Herbert Spencer vs Samuel Gompers on the Libertarian Party: The Case for Principled Purity vs the Case for Working the System
Why we put the philosopher who inspired modern libertarianism against the labor leader who explicitly rejected forming his own party, and what the 2026 Libertarian National Committee convention has to
Herbert Spencer vs Samuel Gompers on the Libertarian Party: The Case for Principled Purity vs the Case for Working the System
Why we put the philosopher who inspired modern libertarianism against the labor leader who explicitly rejected forming his own party, and what the 2026 Libertarian National Committee convention has to do with any of it
CORRECTION, added same day
This post originally compressed two events into one and slightly overstated a legal mechanism. Both are fixed below. Spencer and Gompers also address it themselves in a short follow up video, linked at the end of this post.
Why This Topic
The Libertarian Party has spent the past year airing its own internal fights in public. Its New Hampshire affiliate was censured back in September of 2025 after its chairman, Jeremy Kauffman, made antisemitic public statements, and the national party finally voted to disaffiliate that chapter entirely eight months later, at its May 2026 convention. Around the same time, Iowa Republicans filed administrative ballot challenges against several Libertarian candidates over paperwork technicalities, prompting the Libertarian candidates themselves to go to court seeking reinstatement. The party’s own national chair, Evan McMahon, put it bluntly at the time: the answer to a third party you disagree with is to debate it, not to bully it, bribe it, or sue it off the ballot. It raises a question that has followed every third party in American history: is it better to hold a small, uncompromised position outside the two party system, or to give up the separate identity and try to bend one of the existing parties from the inside.
That question is older than the Libertarian Party itself, and it turns out one of history’s sharpest exchanges on the subject never actually happened between two Libertarians. It happened, in effect, between a Victorian philosopher who thought political participation itself was corrupting, and an American labor leader who built an entire career on the opposite bet.
Why Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer is arguably the single most direct intellectual ancestor of modern libertarianism, well before the word existed. His book Social Statics laid out an early and uncompromising theory of individual liberty, and his later essay collection The Man versus the State became a foundational text for anyone arguing that government intervention, once begun, tends to expand rather than contract. His essay The Coming Slavery is essentially a prediction that every well meaning regulation plants the seed of the next one, and the one after that.
What makes Spencer the right voice for the pro purity side of this debate is that he was not simply skeptical of bad government. He was skeptical of political participation itself as a mechanism, on the theory that anyone who enters the arena to win eventually starts optimizing for winning rather than for being correct. That is close to a word for word restatement of the argument for staying a small, ideologically disciplined party rather than diluting the message to chase votes inside a major coalition.
Why Samuel Gompers
Samuel Gompers spent decades as the head of the American Federation of Labor, and he is one of the clearest historical examples of a movement leader who had every opportunity to found a third party and deliberately chose not to. British trade unionists were building the Labor Party during roughly the same period, and American voices inside the labor movement pushed Gompers to do the same. He refused, repeatedly, at AFL conventions, and instead built a doctrine that came to be known as reward your friends and punish your enemies, meaning the AFL would back whichever candidate in either major party would actually deliver, election by election, rather than run its own slate and lose.
That strategy has real, documented results behind it, including groundwork tied to the eight hour day movement and the anti injunction language that eventually found its way into the Clayton Antitrust Act. Gompers is the right voice for the working the system side of this debate precisely because he is not a theorist arguing what should work. He is a practitioner describing what he watched actually work, and what he watched a purer, more doctrinally consistent alternative fail to accomplish.
Who Else We Considered
William Jennings Bryan. Bryan is arguably the most literal case study for this exact question, since the Populist Party fused into the Democratic Party behind his 1896 candidacy rather than remaining independent. He lived the tradeoff being debated here. We held him back mainly because his position was already so close to Gompers’ that the debate risked collapsing into agreement rather than genuine opposition. He remains a strong candidate for a future episode built specifically around fusion versus independence.
Pierre Joseph Proudhon. Tempting because he is the most radical anti party voice in our roster, but his objection is to electoral politics as such rather than to third party strategy specifically. Putting him across from Gompers would have turned this into a debate about anarchism versus liberalism instead of the sharper, more practical question we wanted to ask.
John Stuart Mill. Mill’s liberalism overlaps with Spencer’s in places, and a Mill versus Gompers debate would have been a gentler, more reluctant respect dynamic rather than the sharp opposition we wanted for this topic. We are holding that pairing for a future episode where the disagreement is more about degree than about first principles.
Why Each Man Takes the Position He Does
Spencer’s position is not simply contrarian for its own sake. His entire philosophical project rests on the claim that liberty is a natural, evolving state that government intervention distorts, and that any single act of intervention creates a permanent institutional appetite for the next one. From that premise, refusing to compromise the doctrine in exchange for a seat at the table is not stubbornness, it is the only logically consistent position available to him. Where the historical record creates real constraints is that Spencer was also famously uninterested in the mechanics of actual electoral organizing. He was a theorist, not an organizer, and the debate script does not pretend otherwise. His strongest material is always the argument, never the tactics.
Gompers’ position is built the opposite way, from the ground up rather than from first principles. He watched British trade unionists build an independent Labor Party and concluded, based on the American context specifically, that a nonpartisan strategy of rewarding allies inside both existing parties would deliver more for actual workers than a smaller party ever could. Where the record creates real constraints for him is that his strategy required sustained, disciplined coalition management, and it did produce exactly the kind of piecemeal regulatory growth that Spencer predicted decades earlier. The script lets Spencer land that criticism cleanly, because it is historically accurate, and lets Gompers respond with the results rather than a denial.
Neither man concedes the core disagreement. That is the point. Spencer believes participation inevitably corrupts principle. Gompers believes principle that never touches power is not principle at all, just an unexamined hobby. Both positions are internally coherent, both are drawn from real historical argument rather than invented for the sake of conflict, and both men would recognize the modern Libertarian Party’s dilemma immediately if you explained it to them.
A Note on the Sources
Spencer’s material is drawn primarily from Social Statics and The Man versus the State, along with the specific arguments made in his essay The Coming Slavery, which remains one of the clearest early statements of what libertarians today call the ratchet effect of government growth. His voice on the page is dry, systematic, and almost entirely unconcerned with whether the reader finds him likable, which made him unusually easy to write as a character who is funny without knowing it.
Gompers’ material is drawn from his autobiography Seventy Years of Life and Labor and from the documented record of AFL convention debates over forming an independent party, where his rejection of the British model is a matter of public record rather than inference. His political motto, reward your friends and punish your enemies, is his own phrase, repeated across decades of speeches, and it does most of the work of defining his character in this script.
The historical record is thinner on any direct personal animosity between the two men, since their careers barely overlapped in any documented way. The conflict in this episode is a conflict of doctrine, not of biography, which is why the debate leans on their actual writings rather than any invented personal history.
What Comes Next
We are holding William Jennings Bryan in reserve for a future episode built around fusion versus independence, and John Stuart Mill for a gentler, more reluctant respect version of this same underlying question. If you have a pairing you would like to see, reply to this post or leave a comment.
Watch the full debate on YouTube, and check out the short corrections follow up where Spencer and Gompers fix the record themselves, still very much in character. Subscribe here on Substack for the companion post every time a new episode drops.