Rebranding a Borrowed Line

In 1840 a handful of abolitionists meeting in Albany nominated James G. Birney for president under the name Liberty Party. They had no ballot lines, no money and almost no votes, under seven thousand that fall. They built the party anyway, around the one thing they believed, and in 1844 it drew about sixty-two thousand votes, enough in New York to matter. By 1848 most of its members had walked into the Free Soil Party, carrying their cause with them and leaving the name behind.

On October 27 Michael Heise, who founded the Libertarian Party’s Mises Caucus in 2017, announced a party with nearly the same name and the opposite method. The American Liberty Party doesn’t propose to build anything. Its website states the plan in one line: “Take control of, repurpose, rebrand, and rename the Libertarian Party.” A week later, on November 3, the podcaster and former Evergreen State biologist Bret Weinstein told the audience of his DarkHorse Podcast that he had joined the effort. “The idea is a friendly takeover of the Libertarian Party,” he said, in partnership with the Mises Caucus, “the sort of hard-headed folks who have libertarian values.” The party’s slogan is “The new home for the America First movement.”

The plan

The strategy rests on something the Libertarian Party has and few small parties do: ballot lines, won state by state over fifty years of petitions and lawsuits. Starting a party from nothing, as Birney’s did, means years of collecting signatures before a single candidate appears on a ballot. The American Liberty Party’s page “So What’s the Plan?” argues that taking over the line that already exists is faster and cheaper, and it describes the Libertarian Party’s present condition as making the job “almost too easy.”

The Mises Caucus has done this once. At the Libertarian convention in Reno in 2022 it won every leadership position on the national committee, and Angela McArdle became chair with more than 69 percent of the vote. State parties in New Mexico, Virginia and Massachusetts disaffiliated rather than serve under it. In 2024 McArdle invited Donald Trump to address the national convention, where the delegates booed him, and the caucus’s candidate for president lost the nomination to Chase Oliver. In January 2025 McArdle resigned. The caucus put Heise forward to succeed her, and on February 2 the national committee chose Steven Nekhaila instead, nine votes to six, with six members the caucus had backed voting against its founder. Reason called it “the collapse of Mises control over the Libertarian Party at the national level.” In October 2026 the national committee sued McArdle, seeking up to a million dollars, after an internal investigation found she had likely breached her fiduciary duties.

So the thinking is that the second takeover has to be won from the floor. The plan names the Libertarian national convention in El Paso, scheduled for February 18 to 21, 2028, and asks supporters to join the party and attend as delegates. Winning the chair takes a majority. Renaming the party and making what the site calls “the radical bylaw changes and rebranding needed to make that vehicle ready to run” takes two-thirds of the delegates. Heise has said the party has “like 8500 members,” and, by Jake Porter’s account, that one episode of Tucker Carlson’s show could be “game over” for it.

Heise laid out two paths in May. In the first, Thomas Massie runs for president as a Republican. In the second, the renamed party holds its nomination open until about two weeks before the Republican convention, keeping its ballot lines ready for whoever the Republicans turn away.

The leverage

The plan’s most distinctive line is “Leverage power comes before electoral power.” Once in control, the site says, the party “does not need to be rigidly partisan.” It could endorse a Republican or a Democrat where that helps, run its own candidate where that helps more, and use its place on the ballot, along with the “heavy-hitters” in its network, to win concessions from both.

There are precedents, and some of them worked. The Anti-Rent Ticket told how Hudson Valley tenants in 1846 elected a Whig governor and a Democratic lieutenant governor on a single slate, by promising their votes to whichever candidate would end the manor leases. Silver Walkout followed Henry Teller’s Silver Republicans in 1896 onto fusion tickets across the Mountain West. Each of those movements had a single demand that a candidate could meet, rents or silver, and a body of voters who would move together to get it. Leverage of that kind depends on the voters, not on the ballot line. A line with nobody behind it is a place to print a name.

The American Liberty Party’s list of demands is longer: America First, anti-corruption, free speech, no new wars, health freedom and the Second Amendment. The site says a coalition promised these in 2024 and abandoned them. It names Massie and Joe Kent as the best representatives of those principles, and says both were “cast out.”

What America First means

The phrase is older than its current owners. Woodrow Wilson used it in 1916 for neutrality in the European war, and Warren Harding in 1920. The America First Committee, founded in 1940 to keep the country out of the second war, grew to some 800,000 paying members before Pearl Harbor ended it, and its best-known speaker, Charles Lindbergh, stained it for a generation in Des Moines in September 1941 by naming “the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration” as the groups pushing the country toward war. Pat Buchanan revived the phrase in his campaigns of the 1990s and carried it into the Reform Party in 2000. Donald Trump took it up in 2016 and made it the theme of his inaugural address: “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first.”

