Libertarians Climbing Off the Fringe

It might not seem obvious, given the bumper stickers proclaiming “I’m Pro-choice on Everything” or the unabashed calls to repeal anti-drug laws, sell off national parks, toss out the income tax, eliminate gun control and privatize welfare.

But the Libertarian Party is edging, just a wee bit, toward the mainstream--at least in style if not in substance.

“The party has gone through its infancy and its adolescence,” said Bonnie Flickinger, a City Council member from Moreno Valley, Calif., and one of about 1,000 true believers gathered near the Capitol this weekend to help select a Libertarian presidential candidate. “Right now we’re on the verge of political adulthood.”

On Saturday, the 605 delegates to the Libertarians’ convention picked Harry Browne, 63, a financial advisor and opera devotee from Franklin, Tenn., to head their national ticket and spread the fervent message: Republicans and President Clinton may talk the talk of smaller government and personal freedom, but Libertarians will never veer from the walk.

Indeed, Libertarian purists, who do not believe the major parties can be vehicles for serious change, look with some contempt upon GOP rhetoric that often sounds like their own, with its emphasis on slashing bureaucracy and reducing the reach of the federal government.

“I don’t want to raise the hood and tinker with the engine,” declared Browne, an author and public speaker who defeated Rick Tompkins, a former talk-show host, and Irwin Schiff, an anti-tax activist, in a first-ballot victory with 69% of the vote. “I want to throw the engine out and replace it with a much smaller motor.”

In a prepared statement, Browne said that if elected president, he would make room in federal prisons for violent offenders by pardoning all inmates convicted of nonviolent federal offenses involving drugs, tax evasion and gun control. He also vowed that during his first day in the White House, he would end affirmative action programs and order all U.S. troops back from overseas.

“And then I will break for lunch, take the afternoon off and go to the movies.”

While it may strain logic to use the words “Libertarian” and “mainstream” in the same sentence, convention delegates acknowledged that their movement is evolving. Party officials now count 175 Libertarians in public office. The party has qualified for the presidential ballot in 33 states and aims to be on all 50 state ballots by August. Browne, who has raised and spent $750,000 in his campaign so far, is hoping to participate in candidate debates with Clinton and likely Republican nominee Bob Dole.

In one sign of a new pragmatism, Libertarians this week removed from their platform a “children’s rights” plank that had been interpreted by some as justifying the purchase of illegal drugs by minors. While members are overwhelmingly for abortion rights, the party adopted a “declaration of tolerance” for those who feel differently, and it resisted an effort to endorse same-sex marriages.

“This is a party that’s moving into the mainstream,” said Michael Tanner, a member of the platform committee, adding that this year’s emphasis is on “marketing ideas rather than fine-tuning philosophical dogma.”

Flickinger, a small-business owner in Riverside County who has been active in Libertarian circles for 20 years, recalled party activists as “more rebellious” in the past than they are today. “These delegates, I think, are more serious than the early Libertarians were.”

Still, it is the decidedly non-Libertarian movement launched by Ross Perot that has dominated third-party interest in the 1990s, a fact that hits a nerve with some Libertarians.

“He’s a tinkerer,” said William Winter, party spokesman, employing a term that is highly pejorative among the Libertarian faithful. Rather than relying heavily on “one fabulously well-to-do charismatic figure” such as Perot, Winter said, Libertarians are establishing a national base of local support.

“He’s a rich sugar-daddy building the party from the top down,” Winter said. “We’re a broad-based, grass-roots party trying to build from the bottom up.”

As for Clinton and Dole, Winter added: “We see them as the Bobsey Twins. They are identical. They are both establishment, big-government politicians.”

The tribulations of surviving in a society that doesn’t lack for regulation, while trying to live a life dedicated to personal freedom, were much on the mind of delegates gathered at the convention this week.

Brad Eichenstadt, 30, a management consultant from Independence, Mo., recalled with disapproval how the U.S. Park Police required Libertarians to aim their loudspeakers away from the Jefferson Memorial during their opening-night gathering. “We are truly in the belly of the beast,” he said.

His friend, Jackie Bradbury, of Parkville, Mo., noted that she works for a firm that advises small farm cooperatives how to comply with federal red tape on safety and the environment. “If libertarianism was the order of the day, this wouldn’t be necessary,” said Bradbury, 27. “I’d be out of a job.”

But Bradbury, wearing a red-white-and-blue hat with two American flags attached to the top, was quick to add that she wouldn’t mind, given the principles involved.