Politics & Power Quote by L. Neil Smith

An obituary written in the language of a rally cry, L. Neil Smith’s “Beloved friends and comrades... the national Libertarian Party is dead” weaponizes grief to deliver a purge. The opening phrase is doing double duty: “beloved” softens the blow, “comrades” borrows the intimacy of movement politics. It’s a deliberate irony from a libertarian writer—using a collectivist term to address radicals who pride themselves on anti-collectivism—signaling that the speaker isn’t mourning a brand so much as mourning a tribe.

“Dead” is the key choice. Not “failing,” not “corrupted,” not “captured,” but dead: irreversible, beyond reform, the only honest response being to walk away. Smith’s intent isn’t neutral diagnosis; it’s a severing ritual. Declaring an institution dead publicly licenses readers to abandon loyalty without feeling like deserters. It reframes exit as integrity.

The subtext is factional warfare, the kind that haunts third parties: the constant suspicion that procedure, compromise, or mere electoral strategy is betrayal. Smith’s career-long affinity for hardline, anti-state libertarianism makes the statement read like a verdict on dilution—libertarianism turned managerial, domesticated, polite enough to exist inside the system it claims to oppose.

Contextually, it taps a recurring libertarian narrative: the party as vessel versus libertarianism as philosophy. Smith collapses the distinction on purpose. If the party can “die,” it was never the idea itself; it was the institutional expression that stopped expressing. The ellipsis is the tell: a pause for the crowd to lean in, then the guillotine.