Lyndon LaRouche, Libertarian?
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, the Libertarian Party and the libertarian movement were saddled with the image of being associated with Lyndon LaRouche, the conspiracy theorist and politician who, according to Wikipedia, began as a far-leftist and ended up as an extreme right-winger operating within the Democratic Party.
Back then, practically every time I would tell someone that I was a libertarian or a Libertarian Party member, he or she would respond with the following question, “You mean, like Lyndon LaRouche?”
I don’t know how LaRouche and libertarianism came to be associated with each other in people’s minds. Someone once told me that it was because of an article in some national magazine that incorrectly stated a close relationship between the two. I think it might also have been the “l” alliteration — libertarian and LaRouche.
It was a double irony because LaRouchies wanted nothing to do with libertarians, and libertarians wanted nothing to do with LaRouchies.
Sometimes out in public, I would be approached by LaRouchies who would be handing out pamphlets. As soon as I would mention libertarianism or Austrian economics (or Ludwig von Mises or Hayek), the LaRouchies would turn and walk away in disgust.
On the other hand, back then libertarians and the Libertarian Party wanted nothing to do with the strange amalgam of statist views and unusual conspiracy theories of the LaRouchies. For example, LaRouche maintained that libertarian Nobel Prize-winning economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek were operating a worldwide drug-trafficking operation. See here to understand more fully why Libertarians back then considered the LaRouche association to be such a big albatross around their necks.
Thus, libertarians and the Libertarian Party spent much of the 1990s and early 2000s doing everything they could to show people that there was no relationship whatsoever between Lyndon LaRouche and libertarianism and the Libertarian Party. I can’t tell you how many times I would respond to people’s question “You mean, like Lyndon LaRouche?” with my standard response: “Actually, that’s a myth. LaRouche has never had anything to do with libertarianism or the Libertarian Party. He’s actually a Democrat.”
By the time the late 2000s and 2010s arrived, libertarians and the Libertarian Party had, by and large, successfully separated themselves from the LaRouchies in the minds of the American people. When I would tell people that I was a libertarian, I no longer would hear, “You mean, like Lyndon LaRouche?” Instead, I would now hear, “You mean, like Ron Paul?”
The recent antiwar rally
Thus, you can imagine my shock and dismay when I saw that the Libertarian Party was co-sponsoring a much-publicized antiwar rally in Washington, D.C., last month that included among its featured speakers a woman named Diane Sare, who is none other than the Lyndon LaRouche candidate for U.S. Senate in New York.
The rally was being co-sponsored by a group called the People’s Party. I don’t know if it was the People’s Party or the Libertarian Party that included Sare as a speaker. Regardless of which one it was, I still asked myself: After so many years of trying to distance the libertarian movement and the Libertarian Party from the LaRouchies, why in the world would the Libertarian Party agree to co-sponsor an event that would include a LaRouchie as a featured speaker? Didn’t the right-wing hierarchy that controls and dominates the Libertarian Party realize that people could easily conclude, once again, that the LaRouchies were Libertarians?
During her talk at that Libertarian Party-People’s Party antiwar rally, Sare stated in part:
“LaRouche even became Ronald Reagan's back channel to the Soviet Union to make an offer of joint laser defense against nuclear missiles to end the threat of nuclear war, and in 1986 400 US Marshals, FBI agents and County Sheriffs assembled at LaRouche’s home with the intent to assassinate him. When Reagan called that off, they surrounded LaRouche’s office, stole thousands of papers and declared all of his publications involuntarily bankrupt. Meanwhile the news media in a coordinated fashion did their job: LaRouche was a ‘political extremist,’ a ‘crackpot,’ an ‘antisemite,’ a ‘fringe cult leader.’ The slander campaign was so effective that there might even be people here who cringed when I brought up his name. By 1989 LaRouche and a dozen of his associates were in prison.”
The New York L.P. convention
Unfortunately, this was not the first time that Sare has spoken at a Libertarian Party event. Just last spring, again much to my shock and dismay, she was a featured speaker at the state convention of the New York Libertarian Party, which I attended. When I asked someone there what in the world a LaRouchie was doing speaking at a L.P. convention, I was told that the New York Libertarian Party and the LaRouchies were working together to get signatures for ballot access for both the LaRouchies and the L.P., specifically for Sare’s 2024 U.S. Senate campaign and the 2024 L.P. presidential campaign.
Imagine what went through my mind: All those years trying to disassociate the Libertarian Party from the LaRouchies and, now, here was the New York Libertarian Party working together with the LaRouchies for ballot access. I could just see all those tens of thousands of New Yorkers being handed petitions by LaRouchies and Libertarians exhorting them to sign for both the LaRouchies and the Libertarians. I couldn’t help but believe that lots of those people who would be asked to sign those petitions would conclude, once again, that the LaRouchies and the Libertarians were one and the same.
An ethical conflict of interest
It was quite surreal, to say the least. But unfortunately, that wasn’t the only surreal part of the New York Libertarian Party state convention.
In order to get signatures for ballot access, the state party needed a stand-in presidential candidate for the petitions, given that the national Libertarian Party had still not nominated a presidential candidate. Longtime prominent Libertarian Party member Larry Sharpe threw his hat into the ring to be that stand-in presidential candidate, and he won the election.
However, at the same time, Sharpe — or one of his consulting companies — was serving as a paid consultant for a pro-Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., PAC and was helping Kennedy get onto the New York ballot as an Independent presidential candidate who would be running against the L.P. presidential candidate.
Thus, here you had Sharpe serving as the stand-in person for the Libertarian Party presidential nominee for purposes of securing ballot access and, at the same time, getting paid generously to help RFK, Jr., an opposing presidential candidate, get onto the ballot too.
In my opinion, it would be difficult to find a better example of an ethical conflict of interest than that, especially one that involves getting paid lots of money by one entity and not any money by the other. As it turned out — and, for me, it was no surprise — Kennedy secured more than enough signatures to get onto the New York ballot and the Libertarian Party didn’t even come close. (New York state courts later ordered Kennedy’s removal from the ballot for incorrectly stating that New York, rather than California, was his state of residence. Kennedy ultimately suspended his campaign and, like many Libertarian Party right-wingers, is now supporting Donald Trump for president.)
Who needs enemies?
Time will tell whether Libertarian Party and the LaRouchies will, once again, be conflated in people’s minds. If it happens again, as it did back in the 1990s and early 2000s, it will, in my opinion, be another disaster for the Libertarian Party.
In August 1995, Lyndon LaRouche stated: “From that point on, during the 1970s, until the end of COINTELPRO, we were constantly beset by the FBI.” Appearing to echo LaRouche, Libertarian Party chairperson Angela McArdle herself recently stated on X that “the Libertarian Party has been the victim of COINTELPRO tactics for many years, if not decades” and that “the operatives who are smearing and harassing us” might be “genuinely Fed-compromised individuals.”
But why would the FBI or other elements of the Deep State need to infiltrate the Libertarian Party and smear and harass the L.P. right-wing hierarchy? After all, it’s the right-wing hierarchy itself that has converted the image of the Libertarian Party to one that is now pro-Trump and pro-Republican (see here and here) and that has now chosen to associate the Libertarian Party with the LaRouchies. With friends like the L.P. right-wing, who needs the FBI, the Deep State, or other enemies? The right-wing element that controls and dominates the Libertarian Party is doing a fine job of destroying the Libertarian Party all by itself.