Stand Up for Liberty! Table of Contents
Stand Up for Liberty!
Chapter Eight
Our Most Important Resource is Our People
What are our resources? How can they be employed? Why will Local Organization make most effective use of them?
Resources are the people, the material goods, and the events we have available when we Stand Up for Liberty! Resources are the tools we will use to Make Liberty Happen! in our lifetimes. Resources are the strengths we deploy to elect Libertarians to office, to pass Libertarian laws, and to gain new resources for the Libertarian Party.
What are our resources? Above all, we have people, American citizens working individually to build a Libertarian America. We have material resources: newsletters, Email lists, databases. We have the financial support of our many donors, amplifying the efforts of those Libertarians who give their time as a gift in kind. We do things; we have events that build the Libertarian Party. We have associated groups: local, statewide, national, special interest...
This chapter discusses only one resource, the human resource. After all,
Our Most Important Resource is Our People
The most important resource that the Libertarian Party has is the people who support our Libertarian cause. We do not have the hundreds of millions of dollars raised -- and largely wasted -- by the Democratic-Republican duopoly and its trains of PACs and sycophants. We do have human beings, every bit as intelligent, hard-working, and motivated as the people who support our opponents. It is our people who are ready to Stand Up for Liberty! and work for liberty in our lifetime. It is through the Local Organization Strategy -- and only through the Local Organization strategy -- that the Libertarian Party can mobilize and use these people effectively.
What sorts of people do we have? A traditional answer of the other parties is that party members are young and old, white and black, male and female, union members and veterans and war heroes. Now, it does happen that the Massachusetts Libertarian Party has a female majority (58%, up to 2/3 in some towns, with an electorate that is 53-54% female), but I'm not going to dwell on that number. Libertarians prefer to honor the uniqueness of each human being.
Most Libertarians give a non-traditional answer. Most Libertarians say every American is an individual, different from every other American, and as entitled to his or her constitutional freedoms as every other American. Other parties may ask a newcomer "What's your special interest group? Who are you with?" Most Libertarians follow me in saying "Hi! I'm George Phillies. Welcome to our Libertarian meeting." and hope to learn the newcomer's name and why she has chosen to Stand Up for Liberty!
I'm going to talk about sorts of people who work for our party. I'm going to talk about what individual people choose to do, not how many votes their friends have, or what color eyes they were born with. I could say we have three sorts of people, more or less. We have members, we have specialists, and we have activists. I could also talk about political campaigns, and say that we have four sorts of people. We have candidates, we have staffers, we have volunteers, and we have voters.
All these people are important. Members are the bedrock on which the Libertarian movement rests. Specialists and activists are the workers who toil to construct the Libertarian movement. Candidates run for office. Except in the most local of elections, a candidate without a staff is not going to do well. Volunteers are the people who amplify the efforts of the staff, turning a few thin voices into the great shout of Libertarian voters demanding low taxes, small government, and personal freedom!
Members, Specialists, and Activists
Libertarians have a wide range of commitments to Libertarian action. Members made a limited commitment to the Libertarian movement. They read a newsletter, come to an occasional meeting, register Libertarian, or usually vote for Libertarian on the ballot. Specialists are people prepared to work for the party, but only in certain ways that they have chosen. A specialist's activity may be a simple task. Some specialist activities are so challenging that most of us could not imagine doing them. Activists do not necessarily work harder than specialists. However, activists are willing to do many different things to Stand Up for Liberty!: They run for office, collect signatures, hold up signs at street corners, and make telephone contacts, depending on the party's needs.
Who are the members?
The members are the masses of people who have discovered that they are Libertarian at heart. They may look for Libertarian candidates on the November ballot. 28 states register voters by political Party. In many of these states, members may have checked a box on the voter registration form and registered Libertarian. Members may show up occasionally at a local supper club, have dinner, and listen to a Libertarian speaker. They may pay their dues to a state party, or may send their dues to Washington, D.C. Alternatively, they may belong to a special interest group that takes Libertarian stands, a friend of liberty such as Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, Separation of School and State, or National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. All these people are members of the Libertarian movement, one way or another.
