Stand Up for Liberty! Table of Contents
Stand Up for Liberty!
CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH AND LAST
What Are We to Do?
Above all, we keep in mind that
The Purpose of a Political Party is
In the above, I've given an implementation proposal for the Local Organization path to Libertarian victory. Local Organization is not a new strategy. It has always had practitioners and champions. New in this book is an implementation: What will Libertarians do to put the Local Organization strategy into effect from sea to shining sea?
This Chapter is divided into two sections. The first section is a summary of my implementation proposal. The second section is the missing piece in the puzzle. The second section answers the critical question: "What do we do within the Libertarian party to implement the local organization strategy?"
Section One - Implementing the Local Organization Strategy in the United States
In Chapter One I discuss grand strategy. We may win by converting our opponents, by capturing their political parties, or by creating a major party of our own. No matter what we do to win, we're going to need the Alphabet, the Numbers, and the V's. The Alphabet gets us activists, ballot status, candidates, dollars, and enrolled libertarians. The Numbers are the consultants, PACs, special interest groups, incumbents, candidates, and donors we must have. Finally, the V's are the volunteers and voters we need for victories.
Chapter Two presents three paths to Libertarian Victory. I summarize the membership recruitment, local organization, and moral armament paths, and their successes (or lack thereof) to date.
Chapter Three discusses how we might choose one of these paths, based on issues of principle, issues of substance, and purely practical issues. All issues lead to the same conclusion: the correct path to Libertarian victory is the Local Organization strategy.
Chapter Four introduces the implementation proposal given in the remainder of this book. The chapter summarizes what topics will be discussed in the rest of the book, and what will be said about them.
Chapter Five gives activities that every Libertarian political group should perform, including developing the voter base, inciting members to organize and run for office, managing information, performing outreach, keeping promises of all sorts, and finally raising money.
Chapter Six considers activities that are most appropriate for a party group or another. At the national level, Libertarians cooperate with other national party groups, lobby, maintain 50- state ballot access for the Presidential candidate, operate Federal and other PACs, and support special-interest and local libertarian activities. State groups support their local groups and local campaigns. They usefully publish two newsletters, one for activists and one for voters. Last and most important, it is local groups that run local meetings, support candidates for local office in winnable elections, and create the political machine needed for victory.
Chapter Seven examines campaigns and campaigning. The theme is simple: A political party exists to elect candidates, not to debate moral philosophy. Libertarians across the 50 states should run as many people for office as we reasonably can. The objective of running people for office is to elect them, or to build a voter and support base for future campaigns, not to generate a list of fundraising targets for the national Party. We attain these goals by running people at different levels of effort for different offices.
Chapter Eight considers our most important resource: our people. Our people are members, specialists, and activists; they are candidates, campaign staffers, volunteers, and voters. We need to develop our resources and to incite members into becoming specialists and activists.
Chapter Nine considers another specific resource: the Internet. We cannot get victory simply by using the Internet, but the use of modern communications of all sorts will greatly facilitate our victory. I make proposals for web pages, internal communications, remote archives, new technical means, and -- for the more distant future -- bringing the Libertarian Freedom Message to the downtrodden masses of Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Chapter Ten considers non-geographic Libertarian organizations: people interested in one issue, and how Libertarians with that interest can be effectively mobilized for the Libertarian cause. I discuss how the other major parties benefit from having nominal special-interest groups that are actually tools of their party, and give a five-step plan by which Libertarians can create corresponding groups with Libertarian inclinations.
Chapters Eleven through Thirteen consider implementing a marketplace of ideas. Chapter Eleven traces the roots of the marketplace of ideas concept. Chapter Twelve discusses how one might in practice be operated. Chapter Thirteen discusses getting market information to individual investors.
Chapter Fourteen examines information management. Information management has four parts: collection, analysis, retention, and distribution. If any of these parts fails, the entire system fails. The many virtues of operating with a distributed memory store are considered.
Finally, this Chapter summarizes the other chapters (above) and examines what supporters of Local Organization must do to put their strategy into effect.