Today it names a bundle. At home it means tariffs set by proclamation to protect national industry, sharp limits on immigration and mass deportation, suspicion of the agencies, universities and press the movement calls the establishment, and, beside those, the health-freedom cause that grew up around vaccine mandates. Abroad it means foreign aid cut back and made conditional, allies told to pay their own way, and a stated distaste for wars that serve no narrow national interest. That last item has split the movement. When the administration struck Iran’s nuclear sites in 2025 and went to war with Iran this year, Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon called it a betrayal of America First, and Trump answered that he was the one who had “developed” it. Massie broke with the president over the war, as he had over the tariffs and the spending bill, and lost his primary to a challenger Trump endorsed. The American Liberty Party is built for the half of the movement that took the restraint seriously, and “no new wars” is that half’s plank.

Much of the rest of the bundle runs against the party it means to take over. The Libertarian platform has long called for free trade and holds that people should “not be unreasonably constrained by government in the crossing of political boundaries.” America First has made tariffs and the border its signatures.

The intentions

What the renamed party would stand for is plainer in what its founders say than in what its site lists. “The new party wont be explicitly libertarian,” Heise wrote in May. Weinstein, who in 2020 proposed Unity 2020, a ticket pairing a candidate of the left with one of the right, describes the audience as the “politically homeless.” Porter, a Libertarian who opposes the takeover, compares the result to the Reform Party, which Ross Perot built in 1996 and Pat Buchanan took over in 2000, after which its nominee won less than half of one percent and the party split.

The person the plan is built around hasn’t said he wants it. Massie lost his Kentucky primary on May 19 to Ed Gallrein, whom Trump endorsed, and After the Shellacking followed what he did with the months he had left. He has filed to run for his old House seat in 2028. Weinstein’s site uses “recruit Massie” rather than “draft,” and Weinstein was careful on the podcast: Massie is “aware of it and is supportive of what we are doing,” he said, and he wasn’t claiming Massie had agreed to anything. Massie, he added, “paid a very high price for his integrity in the public sphere.”

Three things at once

The plan wants three things from the Libertarian Party: its ballot lines, a new identity, and the members who hold the votes. It can have two.

It can keep the lines and the members by leaving the identity alone, which is the party that exists now. It can keep the lines and take the new identity, if enough new members arrive to outvote the old ones, and then most of the old ones leave, as New Mexico’s and Virginia’s did in 2022. Or it can keep the members and the new identity by persuading them, in which case the lines are a bonus and the takeover a courtesy. The two-thirds rule is the place where these collide. Opponents in El Paso need only a little more than a third of the delegates to block the new name and the new bylaws, and groups such as the Classical Liberal Caucus and LPAlliance are already counting. The site doesn’t say how a renamed party would keep each state’s ballot line under that state’s own rules.

A party in form

The Libertarian Party’s numbers sound larger than its life. More than 700,000 Americans are registered to vote as Libertarians, and the national party’s rolls carry about 237,000 names of people who joined at one time or another. The members who pay to belong are far fewer. At the end of 2025 the party counted 9,090 sustaining members, and 3,308 of those were life members whose dues were paid once, many of them decades ago. George Phillies, a longtime Libertarian who tracks the monthly reports, estimated that about 6,000 were paying now, and that about 40 percent let their membership lapse when it came due. One reader of his report asked whether anyone had ever taken the dead off the life-member list.

Behind those figures is a long arc of hope and letdown. David Nolan, who drew the chart this collection keeps returning to, founded the party in Colorado in 1971, and its first members, where they are still living, are in their eighties. Gary Johnson drew nearly four and a half million votes in 2016, 3.3 percent, the best showing in the party’s history, in a year when both major nominees were unusually disliked. Jo Jorgensen won 1.2 percent in 2020 and Chase Oliver about 0.4 percent in 2024. In Indiana, Donald Rainwater won more than 11 percent for governor in 2020 and less than 5 percent in 2024. Many who joined in a good year drifted away after a run of elections in which no Libertarian reached Congress or a governor’s office and the press noticed the party mostly when it quarreled. Others simply grew old, and some left in 2022 with the state parties that wouldn’t serve under the Mises Caucus.

