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?
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 hardcore 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 candidates. 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.
 The Libertarian Party announced on social media that former president Donald Trump would be the lead speaker at its convention this month. |
I voted Libertarian again in 2016, unable to stomach the idea of casting a ballot for such dreadful candidates as Trump or Hillary Clinton. 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 longstanding 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 spokesmen 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 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.
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When the Ivy League had no problem with Nazis
For many Americans, it has come as a shock to see numerous individuals at leading universities proclaim their hatred of Israel and echo Hamas's venomous messages.
There have been scenes of antisemitic mobs attacking Jewish students. Of demonstrators chanting "Hamas, we love you!" Some campus organizations couldn't wait to celebrate the horrific Oct. 7 massacre. At Harvard alone, more than 30 student groups greeted news of the pogrom with a declaration holding Israel "entirely responsible" for the rape and grisly killings of its civilians. It took a humiliating interrogation at a congressional hearing before some university presidents could finally bring themselves to condemn the upwelling of Jew-hatred within their institutions.
College life wasn't like this for those who matriculated in the 1970s and 1980s. Jewish students then were as welcome on campus as any others, and episodes of overt bigotry against them were virtually unheard of. Not until the beginning of this century did the far left's intellectual and political assault on Israel and Zionism become so vicious. In a 2002 essay, Professor Laurie Zoloth at San Francisco State University described how her university was becoming "a venue for hate speech and antisemitism." Lawrence Summers, Harvard's then-president, raised an alarm about the "profoundly anti-Israel views [that] are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities." In 2004, a group of Jewish students at Columbia made a film documenting the intimidation and disdain they were encountering in the school's Middle East Studies department.
Yet antisemitism in academia isn't new. Its roots run deep at some of the nation's most prestigious schools. Many people know that a century ago administrators at Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale imposed rigorous quotas to slash the number of Jewish students they admitted.
Less well known, however, is the reaction in elite academic circles to the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1933. Far from being horrified by the evils of the Nazi dictatorship, especially its ferocious persecution of Germany's Jews, many American universities regarded Hitler's regime with tolerance or even admiration. That history was uncovered by University of Oklahoma historian Stephen H. Norwood in a groundbreaking 2009 work, "The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower." An acclaimed work of scholarship, it documented in startling detail the extent to which professors, administrators, and students at some of the nation's best-known colleges not only refused to raise an outcry about the atrocities underway in Nazi Germany, but in many cases rebuked or silenced those who did.
 Ernst Hanfstaengl, a Nazi Party official and early supporter of Adolf Hitler, raised his arm during a procession of alumni at the 1934 Harvard commencement. |
The pattern was set by James Bryant Conant, who became Harvard's president in 1933. For five years, wrote Norwood, Conant refused to speak out against Nazism when his condemnation would have carried weight. He welcomed Ernst Hanfstaengl, a high Nazi official and close Hitler confidant who was a Harvard alumnus, to take part in the university's commencement festivities in June 1934. In addition, Conant
permitted Nazi Germany's consul general in Boston to place a wreath bearing the swastika emblem in the university chapel. Conant sent a delegate from Harvard to the University of Heidelberg's 550th anniversary pageant in June 1936. . . . In providing a friendly welcome to Nazi leader Hanfstaengl, President Conant and others prominently affiliated with Harvard communicated to the Hitler government that boycotts intended to destroy Jewish businesses, the dismissal of Jews from the professions, and savage beatings of Jews were not their concern....
President Conant remained publicly indifferent to the persecution of Jews in Europe and failed to speak out against it until after Kristallnacht, in November 1938."
Harvard's president wasn't alone in his benign regard for the Third Reich.
Joseph Gray, the chancellor of American University in Washington, D.C., traveled to Nazi Germany in 1936 and returned filled with praise. "Gray declared that Hitler had restored hope to a troubled nation," Norwood wrote. "'Everybody is working in Germany,' he gushed, liberal education was available, and the cities were 'amazingly clean' without beggars."
In New York, Columbia University's renowned president, Nicholas Murray Butler, wasn't content merely to remain silent about the horrors taking place under Hitler. "On several occasions," Norwood found, "Butler lashed out viciously against Columbia students who publicly protested Nazi crimes." He waved away calls by Jewish and human rights organizations to boycott Nazi shipping. "Between 1934 and 1937, President Butler regularly booked passage for trans-Atlantic voyages on North German Lloyd liners that flew the swastika flag, and he encouraged Columbia to engage in academic exchanges with Nazi Germany." Butler did not hesitate to patronize the German ocean liners even after they dismissed all their Jewish employees.
