The question answered on Quora:

Neither.

The Republican Party will always be stuck in a spiral of stupidity and insane compromise. It is easy to see why. It is made of incompatible factions.

  • Conservatives are generally unreliable at making changes, even ones that are necessary. Wow, what a surprise. To be conservative of temperament means, basically, to be resistant to making changes. Remember what the perceptive G. K. Chesterton said of this: “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”
  • Populists of the social conservative bent are worse, for their basic commitments have almost nothing to do with freedom. I see no indication that they will ever do anything but always screw libertarians. Despite themselves being the victim of repeated betrayals. They let themselves be used and discarded by neocons for three decades, and now a huge of them just voted for Trump, the most flagrantly anti-modest, anti-traditionalist man since … TR? A more deluded bunch does exist in America (I will not name the indicated bloc, so don’t ask), but social conservatives are committed to fantasies of the past, so at variance to reality enough to be pure poison for liberty.
  • Populists of the pro-Trump variety are nationalist at core, and will always be easily manipulable by fear. Protectionism and preëmptive war and over-the-top crime-fighting are things they can only seem reasonable about in contrast to the cucks of the Far- and Center-Left.
  • Neocons are cultists, congenitally unable to muster up even scant realism about the limitations of the power of the U.S. military to remake the world over into something that Straussians would like (but would never confess openly in public, for Straussian reasons). One of the great joys of watching neocons in action is to witness their pretense to being reality-based repeatedly dashed upon the shores of real-world politics, governance, and strife. The book to read to understand the neocons is Leon Festinger’s When Prophecy Fails.
  • The shaky business coalition of Main Street and Wall Street is filled with players who just want to stave off utter disaster so they can go about doing business, picking up rents (sorry, it is the accepted economics term) where they can. They are for “free markets” when out of power, but in power they will exploit opportunities for subsidy, protection, and favorable government contracts.

So I don’t expect much of Republicans.

The Libertarian Party, on the other hand, I have much sympathy for. But it, alas, is made up mainly of people who don’t approve of doing politics … doing politics … very badly. They will always shoot themselves in their feet.

More importantly, the system is rigged against any minor party. And it seems to me that Americans give small, upstart parties just a few years to prove they can take down one of the big guys. It is th schoolyard bullying standard. The LP proved incapable of making  the established order even flinch in 1980. Nearly 40 years ago. And not even the over three million votes for the Johnson/Weld ticket really demonstrates that the LP is up to the task. Americans not unreasonably look upon the LP as losers. Weaklings. Crazies, suffering from delusions of … efficacy.

Ideally, the LP would be disbanded, replaced by many competing, cooperating libertarian groups influencing elections, initiatives and referendums, legislatures, courts, commissions, and public opinion in a variety of ways. After a few years with no party, a new party with a somewhat more narrow agenda could float candidates and aim to handle the biggest, most pressing issues.

But that won’t happen for a simple reason: a coördination problem. Libertarians are caught in a prisoner’s dilemma, and don’t have the imaginations to break themselves out of it. They are on a path-dependent course set to waste resources.

Still, the LP could do good, in the near future. How? By playing Agent of Chaos. It could engage in a major blackmail program against the major parties to negotiate the establishment of more open, alternative voting systems: incorruptible (get rid of most electronic systems) and novel (as in ranked choice voting and non-partisan ballot laws). This could be done by threatening to run in races targeting imperiled incumbents and close races, explicitly telling the GOP (or, on occasion, the Democracy) that Libertarians could run to peel voters off one side or the other, in exchange for electoral reform. The LP could threaten to undermine the GOP nationally, for instance.

But from what I can tell, Libertarians like to pretend they can beat the double-headed Juggernaut (the “two-party system”) and take down Leviathan (the dirigiste Churning State) on terms set up by that same Leviathan and Juggernaut. And the same thing keeping Libertarians from dissolving the party gracefully prevents them from doing anything that could have long-term good effects.

So, I wish the libertarians within the GOP … patience. For pushing the rock up the hill only to have it tumble back down will always be their Sisyphean task. I guess that is the case for the party-minded Libertarians, too — the difference being that in the GOP they will always be betrayed by competitive factions — those in power — while in the LP they will always be betrayed by those with no more power than themselves.

This could change, I suppose, if the libertarians could figure a way to introduce a Mule into the system, like Trump has been for the ever-flailing, incoherent GOP: an unpredictable, out-of-the-ether politician who can break through the stuck mindsets of enough people.

Trump was not and is not that Mule for libertarians, of course, though it has been fun to watch the pro-Trump libertarians pretend otherwise. A truly libertarian-minded Mule would have to be able to articulate to wide swaths of people (not just libertarians) the nature of the trap we find ourselves in. This takes intelligence. Imagination. Daring.

I don’t know of any prospects.

What would be better? A million Mules, people who understand the statist trap as well as the electoral dilemma and are willing to do more than merely vote for change. But not even most libertarians qualify (otherwise they would not be in either party) so … patience. I’ve never expected to see liberty in my lifetime. Humanity apparently has to work through its delusions according to a long story arc that has not quite played out yet.

Let us hope civilization survives that playing out.

twv