Libertarian

Lately, I'm frequently asked by Republican campaigns, party executives, consultants and think-tank leaders about how to connect better with Tea Party or libertarian voters.

Partying with Tea Party partiers

It's for good reason that Republican operatives want to connect with Tea Partiers.  After all, Rasmussen suggests that a generic Tea Party candidate is more popular than more traditional Republican candidates.

"Republican leaders should be embarrassed," notes conservative icon Richard Viguerie. "Instead, the Republican establishment disdains this populist uprising. Rather than embracing this genuine movement, establishment politicians and consultants are calculating how to co-opt, sideline, or even defeat the newest phenomenon in politics: tea partiers."

GOP leaders are now observing what conservative movement people have known for some time.

"The media are paying attention now," observes conservative movement writer Robert Stacy McCain. "They have no choice. Over the past nine months, hundreds of thousands of citizens have answered the Tea Party movement's call to direct involvement in politics. Their activism has ignited the spark that now threatens to incinerate the agenda of Hope and Change that once seemed impervious to conservative opposition."

The recent NY CD-23 race showed two things.  The Tea Party movement doesn't seem quite organized enough (yet) to actually win a major race, but we are clearly organized enough to knock out an establishment Republican candidate. 

The Crist-Rubio senatorial primary in Florida will probably serve as the major test between these two factions.  Alternately, one could look at the Alabama gubernatorial race  to see how the chips will fall when a much broader range of GOP candidates jump into the fray.

This Tea Party veteran would like to offer some quick advice to those trying to obtain the support of the Tea Party crowd:

To continue building its infrastructure, the center-right is going to have to start hiring talent from around the country. I understand the value of having most of your human resources in a dynamic, creative cluster like NoVa/DC, but it’s time to tap folks that don’t relish living in Termite Town. Besides, there are creative clusters in other places.

Telecommuters and remote workers aren’t going away any time soon. To remain competitive while extending their national reach, both partisans and non-profits need to think nationally. Virtual workforces are now possible. (Reason Foundation, for example, has people all over the country.) Novel, immersive conferencing environments like Teleplace are getting less expensive and improving collaboration across geographies. There are trade-offs to distributed workforces to be sure, but the costs are going down and the benefits are going up.

The next time you post a job, open your mind. Your best candidate may be in Silicon Valley, Austin, Texas, or Research Triangle, NC—and may want to stay there. 

This is an ongoing fight in many states. Republicans need to figure out how to work with libertarians, rather than treating them as unwelcome outsiders. You can't ask for libertarian votes and then tell them to shut up and go away.  But on the other side of this, libertarians also need to realize that a winning coalition requires an accomodation of interests and the way to lead the coalition is by showing them how they can actually win.  Revolution! may be a lot of fun, but revolutionaries tend to get their heads cut off.  Libertarians need to play electoral democracy....and Republicans need to remember what Ronald Reagan said: "the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism". - Jon Henke

On Friday — timed just right to minimize news coverage — Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer and the state party Grievance Committee notified a number of party members, many of them holding elective office, that they were effectively purged from the party and had been removed from their offices and would be ineligible to hold any other party positions for periods ranging from two to four years.

They’re getting comfortable. As Henke alludes to here, the self-satisfaction that comes with being in control was a primary factor in the waning of GOP power after 2002. The Dems know political power is nothing if not entropic. That’s exactly why the leadership is rushing like hell to do what they can to entrench their power and fundamentally alter the economy (i.e. before things start to burn and the people turn). Having mastered both the blame game and the art of sophistry, they think they’re better and smarter—despite all the linear thinking and pseudo-intellectual fervor. But victory has a half-life.

What is the Right to do? Let the Left languish in their smugness. Let's innovate: 

1. Get better organized and unified. (Includes networking and collaboration.)
2. Convert talk radio listeners into givers and doers. (Need help from the jocks.)
3. Focus on popular messages of freedom, prosperity and suspicion of government.
4. Create new constituencies resistant to government takeovers of their sector.
5. Create media markets to further dilute the leftish MSM. Hasten the destruction of print.
6. Tap, activate and integrate existing grassroots networks while creating new ones.
7. Use mockery and satire to prick the Obama bubble. “What were we thinking?”
8. Redirect resources from policy wonks to message-makers, writers and activists.
9. Find and exploit joints and weak-points. (Attack from the side. A distracting swarm is better than a standing army.)
10. Develop an “operating system” for distributed activism. “Embrace and extend” the left’s successful methodologies.
11. Crowdsource investigation of key leaders. Dig Relentlessly.
12. Use technology as a means to 5 primary ends—registering voters, organizing activists, changing minds, increasing transparency and crowdsourcing ideas.
13. Make a continuous show out of dissatisfaction. Be creative. Create distractions.
14. Plan carefully, but execute rapidly. Make media. Explosive media campaigns should make people do a double-take.
15. Rebrand as a new breed with new ideas. (Use veterans/old guard sparingly.) Think: New Labour circa 1996.
16. Turn the Left’s apparent strengths (brand, power, media adoration, momentum) into weaknesses, a la Sun Tzu.
17. Create alternative funding channels, including micro-donations.
18. Invite in a million ideas and create a filtration mechanism for the best ones.
19. Take risks with policy messages and critiques. Simple and powerful.
20. More meme machine, less policy argument. (Emotion, images, stories & sticky sayings.)

