwald said.

On fiscal issues, Rectenwald said that there should be an off ramp for completely winding down entitlements like Social Security and Medicare of at least for four to five years, so it is somewhat precipitous, but not too much so that you end up with a social catastrophe.

While, like Trump, Rectenwald says the federal government shouldnt have a role in setting abortion policy, he draws a contrast by voicing support for state-level laws that ban almost all abortions, except in cases of rape or when the life or physical health of the mother is threatened. Philosophically, I think abortion is an egregious violation of the non-aggression principle, Rectenwald said, referring to one of the basic tenets of libertarianism. It is aggression against a person. I believe that it is a person regardless of the size or stage of development.

Rectenwald also thinks states should ban transgender surgeries and puberty-blockers or hormone treatments for minors because people under 18 do not have the ability to consent, but once youre of age, if you want to change your body in whatever way you think you can, you have a perfect right to do so.

Chase Olivers antiwar roots.

As the candidate endorsed by the Classical Liberal Caucus, Oliver cuts a much different profile. While Rectenwalds interaction with a woke mob brought him to Libertarian politics, Oliver came into the party as a Democratic antiwar activist who thought Barack Obamas first term was too militaristic because he failed to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and end drone warfare. I became politically homeless until I found the Libertarian Party, campaigning at the Atlanta Pride festival in 2010, Oliver told The Dispatch.

While both Rectenwald and Oliver favor cutting off U.S. military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, Oliver was particularly passionate in condemning Israels war against Hamas. October 7 was a horrible day for the people of Israel, like theres no questioning that what Hamas did was horrible. But the response back has been equally terrible, Oliver told The Dispatch. It has killed so many more innocent peoplelike tens of thousands of innocent people. When pressed on using the phrase equally terrible to describe Hamass attack deliberately targeting civilians and Israels military response targeting Hamas, Oliver apologized and said the actions were not equal but both were morally indefensible.

What I mean to say is that the [Israeli] response is not morally defensible, just as obviously what Hamas did is not morally defensible, he said.

Oliver and Rectenwald more notably differ on domestic issues. On abortion, for example, Oliver supports enacting a federal statute creating a national right to abortion until an unborn child can survive outside the womb and prohibiting abortion after that point except to protect the life of the mother. Thats the standard that I would like to see federally because I think its a matter of bodily autonomy and medical privacy which fit into our constitutional rights, Oliver said, pointing to the Fifth and 14th amendments. Hed like to phase out Social Security and Medicare over a matter of decades, not four or five years. Hes OK with state bans on transgender surgeries for minors, but not restricting puberty blockers.

Asked if Trump or Biden presents a greater danger to the country, Oliver replied: Theyre both turds, right, and they both stink. Im not going to sit here and try to determine which one is better than the other. He added that Biden and Trump are both representative of authoritarian policies to which the Libertarians seek to be wholly distinct from.

A missed opportunity for libertarians?

Its far from clear that either Rectenwald or Oliver will win the nomination at the convention later this month. Roughly 1,000 national delegates will continue voting until one candidate emerges with a majority of the vote, and Joshua Eakle suggested the most viable strategy to secure the nomination is to basically just be everyones second choice.

During a time of deep dissatisfaction with the Republican and Democrat at the top of the ticket, why hasnt the Libertarian Party taken off as a vehicle for a more mainstream center-right presidential candidate who has held elective office before? In 2020, candidate recruitment efforts faltered amid concerns nominating a libertarian Republican like Michigan Rep. Justin Amash would help reelect Trump, resulting in a lackluster candidate like Jorgensen. Infighting since 2022 has certainly dimmed the partys prospects as well.

But Emily Ekins of the Cato Institute pointed to something more fundamentalwhat political scientists call Duvergers lawthats holding back the Libertarian Party. When you have an electoral system like ours, which is single-member districts, first past the postso whoever wins the most votes wins the whole thing, winner-take-allthat tends to create a system with two parties, said Ekins. No third party will take off unless the electoral system is different.

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Will the Trumpification of the Libertarian Party Actually Hurt Donald Trump? - The Dispatch