Section Two - Implementing the Local Organization Strategy Within the Libertarian Party.
There's one more piece needed to complete the picture. So far, I've said what we must do to compete with liberals, conservatives, populists, Democrats, Republicans, and Reformers. Before the Libertarian Party puts Local Organization into effect, advocates of Local Organization must also compete successfully within our own party. This Chapter considers what we will do to implement Local Organization as our Party's strategy.
What do we do? How do we support local organization?
Changing the Committee's structure changes how the Libertarian National Committee will identify national issues. After restructuring, an issue will be seen to be national because it is important to many regions, not because it appeals to a group of members with diffuse constituencies. Changing the Committee structure also eliminates certain conflict of interest issues. When most members represent a geographic area, area-by-area interests balance out.
We also encourage the development of subcommittee structure within the Libertarian National Committee. The Libertarian National Committee should be responsible for developing the policies and approaches that the Chair as CEO will execute and that the paid national staff will implement. In practice, large boards function best by having subcommittees that reommend policy, to such level -- perhaps quite fine -- as the board sees fit, and then having the board act on subcommittee recommendations. <[Aside: why do I say "roughly fifteen"? Libertarian Regions self-organize. The current rules do not guarantee that there are exactly the nine regional representatives we actually now have. Under the rules there could be eight or (at least mathematically) ten. I am not proposing to change the general rule on organizing regions.]
Contrariwise, we do not support advocates of the Membership Recruitment Strategy...
Whether we win or lose, within the Libertarian Party:
In some states, we are the majority within the Libertarian Party. In those states, we use state and local organizations to put our ideas into effect. How? We build up local Libertarian clubs. We field candidates for many offices, especially town and county offices. We put into place pro-local activities. We carry out, as best as we can within the limits of available resources, the Local Organization strategy sketched here, including all the improvements you will make in my plans. By doing so, we build Local Organization, and we field-test and improve its implementation plan. Continuous improvement works in high-tech design. It will work for the Libertarian Party, too.
In some states, our position is the minority within the Libertarian Party. In those states, we urge libertarians supporting Local Organization to Stand Up for Liberty! Form Local Organizations! Run candidates for Local office! Strive to put the Local Organization strategy into effect!
We discourage pointless internal politicking. If the majority in your state organization wants to focus on mass membership in a National Party, candidates for President and statewide office, and self-perpetuating mass mail fund-raising campaigns, up to a point it is better to let them. Save your energy for advancing the Local Organization strategy. The free marketplace of ideas will settle the disagreement.
However, having accepted that advocates of Membership Recruitment are free to carry out their plans, don't let them stop you from Standing Up for Liberty! To paraphrase the ancient Greeks: let the supporters of Membership Recruitment say what they think is right. Just be sure that you personally do what is right.
Engage in Significant Internal Political Action
Having said that I discourage pointless internal politicking, I now advocate significant internal politicking. It should be an objective of the Local Organization movement to take control of the Libertarian Party's National Committee, and to ensure that our Party's Presidential Nominee supports Local Organization.
Why should we want to control the National Committee? After all, Local Organization is not based on democratic centralism. Taking control of the National Committee to take control of the 50 state parties is a mistake. If controlling the state parties is your goal in life, I urge you to consider a more promising career. Butterfly herding comes immediately to mind. Under the Local Organization Strategy the National Headquarters is not going to run the Party. The Party's owners, its activists and specialists and members, are going to run the Party.
Taking control of the National Committee is not necessary for the victory of the Local Organization strategy. After all, we're Libertarians. We're here to encourage the growth of private, consensual groups to replaced statist government operations. The entire Moral Armament approach holds that we will build the strong private civic space that will let us Ignore the State! As Libertarians, we believe that we should replace central control of civic life with unregulated private entities.
If we believe that local and individual organization are better for civic life, how can we believe that the Local Organization strategy requires control of the National Committee? That can't be right! The Libertarian National Committee lacks the coercive power of a government. If the Local Organization strategy is correct, the marketplace of ideas will insure that the local organization strategy wins within the Libertarian Party.
