A Few Observations About Why Libertarians Don't Win

Today I went to a Ron Paul rally at UNT in Denton and, while the candidate was fantastic, I got reminded of why I stopped being involved in libertarian politics. It isn't that libertarians aren't full of great ideas. That's precisely what they are good at. If you were to compare a libertarian candidate (or the LP for that matter) to a corporation, you would say that their R&D is fantastic, but their sales department is so hideously bad that it's sinking the entire ship.

I suppose one could make the excuse that Ron Paul is cutting back because it's obvious that he's not going to win. Still, that's no excuse. If nothing else, continuing to run keeps the ideas out there, and that is very important for the history of the country. The more people who are attracted to the ideas, the better we are as a country long-term. That being the case, it seems to me that there is no excuse for there not being anyone from the Paul campaign going around the room where the rally was held and talking to people. Just as importantly, there should have been more of an opportunity for people to meet and talk to Ron Paul. In politics, ideas are not enough. People have to feel like the candidate cares about them. That means that there should be an opportunity to meet the candidate. I understand that sometimes there are time constraints, but that's really only an excuse for bad politicking. I could never really get to talk to anyone who was involved in the campaign. I would like to offer my talents as a writer to the campaign, but even if anyone were interested in using someone like myself, I couldn't actually talk to anyone about it. This keeps happening over and over, where I keep offering my skills to various libertarians, and I keep getting rebuffed or ignored. How many times can one do that before one gets the message that the ability to communicate well is not of any value to libertarians?

This gets me to the general problem of sales when it comes to most libertarians. If a libertarian is speaking to another libertarian, conversation is easy: you're preaching to the choir. But libertarians have to learn that they also have to convince literally millions of people if they are going to be politically effective. For some reason, libertarians think that one cannot be ideologically pure and also be a good politician/rhetorician. But what good are your political ideas if you can't convince a majority of people to support them? Ron Paul obviously does do a pretty good job of convincing -- he is, after all, a long-time Congressman from rural Texas. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that most of his constituents aren't exactly in favor of decriminalizing drugs. However, Ron Paul quite intelligently argued not for outright decriminalization, but for defederalization of drug laws. After all, since he was running for national office, all he could really do was get the federal government to decriminalize drugs, leaving drug laws to be decided by the states. Those running for national office would do well to follow his lead on such controversial (though not to us libertarians) topics.

Part of the problem too has to do with organization. One problem is that a libertarian organization is almost an oxymoron. How do you get a bunch of radical individualists to work together as a group? I am certainly a believer in self-organizing systems, but please note that at some point, the individual elements do organize and form a system. These systems are all cybernetic, meaning that there is some sort of steersman (or men), creating a feedback loop between the individual elements and the leaders/steersmen. The anarchist element in most libertarians make them loathe to have any sort of rules or hierarchy, and this too undermines the kind of organization needed to be politically successful. Many libertarians don't accept the fact that it is okay to have leaders and to tell people what to do -- so long as the organization is voluntary, meaning the people can come and go as they please. It does not mean that anyone just does as they please -- or not. That's a sure-fire way to make sure nothing gets done -- or at least not enough to actually accomplish anything politically. Rules are not anathema to freedom -- it is just important that we have the right rules to ensure that we have the most freedom. The same goes with political organizations and campaigns. If libertarians are not successful -- and we're not -- it is precisely because we have not found the right rules to play a successful, winning game that will make us all freer in the long run.