When you’re clinging to power and pushing your agenda, it’s hard to keep tabs on the enemy. It’s hard to continue innovating now that your foot-shoulders spend most of their days doe-eyed before O-TV, or making snarky comments on rightwing blogs. In 2008, the Left took all the best aspects of the free market – distributed systems, decentralization, collaboration and voluntary association – and out-organized the Right. Disillusionment with the war and the Obama emotion-bubble helped too. But those will soon fade. It’s time to turn the tables.

To be sure, the Left’s leadership will be busy tearing down what is right and good about the U.S., building up what is wrong and adding to a network of special interests and dependents whom they honestly believe will keep them around forever. They’ll make a good go of it. But take heart: Ireland, New Zealand and Britain all rebounded from the depths of socialism and its crony-capitalist variants. Ireland is now economically freer than the U.S. So is New Zealand. Britain is currently moving right. So there is hope. Let’s start innovating.

A clickable list of about 60 English-language hard-copy conservative and libertarian journals whose back issues can be accessed on-line may be found at :  http://liberty-resource-center.blogspot.com

I find it puzzling that I consistently see the same wrongheaded argument being presented to me by my Democrat friends in their desperate efforts to excuse the excesses of the Obama administration. I'll bring up something like massive troop deployments in Afghanistan and Pakistan or inprecedented deficit spending and corporate bailouts, and their rote reply seems to be that I can't criticize Obama because of all the terrible things that Bush did. Further, because I'm a Republican then I must be complicit in whatever crimes Bush committed and therefore am disqualified from questioning or criticizing Obama.

What they seem to miss here is that if the things Bush did were wrong, then aren't the same things still equally wrong when they are done by Obama? Aren't they even more wrong when they are done by Obama on a larger scale? Bush overspent and created deficits. Obama has already doubled his spending in a few months. Bush deployed hundreds of thousands of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, where our interests are at best debatable. Obama has done the same and is talking about a deployment more than double the size of Bush's biggest commitment to the region. I defy any Obama supporter to identify a qualitative difference between the excess spending and troop deployment of the Obama administration and that of his predecessor. There is certainly a quantitative difference. Obama has dramatically spent more money and put more lives at risk for less reason. If I'm disqualified from criticizing Obama because of Bush, then why aren't Democrats disqualified from criticizing Bush because Obama has done the exact same things and worse?

Their second error is the repeated assumption that because I bear the "Republican" brand I must have supported every Republican and every act of a Republican going back to my infancy. Apparently I have to shoulder the blame for everything both Bushes did wrong and presumably for the sins of Reagan, Ford and Nixon as well. Never mind that I actively protested Nixon's administration, wrote scores of articles critical of Bush and his policies during the last 8 years, and voted Libertarian in every presidential election since 1980. Does this mean that conversely they are going to accept responsibility for the Carter's loss of the Panama Canal, the Drug War, Vietnam and Jim Crow laws? Somehow I doubt it.

Their belief that all Republicans are the same ought to be embarassing, if they had any sense of shame. Their victory in the last election gives Democrats a certain level of arrogance and a tendency to gloat which is truly unappealing and apparently makes them immune to any obligation to think with any subtlety about political issues. They just can't grasp that Republicans are a diverse group. They assume that we're all warmongering, Bible-thumping reactionaries who are apparently on the verge of becoming domestic terrorists -- at least so Obama's Department of Homeland Security seems to believe. My actual beliefs seem to matter nothing to them -- as a Republican I can't possibly be pro-choice, areligious and generally opposed to unnecessary wars. They would certainly never believe that I know thousands of other Republicans who are politically active, share those views and were critical of Bush over these and many other issues.