Many members want to hear what the Libertarian Party is doing. They want to know who we are running for office and how our last campaign did. A membership newsletter, outreach telephone call, web page, or a local newspaper may satisfy this interest. Members are not activists. Their interest in campaigns generally ends with the voting booth and the vote totals.
More or less by definition, a member has no overriding interest in Standing Up for Liberty! by working for his party. Some members believe there is a free lunch at the ballot box, so they can show up and vote Libertarian without doing anything to put Libertarians on the ballot. Other members don't believe there's a free lunch at the ballot box. They know there are real costs to getting Libertarians on the ballot. However, those costs are more than they are willing to pay for the chance to vote Libertarian. These are member attitudes: these are the positions of people who will buy tickets, sit in the bleachers, and cheer on their Libertarian team if one happens to take the field.
From the standpoint of Local Organization, it does not matter a great deal which group a member joins. All libertarian groups need Libertarian members. All groups -- when well run -- expose members to the greater Libertarian movement. Every group creates some likelihood that their members will choose to Stand Up for Liberty! and become more committed to our cause.
Who are the specialists and the activists?
The specialists and the activists are the people who do the Libertarian party's work. Specialists and activists do the tasks that advance the Libertarian movement. Specialists perform a single activity for their party. Activists are more prepared to do what the situation demands of them.
The distinction between activists and specialists has not historically been emphasized. Activists are people willing to do a range of things, some tedious, dull, or simply unpleasant. Activists are people who show at meetings regularly and sometimes get things done. Activists will collect signatures, hold signs in front of polling places, stuff envelopes, phone members to get out the vote, or -- within their broad zone of comfort -- do whatever else is necessary to support the Party.
In contrast, specialists are people who support the party by doing the particular tasks that they have chosen. Donors are specialists. People who give outreach lectures to outside groups are specialists. The party member who stays at home and writes letters to the editor is a specialist. The html guru who debugs the party web page is a specialist. Petitioners are sometimes specialists. Specialists differ from activists; they have defined what they are willing to do for the party.
It is often possible to persuade a specialist to do something outside their specialty, e.g., collect signatures for a nominating petition. However, 'something else' is not what the specialist wants to do. If the specialist is too often put into what *he* finds uncomfortable as a task, he is likely to cease performing his specialist activity, too.
In many cases, specialists and activists first became libertarian members, and then decided to Stand Up for Liberty! by working for the cause. In some cases standing up is easy. The information systems guru who is a key member of a Fortune 500 company has no real trouble tracking three dozen mailing labels for the local newsletter. The professional voice who records ads and messages all day knows exactly how to prepare and place a one-minute radio spot, complete with extra voices and theme music. In other cases activation is much more difficult. The shy young person who commits to collecting signatures at a mall faces a personal as well as a political challenge.
Here in Massachusetts, we have started to see defections from other political parties' activists, notably long-time members of the duopoly Party's city, town, and state committees. These people already know how to be active in politics. They have committed to our platform by changing parties, abandoning the duopoly for the Libertarian party. A challenge for Libertarian groups across America is to recruit more of these people, learn from their knowledge, and employ their talents.
How Are Members Turned into Specialists and Activists? Why?
We want to turn members into specialists and activists, because specialists and activists do the hard work needed to turn the Libertarian Party into America's Majority Party.
How do you persuade people to become more active? You can create a supportive atmosphere for activism by running positive articles in newsletters, publicly praising the deeds of new activists and specialists, and setting the standard: People who Stand Up for Liberty! are congratulated and rewarded.
A supportive atmosphere is basically shallow. A supportive atmosphere encourages people to become more active after they start to become active. By itself, a friendly environment is not very effective at moving members off ground zero into activism.
To pull people out of their shells and onto their feet, there is no substitute for personal contact. There is no substitute for asking and persuading and cajoling members who have become your friends to help you with your challenges. Of course, before you can ask a friend for help, they must become your friend. Before you can have personal contact, you have to meet people personally. To make Libertarian friends and have personal contacts who have Libertarian inclinations, there is no substitute for local organization.