The disillusion is older than any of them. Murray Rothbard, who had done as much as anyone to give the party its ideas and its radical caucus, walked out in 1989. The next spring the first issue of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report carried his “Farewell Speeches to the Alabama LP,” a requiem for the party effort, beside an editorial with Lew Rockwell judging that the libertarian movement was shrinking, not growing. The Mises Caucus takes its name from Rothbard’s teacher and much of its program from Rothbard, and it has published essays under the banner “Rothbard was right.” Its founder is now writing a farewell of his own, in the form of a takeover.

What remains is mostly the people who keep the machinery running: national and state committee members, bylaws and platform committees, a judicial committee that hears appeals, and a convention every two years at which roughly a thousand delegates elect officers and amend the platform. Much of that work faces inward. At this May’s convention the delegates voted to disaffiliate the party’s own New Hampshire affiliate, and Evan McMahon, the new chair, set a goal of 66,000 sustaining members by 2028, seven times what the party has. For many who still do the work, keeping a party’s offices filled has become a pursuit in its own right, the way the Society for Creative Anachronism keeps kingdoms with crowned heads and heralds who rule nothing outside their own tournaments. They draft planks, run credentials and hold elections with real care, and almost none of it reaches a voter.

That is the condition the American Liberty Party counts on, and it explains why its founders call the job “almost too easy.” A party whose convention can be decided by a few hundred votes, and whose dues-paying membership would fit in a single high-school gym, can be taken by anyone able to fill the hall. Heise’s line about one episode of Tucker Carlson’s show describes that arithmetic plainly. The ballot lines are still there, kept alive state by state by the remaining few who collect the signatures, and they are the one part of the party that still matters to someone outside it.

What a ballot line carries

Tragedy of the Commons Word argued that a word is a commons, worn down when each user borrows its reputation for something else. A ballot line is a commons of the same kind. The Libertarian line exists because thousands of people who believed a particular thing about government gathered signatures for it in parking lots for half a century. Its value to the American Liberty Party is what those people built, and the plan is to keep the value while changing what it stands for.

Some of what the new party wants this collection wants too. No new wars, free speech and an end to the government’s habit of rewarding its friends are causes Massie has carried, often alone and sometimes with Ro Khanna on the other side of the aisle. Social Liberty 2027: The Opening asked whether the Republicans’ liberty faction should be helped to rebuild inside its party or offered a home outside it. The American Liberty Party answers with a third choice, a home taken from someone else. And America First is a nationalism. It asks what a government should do for its nation, where liberty, as these essays use the word, asks what a government shouldn’t do to its people, and the two answers sometimes coincide and often don’t.

Birney’s party gave up its name in 1848 and kept its cause. The American Liberty Party proposes to keep a name’s ballot lines and give up the cause they were built for, and the delegates in El Paso, in February 2028, will decide whether a third of them mind.

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A note on how this piece was written: every argument, source, and structural decision in this piece is ours. We chose the examples, worked out the logic connecting them, and directed what each paragraph needed to say. The sentences themselves were drafted with AI assistance from that outline and then edited by hand. We’d rather say that plainly than have a reader guess at it.

Sources: American Liberty Party, So What’s the Plan?; Independent Political Report, Mises Caucus Launches American Liberty Party, Seeks to Draft Thomas Massie for President (October 27, 2026); Daily Caller, Bret Weinstein Unveils New Challenger To Washington’s Uniparty — And It Involves Thomas Massie (November 3, 2026); Jake Porter, The Next Takeover (November 2026); Palm Beach Examiner, American Liberty Party Attempts Takeover of the Libertarian Party (November 7, 2026); Charles Burris, Possible Third Parties: The Liberty Party or The American Liberty Party, LRC Blog (November 7, 2026); Robert Chapman, Massie and Khanna Have a Better Offer Than MAGA With a New Name, Cosmopolity (November 8, 2026); Wikipedia, America First (policy); Donald Trump, inaugural address (January 20, 2017); Charles Lindbergh, address to an America First rally in Des Moines (September 11, 1941); Libertarian Party, Platform, section on free trade and migration; George Phillies, LPUS Membership Continues Decline, Third Party Watch (January 21, 2026); Reason, New Libertarian Party Chair Evan McMahon has no interest in playing kingmaker (May 29, 2026); Federal Election Commission, official presidential election results for 2016, 2020 and 2024; Murray N. Rothbard, “Farewell Speeches to the Alabama LP” and, with Lew Rockwell, “Why The Report?”, Rothbard-Rockwell Report 1, no. 1 (April 1990); Mises Caucus, Rothbard Was Right (August 14, 2020); KFOX14, El Paso selected to host 2028 Libertarian National Convention after close vote; Wikipedia, Mises Caucus and Steven Nekhaila.