If we don't need control of the National Committee, why should we, the supporters of Local Organization, seek to control it?
The National Committee is moving the Libertarian Party in the wrong direction. One readily sees a trend to bureaucratic centralism in the operation of the national Libertarian Party. National fundraising in the millions of dollars yields a pittance to support real political campaigns likely to elect someone to office. There is no longer even a pretense that money raised by the national party is primarily used to promote Libertarian candidates. Instead, the leadership of the national Libertarian Party has turned the National Party into a membership fundraising club, in which donations are recycled to generate more members, more donations, and more paid staff needed for more membership recruitment and donor appeals, not to mention highly expensive headquarters in irrationally prestigious locations.
What is the evidence that we are becoming a membership club? Look at your letters from the National Party. What are the primary criteria for success that the National Party uses to evaluate its own acts? Why, the criteria are the number of new members and the amount of money raised. The criteria for success are the number of people who can be persuaded to mail their dues and sign their card, and the amounts that they donate. These criteria for success are taking us astray. If you judge your performance using wrong criteria, you will move in the wrong direction, and that is exactly what the National Libertarian Party is now doing. Also, new members are largely being recruited from other Libertarian groups. Recruiting members of another Libertarian group into the national party makes the Libertarian movement not one iota larger.
Of course, the national party does trumpet Libertarians who run for office and sometimes are elected. However, those candidates are from local and state organizations, and run with essentially no support from the national party. The national party rightly reports to all Libertarians the successes of Libertarians in other states, but those successes reflect the hard work of local activist groups, not a success of the National Party organization.
The national party does run a Presidential candidate. Our candidate is on the ballot in every state, a major achievement that few parties outside the duopoly regularly achieve. However, "finished fourth in ninety-two" and "finished fifth in ninety-six" suggests that the President campaign focus is not advancing the Libertarian Party. Indeed, we are moving backwards. Short of a fusion candidacy with another party, we are unlikely to do much better in the next Presidential election than we did in the last Presidential election.
The current behavior of the National Libertarian Party reflects the ineffective Membership Recruitment strategy, which puts an excessive emphasis on membership recruitment and fundraising drives by the national party. We should replace Membership Recruitment with Local Organization. We should direct the focus and spending of the national Libertarian Party into activities that build local organizations, develop the voter base, and run candidates in winnable elections. We'll build a far more effective Libertarian Party, and incidentally create a Libertarian Party that people will want to join without being pressured.
For the last quarter-century, we've focused the party's efforts on running someone for President, and on running people for statewide office. Statewide races -- in some states! -- can improve ballot access, so in those states some statewide races were not complete wastes of money. The millions we spent on Presidential campaigns have gotten us almost nothing. If some of that money had been redirected to lower-level races that we can win, and invested in building Libertarian special-interest groups, the Libertarian Party would be well ahead of where it is now. By taking control of the National Committee, supporters of the Local Organization strategy can redirect the party's attention away from massively expensive, ineffective Presidential campaigns and Membership Recruitment gimmicks.
The core issue is that under Membership Recruitment the National Committee puts a massive drain on Libertarian Party resources. The National Committee raises vast sums in Libertarian funds and invests that money in Operation Everywhere, Project Archimedes, and similar schemes. That money drains the limited resources of the Libertarian Party, a drain that the supporters of Local Organization will end by putting control of those resources in our hands. For example, we apparently spend $10,000 on single-effort consultancies. $10,000 is more money than any of our congressional candidates except two raised in 1998. Indeed, in a recent year the National Committee raised 2.6 million dollars and spent under 3% of its income on supporting local candidates.
By taking control of the Libertarian National Committee, we can divert those millions of dollars into effective spending. Effective spending is spending that gives results, results that you can show prospective donors to persuade them to give you more money.
Furthermore, the national Party controls the most effective tools for putting Local Organization concepts in front of our members. The Local Organization strategy asks state and local groups to change and do things they have not done in the past. The National Party is well placed to ask for these changes. Control of the National Party gives supporters of local organization an excellent platform to propagandize for our strategy.
