This is Part 1 of a 2 part series. This part deals with my frustrations with the current positioning and approaches of the Libertarian Party.
During the 2012 electoral cycle I continued my life-long approach to politics of remaining skeptical of and divorced from mass-market political parties. I learned a long time ago back in the UK that the two major parties in a country tend to form a cozy duopoly, both benefitting from The System. This is no different in the modern USA. Accordingly, I voted Libertarian in several key electoral areas. I voted for Gary Johnson for President (and donated money to his campaign), and voted Libertarian in a number of state and local electoral races.
However, since the election, I have been forced to re-appraise my level of support for the Libertarian Party, mainly as a result of reading some of the comments of local LP members. I believe that the Libertarian Party, with its current approaches to governance, and its attitude to building membership, is doomed to remain a novelty on the fringes of American politics.

The underlying challenge with the LP is that they have an attitude that they will accept support from anybody, even if those people are authoritarians and wackadoodles, crackpots and wolves in sheep's clothing.
There are a lot of GOP partisans who think of themselves as libertarians. I have had discussions with them in the past. They always slowly unravel in front of you when you test their committment to libertarian principles by asking them whether they support the War On Some Drugs, massive military spending, equal rights for gay people. etc. etc.
I'm not generally in favour of strict ideological purity tests if you want to be a mass-market political party, since that tends to reduce your pool of possible members, but if you go to the opposite extreme and accept any wackadoodle as a member because you simply think in terms of needing more members, sooner or later you are going to have to engage in major damage limitation after those wackadoodles damage the party publicly with some incendiary collection of thoughts or actions.
Right now, the LP is toxic to many progressives because its economic liberty arguments are incoherent and read like an apologia for capitalist excess, and it's constitutional argument airtime is being dominated in many states (including my residence state of Texas) by a bunch of people most of whose instincts hover somewhere between secession and setting up a self-governing commune in the Middle Of Nowhere because they can't get their way. What seems to be absent from the LP is any significant outreach based on civil liberties, which seem to be regarded by many libertarians as something that will magically appear once Government Is Off Our Backs. The current libertarian airtime is dominated by an obsession with "rights", with little or no mention of the obvious corollary that with rights come responsibilities. The Constitional concept of inalienable rights appears to have been twisted into a view that any right written in the Constitution is absolute, and that any attempt to set boundaries on the right is automatically definable as "fascism", "communism", "government overreach" etc. etc. This is mixed together with some decidedly dystopian views and fantasies about the future of the USA, which, if I believe these people, appears to be in such a fragile state that it is a miracle to me how this country survived through World War I and World War II, amongst other adolescent growing pains. Co-morbid with the adoption of dystopian fears is a "closet revolutionary" mindset which manifests itself in a chest-beating tendency to dare "The Government" to come get their guns/money/freedoms etc. I sometimes feel I have just been parachuted into America circa 1800, to judge by some of the rhetoric on display.

I well remember my utter amazement when I stuck my toes into the water of college political groupings in the UK in the early 1970's. All of the various groupings seemed to me to be united by only two things - their total hatred and contempt for each other, and their contempt for "the sheeple" (i.e. any non-members) who were generally regarded as objects of pity for their inability to understand how effing brilliant their political philosophy was. The groupings were dominated by intellectuals who spoke in often-abstract terms about concepts that were barely explicable to non-members. It was the worst kind of intellectual navel-gazing.
Libertarianism has some of the same issues. Like many movements founded by intellectuals, a lot of Libertarians in websites and discussion forums tend to show poorly-disguised contempt for many people who might otherwise be interested in their ideasl. This is not good salesmanship. As a rule, people will tend to avoid associating with people who they believe think they are stupid or malevolent.
Right now, the LP seems to believe that progressives and people on "the Left" (whatever the hell that antiquated shibboleth might mean, I thought it ceased to have meaning 40 years ago, but it still seems to function as a cross between an empty slogan and a categorization panacea) are its natural enemies. It feels more attracted to authoritarians and GOP partisans. Bleeding Heart Libertarians does a good job of trying to demonstrate that this default worldview is not necessary, but I don't believe that it has either critical mass or positioning with the broader libertarian movement at this time.
Ignoring a large section of the population is not smart politics. If you were a business trying to sell to the general public, you probably wouldn't knowingly try to alienate 40+% of your potential customers. (Ask Mitt Romney how his "47%" comment worked out for him last November.)
As long as groups like the Libertarian Party continue to believe that their natural allies are currently in the GOP, and that democrats and progressives are "statists", "socialists" or "fascists", the LP is halving its chance to ever gain critical mass. The Libertarian party has never polled more than 1.1% in a Presidential election in the last 40 years, which gives you some idea of how big the hill is that it has to climb. Now, there are regional pockets of LP strength, which is good, but the national picture has not improved in decades.
I have tried to point this out to members of the LP in Texas, but based on what I have been seeing on my Facebook feed, my perception is that currently they are too busy plotting and imagining their imminent glorious revolution against the Federal Government to listen.

NEXT PART - Some thoughts on what the Libertarian Party can do to improve its chances of gaining critical mass or airtime for its ideas.