The MAGA takeover of the Libertarian Party?

Here is a puzzle: Why would the Libertarian Party, which will be nominating a presidential candidate at its national convention in Washington this month, invite former president Donald Trump — the Republican Party's presumptive 2024 nominee — to be its keynote speaker?

Here are four possible answers:

1. Libertarians are uninhibited by ordinary political rules and inviting a rival to address their convention is just the sort of eccentric move that appeals to them.

2. Party leaders, knowing Trump is more likely to be elected in November than their own nominee, want to encourage him to embrace libertarian ideals of shrinking government, expanding liberty, and curbing the welfare state.

3. Libertarian Party leaders never expected Trump to accept their invitation but will gladly exploit the publicity he brings them in order to promote their own issues and candidates.

4. The Libertarian Party has been taken over by hard-core MAGA supporters who want to help Trump win.

My money is on No. 4.

Though many of my instincts are small-l libertarian, I have never been a registered member of the Libertarian Party. On several occasions, however, I have voted for the party's presidential candidate.

In 1996, I was far more impressed with Harry Browne, the Libertarian Party standard-bearer, than with the other candidates on the ballot — Democratic president Bill Clinton, Republican senator Bob Dole, and billionaire businessman/crank Ross Perot. In a column that year, I marveled at a would-be president who was motivated not by ego or lust for power but by principle.

"Imagine — a candidacy based on individual freedom, economic liberty, parental authority, local control of local matters, an end to the national income tax, and a federal government that doesn't meddle in our lives," I wrote. "What American would vote for that?"

As it turned out, 485,759 of us Americans voted for that — one-half of 1 percent of the popular vote.

I voted Libertarian again in 2016. The Libertarian candidates that year — two prominent former Republican governors, Gary Johnson of New Mexico and Bill Weld of Massachusetts — were at best lukewarm in their libertarian commitments. But in terms of character, they were head and shoulders above the major-party nominees. Apparently quite a few #NeverTrump and #NeverHillary voters felt the same way, because the Johnson-Weld ticket drew 4.5 million votes, or nearly 3.3 percent of the nationwide popular vote.

The Libertarian nominee four years later, political activist and college professor Jo Jorgensen, didn't do nearly as well; she polled only 1.8 million votes, or a little more than 1 percent of the national total. But that, some claim, may have prevented Trump's reelection as president. In four states that Joe Biden narrowly carried — Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — Jorgensen's vote total was larger than Biden's margin of victory. Some argue that had there been no Libertarian option on the ballot, most of the votes Jorgensen amassed might have gone to Trump and sent him back to the White House.

To be clear, I don't subscribe to that theory. Many Jorgensen voters, including me, could not have been induced to cast a ballot for Trump under any circumstances. That wasn't just because of his character failings but also because Trump is no libertarian. Unlike Johnson and Weld, who could at least portray their views as libertarian-lite, Trump is affirmatively opposed to most libertarian principles. There is his long-standing animus against immigration, both legal and illegal. His decades-long hostility toward free trade and support for higher tariffs. His call to confiscate guns without waiting for due process. His declaration that a US president has untrammeled authority to order businesses to close. His vow to never "cut a single penny" from the crushingly unaffordable Social Security and Medicare programs. His repeated fawning over the world's dictators, including Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin. The nearly $8 trillion he added to the national debt during his presidency.

As the Libertarian Party itself declared in 2018, "Trump is the opposite of a Libertarian."

But that was the Libertarian Party then. The Libertarian Party now is a very different creature.

Beginning in 2017, a bigoted faction calling itself the Mises Caucus moved systematically and ruthlessly to take over the Libertarian Party. For years, the party had had a reputation for free-market fundamentalism, open immigration, drug legalization, and live-and-let-live tolerance. All that began to change as the new faction moved in and took over the party's communications channels. Suddenly the Libertarian Party was employing some of the ugliest tropes in the alt-right lexicon.

"The caucus began taking over state parties, packing members into sparsely attended conventions," recounts Andy Craig in the Daily Beast. "As they did so, they quickly started attracting negative attention for saying … things that sounded less like liberty and more like the tiki torch brigade." For example, Libertarian Party social media posts equated COVID-19 vaccines to the Holocaust with yellow Star of David patches, denounced Pride Month as "degeneracy," told a Black politician she should pick cotton or go back to Africa, and pronounced it "obviously correct" that "the end of apartheid destroy[ed] South Africa."

The move by the Mises Caucus to take control of the Libertarian Party seems to have begun immediately after the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. The violence of that episode was promptly condemned by the Libertarian Party's national committee, which released a strong statement declaring bigotry, in the words of the party platform, "irrational and repugnant." The statement affirmed that "there is no room for racists and bigots in the Libertarian Party."

To some on the far-right fringe of the movement, that was intolerable. As Joshua Eakle, a longtime libertarian activist and former Libertarian Party state chairman, recounted in an eye-opening thread on X last week, the statement denouncing the Charlottesville bigots infuriated some extremists, who launched an insurgency to take over the party for the Trumpian right. By 2022, that takeover was largely complete. An early priority of the new administration was repealing the platform language condemning bigotry. By the thousands, traditional Libertarian Party leaders and dues-paying members quit or were forced out. What remains of the party's national committee, Eakle wrote, "has become nothing more than a satellite of MAGA authoritarianism."

Perhaps there will be a movement by genuine lovers of liberty to take back the Libertarian Party from the bigots who have usurped it. If so, I will cheer from the sidelines. But as long as the party is in the hands of its current operators, the odds of my voting for a Libertarian alternative to Trump and Biden is nil.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission."