The Late Great Libertarian Bait and Switch

by Carl Milsted Jr.

Posted April 20, 2006

“Guess what? You’re a libertarian!” Around the nation hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people have heard this declaration after taking the World’s Smallest Political Quiz at Operation Politically Homeless booths. I do not know the precise figure on how many have heard this, or the equivalent, but according to the Advocates for Self-Government web site, 35% of 5.6 million people who have taken the Quiz online have scored libertarian. This means there are at least 2 million people out there who know that they are libertarian.

According to a Rasmussen poll, 16% of a scientifically random sampling of people scored libertarian. This means that there are tens of millions of libertarians out there waiting to be identified!

So what are ye Libertarians waiting for? Donate to the party! Give out copies of the Quiz to your friends and neighbors! Work an Operation Politically Homeless Booth! There are millions of people out there waiting to be recruited! It is time for a major groundswell of Liberty in America! It’s…

We interrupt this pipe dream in order to inject a dose of reality.

If all the above were true, the groundswell would have already happened. The Libertarian Party has been around for 35 years. Millions have already taken the Quiz. The Party should already be much bigger. If a mere 5% of the identified libertarians were members of the Party, it would have over 100,000 members.

What is wrong? Is there so much bias against new political parties in this country? Are people so apathetic? Is the system so rigged? Is it the FEC’s fault? BCRA? Biased media?

No, the answer is much simpler. There aren’t that many libertarians. There are only a few hundred thousand libertarians in the United States at most. There might even be less than 100,000. That is, libertarians are a tiny minority of the population, if you use the definition of a libertarian used by the Libertarian Party. To join the Party, one must sign the following pledge:

“I certify that I do not believe in or advocate the initiation of force as a means of achieving political or social goals.”

To take this pledge seriously requires advocating zero taxes, and no laws other than those needed for the defense of life, liberty and property. Not only that, one must advocate these things right now! To allow time to phase out government is to advocate continued initiation of force during the interim. To follow the dictates of this pledge requires calling for an end of Social Security payments tomorrow, closing all the public schools, defaulting on the national debt, selling all public lands to the highest bidder regardless of the environmental consequences, and resorting to an all-volunteer militia for national defense. Very few people agree with such a drastic program. In fact, there are quite a few people within the Libertarian Party who disagree with this drastic program. Many freedom lovers join the Party despite the Pledge because:

1. They didn’t think very hard about the implications of the Pledge.
2. They were told that the Pledge was really just a pledge not to advocate violent means to overthrow the government.
3. They rationalized their way in, figuring that their desire for smaller government across the board was close enough to the spirit of the Pledge.
4. They were brash teenagers when the first joined the Party, willing to take the risks involved in the anarchy tomorrow strategy.

I fall under the fourth category. As I have grown older and wiser, I have come to realize that anarchy is problematic. More importantly, I realize that even if anarchy (or voluntarily funded government) is workable in the long run, it is definitely not workable overnight. Trying to implement what the Pledge (or the current LP platform) demands overnight would be considerably worse than allowing the welfare state to continue.

So, technically speaking, I should leave the Libertarian Party. Since there is no political party which is libertarian in the Advocates for Self-Government sense of the word, I need to either start a new libertarian party or give up on political activism. Neither option is pleasant to me. And these options are unpleasant to many others within the LP.

So, instead, I am fighting to reform the Libertarian Party, to fix or eliminate the Pledge, and to produce a platform that appeals to that 16% of the population who score libertarian on the World’s Smallest Political Quiz. I much prefer the definition of libertarian used by the Advocates. It is a definition around which one can build a real political movement for more liberty.

But there is great resistance within the Party for such a change. The anarchy-next-Wednesday crowd is fighting hard to keep the platform the way it is. And there is great resistance to changing the Pledge. Some like what the Pledge requires. Others cite something called the “Dallas Accord,” a gentlemen’s agreement between anarchists and minarchists in 1974 not to argue. I have been accused of being divisive by bringing up this supposedly settled issue.

Divisiveness is a sunk cost. The Libertarian Party is an acrimonious organization, and has been all along. And the fundamental reason for this acrimony is that there are two very different definitions of the word “libertarian” in use: the Nolan Chart definition and the Pledge definition. All too often, people are recruited into the party using the first definition and are later told that they signed up for the second definition.

This is bait and switch membership recruitment. It does bring more people in. And many of the moderates brought in do radicalize after they join the party. However, this approach is also highly dishonest. And it creates discord between the purists and those brought in under false pretenses.

To do honest recruitment, Libertarian Party activists who defend the Pledge should drop the usual Nolan Chart when giving out the quiz:

and replace it with this one:

Do this, and the acrimony will die down; the Party will shrink down to an ideologically united debate and demonstration club. There will be no more calls for compromise in order to win elections because the Party will be too small to be tempted by the prospect of victory. Money and effort now wasted on FEC compliance and ballot access could be diverted to voter education and attention-getting activism.

My question to those who defend the Pledge: Is this what you want? Do you want a Party that is truly restricted to those who follow the Pledge? Do you want to have a Party that is tiny but united?

Or are you ready to do real politics? Are you ready to build a movement of all libertarians, using the Nolan Chart definition? Are you ready to work side by side with people with whom you agree with only 75% of the time? Are you ready to win elections and shrink government?

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