Third Party Pioneer Leaves Legacy of Anti-Establishment Protest

David Nolan, co-founder of the Libertarian Party and inventor of the ubiquitous World’s Smallest Political Quiz, passed away this week at the age of 67 in Tucson, Arizona. He leaves behind what is arguably the closest thing to a viable third political party that the U.S. has seen in the past half-century.

Nolan identified as a Republican while at MIT in the 1960s. He was a member of Young Americans for Freedom and a founding member of MIT Students for Goldwater in 1964, which promoted Republican Barry Goldwater as a candidate for president.

It was 1971, when Nolan and a few of his colleagues watched President Nixon declare on television that he was taking the country off the gold standard and would enact wage and price controls to combat inflation. His speech was a hit, and his proposals were popular among most Americans, but not with Nolan and company. Nixon’s speech outraged them. Nolan called abandoning the gold standard "economic fascism." To him and his friends, price and wage controls were yet another tool for government intrusion into the lives of individuals and industry.

That was August 15^th, 1971. The Libertarian Party was born just a few months later, on December 11^th, in Denver, Colorado. Nolan’s hand in its formation is somewhat ironic. Nolan was still a member of Young Americans for Freedom in 1969, when libertarians within the group organized to wrest control from conservatives. A physical altercation followed, but Nolan did not side with the libertarian insurgents, instead opting to remain with YAF. It would be another two years before he totally cast off his conservative mantle.

Nolan went on to invent a chart that people could use to determine their place on the political spectrum in terms of desired economic and personal freedoms, not conservative and liberal policies. On Nolan’s chart, which was little more than a simple X-Y axis, Libertarians fell in the quadrant that allowed for the maximum amount of both, while Republicans favored more economic than personal freedom, and Democrats the opposite. This graph would become the World’s Smallest Political Quiz, which is highly popular on the internet and used in many classrooms throughout the country.

Since the party’s inception, Libertarians have put up several candidates for president, and some even made it onto the ballot in every state. Earlier this month, Nolan finished an unsuccessful campaign to unseat Arizona Senator John McCain. It was his second consecutive attempt to win the office, but Nolan didn’t have any delusions that his party would win major elections in his lifetime. Nolan was primarily interested in changing the political conversation by his and the party’s presence alone. For Nolan, the fact that “Libertarian” is a widely-understood political classification is legacy enough.