Stand Up for Liberty! Table of Contents
Stand Up for Liberty!
Chapter 10
Special Interest Groups
This Chapter considers special interest groups: assemblies of people interested in a single issue. Special interest groups include the Chamber of Commerce, the schoolteacher's union, and Washington think tanks. Most special groups bond tightly to one political party or the other. They may say that they're non-partisan, but somehow they almost always support the Democrats (or Republicans). Special interest groups provide real support for their party. They mobilize people who might not be especially partisan, but who do care deeply about their one issue; they turn that enthusiasm about an issue into enthusiastic support for a political party.
Each group has libertarian members. For each group and its questions there is a Libertarian answer. How do we capture their energy and enthusiasm, and channel it to Libertarian ends? This chapter discusses what special interest groups are, how they provide political support, and suggests a five-step program for creating Libertarian-leaning special interest groups to neutralize the special interest supporting the other major parties.
How do special interest groups differ from local Libertarian groups? Consider first the local groups. City and county Libertarian clubs unite Libertarians who live in the same area. Neighbors can meet each other regularly. They learn each others' strengths and weaknesses. They have straightforward opportunities to form the bonds that let them work together. Local groups support Libertarian candidates by working with residents of their home town. The Boston Libertarian Club encourages Bostonians to support Libertarian candidates in Boston. A successful Libertarian movement will be based on local Libertarian groups supporting local political campaigns.
A successful Libertarian movement also needs groups united by common interests rather than by common geography. Interest groups work for Libertarian candidates by uniting people with a common cause and opening them to Libertarian ideas and people. The Liberty Belles encourages feminist gun owners to support Libertarian candidates who support the right to keep and bear arms.
The other major political parties already have interest groups attached to them. Such groups are formally independent of their parties. Why are they kept independent? A group that is visibly run by a political party is less convincing to the public than a group that is nominally independent. A special interest groups appears to be independent, but in fact dutifully supports its political party.
Where are these groups? The initials NRA and NARAL do not stand for "National Republican Association" and "National Anti-Republican Action League". Indeed, there are Democrats supported by NRA members and Republicans supported by NARAL members. However, as Libertarians around the country have noted, the NRA will endorse anti-2nd-Amendment Republican over a pro-Bill-of-Rights Libertarian. In 1998 in my own Congressional district, NARAL supported my Democratic pro-life (he favored a ban on many late-term abortions) opponent, rather than endorsing the Libertarian pro- choice candidate. You can take whichever side you want on the abortion issue. My point here is that the pro-choice group supported a candidate who was not pro-choice but who was a Democrat. In the same year, the Massachusetts Gun Owners Action League endorsed Republican gun-grabber Governor Cellucci over his Libertarian pro-RKBA opponent Dean Cook.
In 1994, Worcester Congressman Joe Early was under siege by Republican challenger Peter Blute. Early had significant support from the Massachusetts biomedical community. Democrats are not particularly known as friends of working physicians, but Early sat on committees that could help steer hundreds of millions of dollars of Federal funds into Greater Boston biomedical research. Early therefore got his money. Biomedicine -- or some part of it -- is a special interest group, attaching itself to a particular candidate because it wanted to feed at the Federal patronage trough rather than earning Federal contracts through demonstration of merit. [I remind Libertarian readers that I am discussing why the biomedical community acted as it did, not what policies a hypothetical Libertarian government would apply to research.]
Each interest group has a nominal issues-based agenda: abortion, educational television, research grants. However, when the issue and the preferred political party go their separate ways, each group follows its party, not its agenda on its issues.
Party attachments are highly beneficial to the associated political party. Their candidates get support from their special interest groups, whether they have earned it or not. Democrat A may oppose everything that group B stands for, but group B will still say "elect A and get us a Democratic Congress". Even if the interest group doesn't endorse individual candidates by name, it can tell its members how each candidate stands on issues. It can present to the press and the general public its evaluation of possible positions, and who supports those positions. Shading a presentation can be better than a simple endorsement. The members and general public learn which way their group's leadership is inclined, and think they have heard an impartial evaluation of the situation.
Interest groups choose the candidates that they support. Their choice reflects a political control mechanism. It's not a formal mechanism. It's not a secret society behind the scenery pulling strings. It's just that the activists in each group have a particular position on political parties as well as on issues. When they are confronted with an inconsistency between their issue and their party, they often forget they're pro-choice or pro- RKBA, and remember they're pro-Democrat or pro-Republican.
Sometimes special interest groups have very firm ties to the Democrats or the Republicans. Under a recent Presidential administration, one could apparently track money going into a group that allegedly spoke for the elderly, seemingly to replace similar amounts of money coming out of that group and going into a labor union, targeted to influence that union's elections. You could ask if the original group was acting in the interest of its members or at the behest of its political masters. Similarly, PBS television stations are nominally non-partisan. Nonetheless, it was recently reported in the Boston Globe that a New England PBS station repeatedly provided its donor lists to the Democrats. Other PBS stations across the country did the same. No other political party is known to have obtained similar access to those lists.
Special interest groups of a different sort are the Washington and local "think tanks". Think tanks analyse issues, typically public policy issues. Think tanks develop and organize reasons for supporting a particular point of view. Think tanks examine consequences of adopting different policies. They provide support for candidates. They help candidates work out what the liberal or conservative or libertarian stand on an issue is. They give candidates TV-sound-bite arguments to defend their points of view.
You might think that think tanks would be non-partisan. In fact, your position on each issue determines which questions you ask, not to mention how you interpret the answers. A Roosevelt Liberal think tank might ask "how can we spend this money more effectively?" Looking at the same issue, a Conservative think tank might ask "How can we get the same results more efficiently and cheaply?". A Libertarian think tank would ask "Why is this government program poking into none of Uncle Sam's business, and why is it a total waste of money, too?" Indeed, many famous think tanks (e.g., Brookings, Heritage, Cato) are said to have liberal, conservative, or libertarian leanings. Those leanings do not mean that think tanks are tools of a political party. Those leanings mean that the think tank chooses its questions, not just its answers, from a particular political perspective.
Many special interest groups are firmly in the grip of one of the duopoly parties. Libertarians with those special interests are left in a quandary. The group that naturally represents you instead serves a hostile political party. How can you advance liberty within your profession or union or hobby, when your interest group is owned by the Democrats or the Republicans? How can Libertarians around the country gain the political advantage that comes from having sympathetic special interest groups? How can Libertarians benefit from the intellectual support that a Libertarian think tank would give?
A simple answer is the best when it is right. The Libertarian Party needs its own pro-Liberty special interest groups. A Libertarian group represents some special interest, scuba divers or cab drivers or land developers, but at the same time takes a Libertarian stance on issues and candidates.
I am not saying that no such groups exist. One can readily name Libertarian-friendly special interest groups: Association of Libertarian Feminists, National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, or the Institute for Justice. All take staunchly Libertarian positions, but none is controlled by the Libertarian Party.
Some special groups are geographically concentrated, but others are not. Every state has lawyers; two dozen states have a seacoast. A Libertarian Litigation League draws members from across the country. The Libertarian Oceancoast Resort Operators Association largely functions within a few miles of the water. It is almost never the case that a special interest group is geographically local, the way a town committee is local. Launching and maintaining a special interest group by meeting in the local pub is in general not practical. How, then, do we get a set of Libertarian Special Interest groups?
Of course, we could convince a special-interest group that already exists that they should become Libertarian. It's been done. If you belong to a group that takes political positions, you should Stand Up for Liberty! by trying to coax that group in the directions of small government, low taxes, and the whole Bill of Rights. This is a challenging process. For starters, the duopoly parties will stay hard at work, tugging the other way.
How do we persuade people having special interests to Stand Up for Liberty! and support the Libertarian cause? I present a five-step plan. Carrying out the steps is greatly aided by outside support. The supporter could be the national party. It could be a major state party. It could be a PAC or some other manifestation of the marketplace of ideas. You should care about what the outside group does to support Libertarian special interest groups, not which outside group is doing the supporting, at least within reasonable limits.
So, what do outside supporters do? How can the National Party or a Libertarian PAC forward freedom by helping Libertarians to organize themselves?
First, identify causes with a Libertarian theme. Identify causes where a Libertarian point of view would stand in stark relief to the statist viewpoint of current interest groups. In some cases, the theme is easy to spot because its Libertarian activists come to you asking for endorsement and support. In other cases, you need to look at public issues through a Libertarian filter. When are your Libertarian sensibilities especially offended by what you read in the newspaper? What groups are peculiarly hurt by some statist policy?
Second, find the activists who will make your Libertarian special interest group fly. This is the difficult step. You may, for example, identify all the mistletoe canners in your state. To get a mistletoe cannery special interest group running, you need to find people who are attached to the special interest *and* are Libertarians *and* who also have the skills and dedication needed to make a special interest group work. That's two sets of talents your founders need. Finding people with these two sets of talents is not easy. The talents needed to make a special interest group get off the ground are not the same as the skills developed in most crafts, hobbies, or professions.
