Thoughts on Shane Cory

Most Libertarians will agree that we are going to be better off without Shane Cory as the Libertarian Party Executive Director. Over his tenure, Shane had done different things to anger different factions in the LP. No matter which faction of the Libertarian Party you fit into, Shane probably did something to make you mad. There are, however, lessons to be learned.

First off, the appointment of a new Executive Director needs to bring the position back to being a purely administrative one. Ideally, the position of Executive Director should not have any power at all to issue press releases on a matter of pure policy. While it will help to have someone in the ED role that is ideologically a libertarian (Shane was open about the fact that he wasn't a libertarian), it should never come up because the role is an administrative one. Leave the policy to the individual candidates.

Because the Libertarian Party is so ideologically divided among the various factions, if the ED opines on policy, factions of the party will get angry. If we hire a plumbline libertarian as ED and they opine on policy, he will anger the reforms, as an anarchist ED would. A pragmatic, conservative or reformer ED who is open about policy will anger the anarchists and "purists". We need to return to the true function of the ED -- an administrative role that runs day to day operations at LPHQ without injecting his own policy or issuing policy statement unilaterally.

If we returned the ED to administration and let individual candidates decide their own policy, it would help to ease tensions among the radicals and reforms.

Besides, what could be more libertarian than that.