The 2008 Liberty magazine poll results are out and they support something I’ve been talking about for the past few years and regard as crucially important for libertarians. The Libertarian Party specifically and electoral politics generally are very poor tools for the advancement of libertarian ideas if we’re talking about radical (i.e. real) libertarianism. Consider the first two questions alone:
1. There is a proper role for government, but that role is much smaller than the role government plays at present.
Today: 89.5% agree
20 years ago: 66% Agree
2. Government should be eliminated altogether.
Today: 10.5% agree
20 years ago: 31 % agree
Whether there should be some minimal government is one of the oldest controversies in libertarian thought. If the poll results are representative of overall libertarian opinion, the minarchists clearly are making their case more persuasively than are the anarchists.
The trendline is clearly away from anarchist sentiments. The above supposes, though, that anarchists are (and have been) making their case among the movement cross-section represented by Liberty magazines reader poll — and that it is this case which has been rejected in favor of a purported minarchist case supposedly being actively advanced. No such thing is going on at all. Rather, within the libertarian movement, anarchists are not making their case because they’re busy “doing politics” and minarchists enjoy the pro-government bias inherent in existing government being the status quo.
I assert that anarchists in the LP (”partyarchs“) haven’t been adequately making their case because the attempt to use a political party as a vehicle for the communication of ideology results in our best and brightest people being tied up in endless platform wars with establishmentarian elements and vainly struggling to defend radicalism from smears by our worst enemies — those who want to define libertarianism out of existence by making the word come to mean something else entirely.
Perhaps the next LP executive director can be Grima Wormtongue.
The point is not merely that the libertarian movement is currently going down a wrong path, but that it has been going down the wrong path since the founding of the Libertarian Party in 1971. It’s not just that YOU, Mr. & Mrs. Partyarch (you anarcho-wretches) are somehow doing something wrong. As the Liberty poll results show, the libertarian movement as it existed 20 years ago was doing something wrong. Rather than libertarians gradually winning over mainstream society to our way of seeing things, mainstream society is gradually winning over libertarians to their way of seeing things.
Electoral politics FAILS. There are built-in incentives for the distortion of our ideas contained in the approach and I maintain that those incentives are inherent in the approach itself.
The solution is revolution.
Death to the Party!
Ultimately, simple economic analysis points the way. If you’re busy sinking time and energy into building the Libertarian Party as an institution, you are foregoing using that time and energy to talk about anarchism. Opportunity costs do not merely arise in just financial matters, but in all decision-making.
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