As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian.
Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace.
In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now.
Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site.
Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson.
A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the web site is "Smaller Government, Lower Taxes, More Freedom" -- identical to right-wing Republican (and notorious culture-warrior) Dick Armey's FreedomWorks web site, which advocates "Lower Taxes, Less Government, More Freedom."
Mix in the Barr candidacy, the Root VP candidacy, Bill Redpath's pandering to the right wing (and abandonment of Libertarian principles on war and civil liberties) in his "list of promises to voters," and the efforts to replace the LP platform with a Republican Lite platform, and it's increasingly difficult to differentiate the Libertarian National Committee from the GOP -- except that the LNC lost all the time and the GOP lost only most of the time this year.
Organizations that abandon their core mission to become pale shadows of the competition are on their way to irrelevance. Every step of the way the LP takes in this direction is another step towards the glue factory -- as recent fundraising problems and fading relevance in the media indicate.
It's not yet too late to rescue the LNC and bring it back to strength, but time is running out.
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