You would think that some simple self-examination would enlighten them. Lyndon LaRouche, the Unabomber and Louis Farrakhan are or have been active members of the Democratic party and remain largely on the poilitical left. Does that mean that all Democrats share their views? There are even large factions within the political left and the Democratic party which don't agree with each other. Most of the Democrats I know aren't outright socialists or communists, but those philosophies thrive within the progressive wing of the party. Nativism and strong anti-immigrant beliefs are common among union Democrats, but many other Democrats remain liberal on the immigration issue. If their party isn't homogenous, why do they assume that all Republicans are the same?

This idea that the sins of one administration or political faction do not excuse the abuses of another also extends to foreign policy and seems to confuse the left there as well. When dealing with the issue of Iran, they always seem to fall back on blaming the United States because we put the Shah in power. Apparently we have to excuse the sins of the current regime because of the wrongs done by the Shah. Never mind that they killed more political dissidents in their first two years in power than the Shah killed in 17 years and have done more to limit freedoms for the general population and especially for women than the Shah ever did. It's the same with Israel. Because Israel is militarily aggressive and inhumane, it excuses every action of violent excess from the terrorist groups and equally aggressive and inhumane neighbors like Syria and Iran. Somehow Arab violence doesn't count because Israelis deserve it.

What they seem not to grasp is that wrong is wrong and right is right, regardless of the political persuasion of the perpetrator and regardless of the actions of others. You can't pick and choose between murderers and madmen and say that the crimes of one are excused because of the crimes of another. You can't excuse the policies of someone you voted for and criticize someone you opposed for policies which are exactly the same. While there may be different standards of what is right and wrong, whatever standards you choose to accept have to be applied uniformly. If you don't follow that rule and instead live by a subjective double standard which applies one set of rules to those you like and another to those you dislike, then you should expect rational people to dismiss your political opinions as worthless and brand you a hypocrite.

So please, the next time I criticize Obama or your favorite terrorists or Hugo Chavez, please keep in mind that the things they do should be judged on their own flaws and merits. Everyone is responsible for their own actions and nothing done by someone else excuses or justifies them.

I can't leave this Lindsey Graham story alone.  It's not just that the free market, limited government, social tolerance voters (a swing vote that accounts for up to 20% of the electorate) deserves more respect from the Republican Party - it does - but that Lindsey Graham and many other Republicans don't seem to realize the position of weakness they are in.  Consider...

Lindsey Graham, while announcing that "We are not going to build a party around libertarian ideas", said...

“I’m a winner, pal,” Graham [said] ... “Winning matters to me. If it doesn’t matter to you, there’s the exit sign.” [...] “I’m not going to give this party over to people who can’t win,” Graham responded.

But the Republican Party is already controlled by people who can't win.

The decline in Republican Party affiliation among Americans in recent years is well documented, but a Gallup analysis now shows that this movement away from the GOP has occurred among nearly every major demographic subgroup. [...] By the end of 2008, the party had its worst positioning against the Democrats in nearly two decades.

While it is important to be flexible enough to win elections in more States, the solution to the Republican Party problem is not "be more vague, so that you don't alienate people".

As for Lindsey Graham: It's hard to see any coherent vision from Sen. Graham beyond 'power and perks'.  Republicans need to find out exactly what it is Sen. Graham is trying to "win".  He may have won his own election, but that only makes him a leader in the downward spiral of the Republican Party.

Republicans need libertarians more than libertarians need Republicans.  It's time for libertarians - fiscally conservative, socially tolerant people who advocate limited government and individual freedom - to start fighting back. - Jon Henke

There are all sorts of self-described libertarians out there: Ron Paul libertarians, Libertarian Party libertarians, Club for Growth libertarians, Cato libertarians, Reason libertarians, Next Right libertarians, Neal Boortz libertarians and Lew Rockwell libertarians.  There are also millions of people who don't even know they are libertarians.

During the Goldwater-Reagan years, Republicans knew they needed libertarian votes to win the White House.  After George H. W. Bush disregarded his "read my lips" pledge, libertarians felt pretty isolated until the Republican Revolution.  Once the Republican Party gained control of Congress, libertarians and the goals of the Republican Revolution were simultaneously flushed down the commode of win-at-all-costs politics.

Republican leaders were warned time and time and time and time again that they would pay a price for dismissing potential libertarian supporters. Republicans did pay a significant price in 2006, but continued on as if nothing had changed.  Immediately after it became apparent that John McCain was going to win the 2008 Republican nomination, the Libertarian Party sent a funeral wreath to the RNC.

There are a lot of senior Republicans who apparently wish for this downward spiral to continue, as they continue to bash libertarians to this very day. 