Furthermore, you need a reasonable number of founders, not one or two. There are some near-unique people who can launch new groups all by themself. In most cases, you need a half-dozen or so activists to give good odds on success. If the group is based on a single activist, loss of that activist closes down the group. A single person may be honest and have the best of intentions. A single person sooner or later has health problems, family difficulties, a job that needs attention...and will have to give up on the special interest group, at least for a bit. If the special interest group is left hanging, it will often fail. On the other hand, if enough people are around to carry the load, the loss of one activist is a loss, not a total disaster.
Third, launch an interest group linked to their cause, e.g., The Friends of the Third Amendment or the Liberty Belles. The interest group should not be explicitly Libertarian, any more than the NRA is explicitly Republican or NARAL is explicitly Democratic. An explicit tie to a single party drives people away. You want only an implicit tie from the group to Libertarian ideas.
What is an implicit tie? An implicit tie requires that the group's founders support libertarian principles, but do not spend their time beating Libertarian Party drums. The people who start the group happen to be libertarians, and the standards for endorsing candidates often cause Libertarians to be endorsed, but the group is not formally a Libertarian Party subsidiary. There's nothing that requires that founders are all pure-hearted Libertarians. However, the organization's principles need to be such that the group cleaves to Libertarian candidates and positions.
Fourth, the support group does fundraising and membership recruitment for the interest group. Alternatively, the support group helps the new interest group to do its own fundraising and membership recruitment. For example, many people are perfectly able to do a recruiting mailing, except they have never heard of professional mailing house, and have no idea how to prepare printer's masters for a mailer to copy and distribute.
Depending on how many activists have appeared, the support that is needed to launch a special interest group may be substantial or quite modest. The objective is to create an organization associated with a particular special interest that also supports Libertarian ideas and candidates. The same group generates Libertarian-leaning press releases, studies, and publications, to move public debate in a Libertarian direction. Such organizations have long benefited the Democratic and Republican parties. If you want corresponding organizations that will Stand Up for Liberty! and help the Libertarian Party, you need to invest in them before you can show a profit.
Fifth, the interest group should occasionally support members of the other major parties. On almost any issue, at least some members of the Duopoly come down on the correct side. Supporting them reminds people that we can agree -- on specific issues -- with the Democratic or Republican Parties. Supporting them leaves dogmatic Democrats and Republicans with the impression that they belong to a group that supports a cause, not a group that only supports a political party that is not their own. Occasionally, such support elects a candidate who will take libertarian stands without being a Libertarian.
At the early stages, interest group creation is an important task for national and state organizations. Initially, the Friends of the Third Amendment may be two dozen people scattered from coast to coast. These two dozen Libertarians are the seed who will -- with proper support -- grow a strong nation-wide organization. Eventually, as the organization expands, Local Organization leads to State interest groups that expand on the work of the national.
Moving an interest group from twelve people in their living rooms to a functional national association requires publications, advertising, electronic outreach, etc. Yes, in principle the twelve people can elevate themselves to national prominence, but initial growth phases are challenging and slow. A support group such as the national party or a PAC can give the interest group a leg up into national prominence. By providing thoughtful assistance, the national Party or some other widely-based group can be the incubator for a special-interest groups. The incubator is the mechanism that lets a few highly-motivated people move from first contact to national significance far faster than would otherwise be possible.
Persuading the real welfare kings -- people who really do drive a Mercedes or a Cadillac while working under Federal contract -- to support Libertarian policies will not be easy. The Libertarian Party needs a set of Libertarian special interest groups, covering as many areas as there are special interests. We need those groups so that biomedical researchers and gun owners and computer programmers and single welfare mothers and smokers can join a group that stands up for their special interest, and that Stands Up for Liberty!, too. We need these groups to bring all manner of people who care very much about their one question to support the Libertarian platform and Libertarian candidates.
In summary, I've discussed special interest groups, and the opportunities and advantages that special interest groups offer the duopoly parties. I then outline a five-step plan, explaining how to use our resources to develop our own special interest groups. The five steps require finding the special interest, finding a core of founding leaders, launching the new group, doing fundraising and recruitment, and enjoying the group's support of our candidates and issues.
The party and its surrogates should not own special interest groups. The party and its surrogates should not run special interest groups. However, the party should nurture special interest groups, because in doing so it will give itself valuable pillars of strength, far more quickly than would otherwise be possible.