At the elite women's colleges known as the "Seven Sisters" — Vassar, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Barnard — there was a similarly "sanguine view of Nazi Germany," Norwood wrote. In 1937, Wellesley's president Mildred McAfee recruited a pro-Nazi professor, Lilli Burger, to join the college's German Department. A "staunch supporter of Hitler," Burger used her time on campus to extol Hitler's "great work" and assure the student newspaper that reports of anti-Jewish persecution were greatly exaggerated.
The head of Barnard also had words of praise for what was underway in Germany. Virginia Gildersleeve returned from a trip to Europe urging Americans to recognize the validity of Hitler's quest for new territories and applauding the Nazi regime for allowing "a certain proportion of Jews" to study in universities. "It did not seem to bother her that the Jewish student quota was a minuscule 1 percent," observed Norwood, perhaps because she too had "implemented procedures designed to significantly reduce Jewish admissions to Barnard."
At Smith College, organizers were eager to invite a speaker who could present, as the student paper put it, "the pro-Nazi side of the German picture neglected by the American press." That speaker, Dr. Hans Orth, told his audience that Jews had pushed Aryans out of jobs and that Germans rightly objected to being ruled by "a foreign race." Apparently some of those who attended the event found Orth's claims unconvincing. Wrote Norwood:
The student newspaper at Smith College complained that the audience during the question period . . . had displayed "a singular lack of open-mindedness." The editors were annoyed that it had refused "to listen courteously to the young German's sincere vindication of the Hitler regime."
There are differences between the 1930s and the 2020s, of course. No one in academe sings the praises of Adolf Hitler anymore. Instead protesters at Columbia tell identifiably Jewish students to "go back to Poland," demonstrators at Northeastern and MIT call for an "intifada revolution," a Cornell professor proclaims himself "exhilarated" by the Oct. 7 butchery, a Hezbollah flag is flown at Princeton, and a Jewish student at Yale is hit in the eye with a flagpole bearing a Palestinian. Despite everything that is different from 90 years ago, it is once again the case that at exalted American colleges, there is open and exuberant support for the world's most murderous Jew-haters. Some things don't change.
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The birth of the Ninth
I once described being tagged on a social media post by someone who invited followers to answer this question: "You have a time machine, and can travel to see one artist in concert, any location, any time. Where would you go?"
Most of the responses focused on legendary rock 'n' roll performances, such as Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison or Bruce Springsteen's 1974 show at the Harvard Square Theater.
Not I.
"I'm programming the time machine," I wrote, "for May 7, 1824 — Vienna — the premiere of Ludwig van Beethoven's 9th Symphony, with Beethoven himself conducting."
It was 200 years ago today that Beethoven's final symphony — now regarded as one of the supreme achievements of Western music — had its debut. By all accounts it was a great occasion. Not only was the symphony written for the largest orchestra Beethoven had ever employed, it was also the first to incorporate vocal soloists and a chorus. The concert marked the composer's first appearance on stage in 12 years, and musical Vienna was wild with anticipation.
By that point in his life, Beethoven was completely deaf, so while he stood on stage, marking time and turning the pages of the score, he was unable to hear a sound. The performance was a triumph and the spectators were ecstatic. But Beethoven could not hear the tumultuous applause. Only when one of the singers turned him around did he see the audience giving him one rapturous ovation after another.
Two centuries later, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and especially its "Ode to Joy" choral section, remains one of the most revered musical works of all time. It is also an individual achievement so transcendent — a symphony composed by a man who could not hear — as to be almost beyond imagination. What wouldn't I give to travel back in time to see that!
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What I Wrote Then
25 years ago on the op-ed page
From "Big lies about Big Tobacco" May 10, 1999:
What [Robert] Levy and [Rosalind] Marimont call "the granddaddy of all tobacco lies" comes from a 1993 report of the Centers for Disease Control which estimated that 419,000 Americans had died in 1990 of diseases attributable to smoking. A disease was attributed to smoking if the risk of dying from it was greater for smokers than for nonsmokers. But here's the rub: The CDC included in its death toll diseases for which the relative risk to smokers was statistically insignificant.
It is reasonable to claim that a smoker's lung cancer death was smoking-related, inasmuch as a smoker is 23 times more likely to die of that disease than a nonsmoker. But it is not reasonable to make the same claim for cancer of the pancreas, since the relative risk of that disease for smokers is minuscule — between 1.1 and 1.8 (i.e., a smoker isn't even twice as likely as a nonsmoker to contract pancreatic cancer.) The National Cancer Institute . . . cautions against relying on relative risks of less than 2. "Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias, or effects of confounding factors not evident."
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