Which is easier for a libertarian? Trading in the black markets of banned social behaviors or not paying your taxes? Clearly the former. That’s why when it comes to the unsavory business of political team sports, I generally get behind the team that signals a greater likelihood of leaving the economy to heal itself holistically. Whatever team is more likely to stay out of my pocket and tries not to punish performance (as much) will get my vote. That’s why I continue to support “fusionism,” the coalition between conservatives and libertarians. In short, the accretion of state power in economic matters is much more serious to me than concerns about the renaissance of the moral majority. I’d rather have a President with quaint views on sexuality and drug use than a Fabian Socialist with a trillion-dollar credit card.

But many beltway libertarians have gone “liberaltarian.”  It’s a term meant to describe freedom-lovers who share common purpose with the left on social issues and have therefore made a couple of steps leftward, politically—perhaps even far enough to give hope and change a chance in the voting booth. At least social issues are part of their motivation. Apparently, these libertarians are also tempted by both the pretentions and progressivity of the left—some by the pseudo-intellectual salon culture, others by the genuinely intelligent and cultured members of the leftwing. Libertarians, generally, recoil from the strain of populist conservatism that was created in the left’s caricature of Sarah Palin late last year. And who can blame them? Truly populist conservatives can, indeed, be pretty intolerant and toleration is the prime virtue of any civil society.

So, while I would urge libertarians to carry on sipping lattes with their liberal acquaintances, I’d also suggest they make their core political allegiances with the limited government right—particularly in this age of champagne socialism, White House messiahs and big government fetishism. After all, that’s the only way we libertarians will continue to get a word in edgewise while speaking truth to power. We won’t get it by ingratiating ourselves to lefties and dropping comments about “dispersed knowledge” at cocktail parties. Such is not likely to impress those for whom equality of outcome is their first and last value.

Yuval Levin lays it out pretty well when he writes:

In American politics, the distinction between populism and elitism is further subdivided into cultural and economic populism and elitism. And for at least the last forty years, the two parties have broken down distinctly along this double axis. The Republican party has been the party of cultural populism and economic elitism, and the Democrats have been the party of cultural elitism and economic populism. Republicans tend to identify with the traditional values, unabashedly patriotic, anti-cosmopolitan, non-nuanced Joe Sixpack, even as they pursue an economic policy that aims at elite investor-driven growth. Democrats identify with the mistreated, underpaid, overworked, crushed-by-the-corporation “people against the powerful,” but tend to look down on those people’s religion, education, and way of life. Republicans tend to believe the dynamism of the market is for the best but that cultural change can be dangerously disruptive; Democrats tend to believe dynamic social change stretches the boundaries of inclusion for the better but that economic dynamism is often ruinous and unjust.

Where does that leave the libertarian? Are we to be the cultural and economic elitists? Such a lonely place. But unless we’re talking about weirdo survivalists in rural Michigan or computer gamers claiming a 2nd Amendment right to own nuclear warheads, many beltway libertarians might, indeed, be considered doubly elitist. Still, I wouldn’t strain these characterizations to make them fit. I like the term “dynamists” much better. While we are much more likely to be cast as apologists for both fat cats and pot-smokers, we’d rather be known as those who see the value of innovation and progress through free association—whether in the cultural or economic sphere. And while we have our own branding problems, we bring some important things to the table—unbeatable understanding of market processes, tech-savvy, and a pretty good insight into the way the left thinks.

So the question remains: with which of the two major power-centers (realistically speaking) should we cast our lot? Should we be liberaltarians or fusionists? Well, it depends. The troubling truth is that in recent years Republicans have given us little on which to pin our hopes. If you’re asking libertarians to choose between two statist mobs, we’d just as soon stay home and write snarky articles at both sides from the comfort of our ineffectual non-profits. (Our rectitude is enough to sustain us.) And while we haven’t seen political power since the 18th Century when a couple of us sat down and wrote those Founding documents, we should realize that there is probably a lot more overlap with conservatives on matters of statecraft. In fact, the best hope for the Republican Party is probably to become more like us. But if conservatives want to keep this fusionist coalition going, they’re going have to do more to keep from losing libertarians to the cappuccino crowd. And we can’t afford to lose each other. Not right now. Not with so much at stake. Let's put the Bush years behind us and move on.

I got a lot of feedback on this post. Seems like people are eager to Reboot. Rebuild. Rebrand. But one thing folks told me they’d like elaboration on is the following: “Rules, tools and best practices give rise to all the good stuff that comes from the bottom up.” So let’s elaborate.