[Texgreen] State Sharing and Structure: Learning from Libertarians

[David Pollard]

note: This was posted by (and fwded with permission of) Phil Huckelberry
a NC member from Illinois who had the opportunity to talk with one of the
leaders of his state's Libertarian Party about party structure and growth.
I found it fascinating and thought that some of y'all who are interested in
growing the GPTX would to. -dave

State Sharing and Structure: Learning from Libertarians
To: natlcomvotes@green.gpus.org

As we all know, the "other third party" that might arguably claim to be at 
about the same organizational level is the Libertarian Party (they're the 
ones who would make the argument, of course.)

At the Illinois Renewable Energy Fair this weekend, our table was plopped 
next to the Libertarian table (and also, excitingly, across from the 
Republicans for Environmental Protection and the Ogle County Democrats... 
go figure, we got along smashingly with the Republican and the Libertarians 
and didn't speak to the Democrats as well.  I wonder if it was something we 
said...)

Anyway, the opportunity availed itself to have a conversation about 
building third parties with the Executive Director of the Libertarian Party 
of Illinois.  Some of what came out of this discussion is actually relevant 
to what we're currently discussing.

Turns out that a lot of what we're going through, the Libertarians are 
going through as well... but worse.  There's a huge schism within 
Libertarian ranks between hardcore government-out-of-everything-period 
Libertarians and what for lack of a better way to put it I would call 
"moderate" or "sane" Libertarians who believe the hard-line message might 
have something to do with their party going nowhere for the last 30 years.

One of the results of this schism is that a lot of the current Libertarian 
leadership has come from the ranks of the people who refused to engage in 
the fight at all.  This "middle ground" between the hard-liners and 
moderates seems to find the ideological debate fairly irrelevant to the 
core issue of building the party up.

One development from this rancor in the Libertarian ranks is that the 
national Libertarian Party has decided to change the way it deals with 
party membership and financing.  The national Libertarian Party now has a 
dues-free membership setup, the idea being that this will allow them to 
develop a much larger list of names and do internal fundraising 
accordingly.  One of the side effects of this is that, since there is no 
longer a formal dues system at the national level, there is no longer any 
state sharing of dues.

It seems that many of the state chapters of the Libertarian Party relied 
primarily on the state sharing program with the national party.  With that 
program taken away, many state parties opted not to pursue ballot access 
this year.  The Libertarians in Illinois have almost no candidates this year.

The Libertarians have traditionally been driven by a top-down money flow, 
which explains why even without any kind of serious grassroots presence 
they've typically done better than us on ballot access.  With a shift to a 
membership-oriented focus where they're more aggressively soliciting 
members as an intermediary step to soliciting funds, it seems on the one 
hand that they're taking a step toward a more grassroots approach, but on 
the other, it seems that with the impetus on state and local groups to do 
their own fundraising, the national party may actually wind up in control 
of a larger pool of money at least at first because it's pretty much the 
only facet with the ability to raise funds.  In other words, the party 
becomes more membership-driven, but the finances are more likely to stay at 
the top.

The contrast with us is very interesting.  Even with all the talk of state 
sharing, the majority of Green Party dollars in the country never go 
through GPUS at all.  At the same time, we've done very little systemic on 
a state by state basis to build up the nominal financial strength of the 
national party.

I believe that the approach the Libertarians are using is actually going to 
hurt them.  Suddenly state parties are cash-starved and lack the necessary 
infrastructure to do anything about it.  This is at a point in time where 
there's already some tension within their party.

Meanwhile, our situation is that the national party is cash-starved, but so 
too are several of the state parties.  But the state parties have never 
been especially reliant on GPUS for financial aid.  The state parties, in 
effect, grew up being told they needed to be self-sufficient.

With this as a backdrop, what we are now experiencing within GPUS is sort 
of an unstated but steady push to make the national organization stronger 
and to bring weaker state parties along with it.  There is talk of a State 
Support Committee, major ballot access needs are being identified, and 
action committees are beginning to articulate a much broader role for the 
national party.  The thing is, that membership base that the Libertarians 
are now seeking to build so they can have what they feel will be a more 
sustainable financial base, that's something we already have.  The catch is 
that we haven't necessarily done very much with this basic resource.

Some people have suggested that the next step ought to be state parties 
giving the national party their lists.  I think this makes some sense, but 
I also think we need to be thinking about a different approach.  I think 
what we really need to be emphasizing is state party empowerment.  Many of 
our state parties need central _guidance_ that they aren't receiving 
because structurally we're not really set up to provide that guidance.

I think it's high time we took the plunge.  It's time to seriously 
reconsider the formal role of the national party and to make it 
emphatically clear that GPUS is here in large part to provide necessary 
services to state parties.  The solution is not the top-down approach the 
Libertarians have used in the past, nor is it along the lines of their 
solution to their problems.  But the solution also isn't this aloof 
hands-off approach Greens have traditionally used.

The problem as I see it is not simply the direction in which work flows 
(top-down versus bottom-up) but also in the sense of what the graph is upon 
which work is flowing.  Traditional anti-hierarchical thought posits that 
most decision-making occurs at a broad base as opposed to a skinny top.  In 
three dimensions, this model would look like a pyramid, or perhaps mor 
elegantly, a cone, with a broad base and just a point at the top.  I submit 
that the cone model is obsolete.  Consider instead that the party is a 
cylinder, or a slightly acute frustrum, where there's nearly as many people 
"at the top" as "at the bottom", and the top isn't a traditional 
hierarchical top where a small number of people provide instructions to a 
large number at the bottom, but instead that the people at the top are 
_also at the bottom_.

Short-term, the national party needs to get some work done to lay the 
groundwork for actualizing this.  We need to improve our Mission Statement, 
and we need to come up with a meaningful short-term solution for our 
financial difficulties.  But medium-term, we need to be looking toward an 
expansion of the role of the national party toward providing substantial 
services to state and local parties and Green candidates, and we need to be 
developing our finance and fundraising apparatus with that vision in mind.

By mid-2007, we should have a bustling national organization, with action 
committees actively engaged in work across the country, networking with 
Green groups at the state and local level, with GPUS-assisted ballot drives 
underway in states where we know that assistance is needed (e.g. Arizona) 
and GPUS-led ballot drives underway in states that need even more 
assistance (e.g. Kansas), with a unified commitment to run a strong 
presidential campaign in 2008 but to simultaneously run our largest overall 
slate of candidates yet for offices of all sizes across the 
country.  Everything I'm suggesting is eminently doable if we just decide 
to make it happen and do the work to actualize it.

Even though most of what I think we have to learn from the Libertarians is 
what _not_ to do, it can still help provide a larger contextual construct 
upon which to develop a realistic plan for what we _should_ do.

So:  given that the NC is a highly reactive body due to the way in which it 
is constituted, what is the best way to approach making serious progress on 
some of these ideas?

Phil Huckelberry
Illinois Green Party