This three-part feature exists to ask what should happen there, what is likely to happen there, and what either outcome would mean. The first piece cannot begin at the convention. It has to begin at a distance from the convention, with the most basic question: what is being claimed, and by whom, when someone uses the word libertarian?

We need a framework that measures what politicians actually do with power, not what they claim to believe or which team they represent. We need to answer Jefferson’s question with evidence rather than assertion: Did this leader’s policies leave Americans more free, or more governed?

This article examines the major alternatives: conservatism’s emphasis on tradition and organic development, socialism’s challenge to private property and markets, libertarianism’s radical extension of individual liberty, and several other traditions that reject liberal individualism from different angles. Each rests on distinctive assumptions about what humans are, what they need, and what social organization can achieve.

A party is a coalition of diverse interests that temporarily align because they need each other to win elections. That word—temporarily—is crucial. Coalitions are inherently unstable. They hold together only as long as the constituent factions believe they benefit more from staying in the coalition than from leaving it.

Identify the differences between party and ideology