The reasons that drive us to control the National Committee also drive us to nominate advocates of local organization for President and Vice President. Every four years, the Presidential race gives us an umbrella campaign, a way to put the Libertarian Party in front of every voter. Into which shape do we mold that campaign?
Historically, our Presidential campaigns have consumed vast party resources. Our Presidential ticket's results have not varied substantially since 1980. If a Libertarian Presidential candidate were an advocate of local organization, her campaign would rebound to our benefit. By running a limited campaign, our Presidential nominee would free enormous sums of money to support Libertarians running for Congress, State legislature, and lower office. A Presidential nominee who campaigns locally will garner enormous publicity in local publications, putting our local candidates and their groups before the voters. By speaking up within the Party for Local Organization as the path to Libertarian Victory, the Presidential campaign also lures Libertarians across America to into working for their local Party.
I therefore urge supporters of Local Organization to work to organize to gain control of the National Party.
An important caveat:
We believe in the intellectual marketplace. We should respect our fellow Libertarians who believe that Membership Recruitment and a single big national group will give us a Libertarian electoral majority. We believe that Membership Recruitment is the wrong strategy, and Local Organization is the right strategy. We try to put our plans into effect but do not sabotage plans based on other strategies. We may not give them our money, but we do not keep them from spending their money. In our conduct, we should always remember: Perhaps our strategy is wrong and their strategy is right.
Where is the Libertarian Party Now?
Recruiting members for the sake of having members is a winning strategy for a membership club. It's not a winning strategy for a political party. Recruiting members because they will someday be donors is a winning strategy for a charity. It's not a winning strategy for a political party. Recruiting members because they will someday become activists can be a strategy for Libertarian victory. It's not a winning strategy unless you also have a membership activation strategy. The succcessful membership activation strategy is Local Organization. It is through Local Organization that we will gain the Alphabet, the Numbers, and the Vs of Victory.
A successful national leadership of the Libertarian Party will understand that we are not a membership club, and should not act like one. A successful national leadership of the Libertarian Party will understand that we are not a charity, and should not act like one. A successful national leadership for the Libertarian Party will know that success comes from activating the members, turning them into activists and specialists. A successful national leadership of the Libertarian Party will recognize that Libertarian Victory comes from implementing the Local Organization strategy, and will do its part toward implementing that strategy.
We have the people. We have the mission. The Local Organization strategy will persuade our people to Stand Up for Liberty! and do the work that gets us to Libertarian victory.
What Do We Do Across America? What Should You Personally Do?
There's no such thing as a free lunch in economics. There's no free lunch at the ballot box, either. If you sit back and wait for someone to give you free money, you're going to have a bit of a wait. If you sit back and wait until someone gives you Libertarian candidates and Libertarian political victories, without your helping to earn them, you're going to have a very long wait indeed.
If you want to move toward a Libertarian future, you yourself need to challenge the Democratic-Republican duopoly. You need to challenge it in your ward and precinct, your town and county and state, even in the Halls of the Federal Congress. The Libertarian future belongs to us, but only if we each take the initiative.
How you make the challenge is up to you. Not everyone will Stand Up for Liberty! in the same way. Some will run for office. Others will donate their time or money. Others will speak up for the cause of freedom, write letters to the editor, or sound off on the Internet. The path you choose to Stand Up for Liberty! depends on your personality, your resources, and your time. One outcome is certain: If we all sit and do nothing, the defeat of Liberty is assured. Only if you, personally, and every other Libertarian chooses to Stand Up for Liberty! can we reach the Libertarian future of freedom, peace, and prosperity.
It's time to Stand Up for Liberty! It's time to send forward the banner of freedom from sea to shining sea. It's time to Stand Up For Victory! for the one American political Party that stands one hundred percent for freedom, one hundred percent of the time, without any compromises.
The path to Libertarian Victory, the path to the Libertarian future, is the Libertarian strategy of Local Organization and Local Victory. Let us advance down that path to the Libertarian future of peace, prosperity, and freedom.