The much-maligned Libertarian Supper club is a fine way to meet locally. The key to activist success in a supper club environment is simple. Activists must remember that they have a supper club, but the purpose of the supper club is not supper. For activists, the purpose of the supper club is to befriend new people of Libertarian inclination and to start your friends along the road toward activism. The much-praised 8-page fund-raising/recruiting letter can't substitute for local groups, friendship, and personal contact. The much- praised 8-page fund-raising letter can't replace local people setting an example when they personally Stand Up for Liberty! The much-praised 8-page fund-raising letter can't replace local campaigns and events that get people involved with their own party.
Membership Recruitment and the Members
How can you recruit members? You can try to move people from one membership activity to another, from reading web pages to joining the JPFO, the ACLU, or their local Libertarian club. All member groups are valid parts of the Libertarian movement. Persuading people to join one more libertarian group does strengthen that group a bit. Persuading people to join one more Libertarian group makes it more likely they'll hear about about Libertarian efforts to change laws and put Libertarians into office.
Bringing a person into contact with one more group makes it one bit more likely that he will hear the one message that persuades him to Stand Up for Liberty! When the correct logical appeal (perhaps the cry that sets fire to the member's heart or the right reminder of our Republic's glorious heritage and national patrimony) reaches the right member, that member will become an activist.
However, shuffling members from Libertarian group to Libertarian group by itself has only secondary effects on the Libertarian cause as a whole. If all you do is to move Libertarians from one group to another, there are no more Libertarians than there were before. Recruiting Libertarians to join your group *may* help your part of the Libertarian movement. However, unless your new member becomes more active because he joined your group, your group is stronger only because you weakened another part of the movement.
Members are a burden as well as a strength. They must be reached. They must be reminded to renew their memberships. Their votes must be counted in any internal election. If you have enough members, these burdens require dedicating additional activists to servicing the members, hiring part- or full- time staff, or perhaps using professional mailing and outsourcing services.
No matter what your size, additional members are an additional burden on your limited corps of activists. No matter your group's size, there are costs to having extra members. Members consume resources, resources that would not be consumed if membership were smaller. Careful planning can overcome many of these costs. Dues can be set to compensate for the expense of servicing additional members. Careful attention to marginal costs will ensure that extra members are a net benefit rather than a net burden.
Adding members to your group does not strengthen your group where it is probably weakest. Adding members does not give your group more specialists and activists, the people every Libertarian group needs to compete with the millions of activists of the duopoly parties. Adding members -- the Membership Recruitment strategy -- is by itself a feeble reed on which to build a Libertarian majority.
Of course, every member of a group might become a specialist or an activist, and contribute directly to the creation of the Libertarian future. You can always hope that members will be activated by chance. That's a pure recruitment strategy. You build up a membership club, and hope the members become activists. Alternatively, you can use the strategy that makes membership activation a fundamental objective. That strategy is Local Organization.
Candidates, Staffers, Volunteers, and Voters
I return to a theme of Chapter 4:
The Purpose of a Political Party is
If we fulfill this purpose, we are the Libertarian Party. If we do not run candidates for office, we are not a political party at all, just a group of party-goers.
Recruiting candidates is critical to Libertarian victory. We need 400,000 candidates, give or take, to contest the 400,000 political offices that exist across the country. (We may get by with a few less, because we may be able to abolish some of those offices before we elect our people to them. We can't count on that advantage.)
Why do we run people for office? We run people for office because we want to elect them, so they can move the United States in a Libertarian direction. However, we also run people for office because every political campaign has benefits beyond winning elections.
Candidates are not enough for victory. Each candidate needs a campaign staff. Staffers are the people who do the hard work needed to elect our candidates to office. Until our candidates have campaign staffs, they will run for office but rarely win.
In a successful theater company, for every star performer there is a technical company behind the curtain. In electoral terms, the star is the candidate, and the company is her campaign staff. We do need to develop our star actors. Just as important, we need to develop our technical companies. A successful party develops campaign staffs as well as candidates.
To get a Libertarian electoral majority, we need the Alphabet, the Numbers, and the V's of Chapter One. To get a Libertarian electoral majority we need campaign advisors, donors, petitioners, leafletters, and every other sort of campaign staff member. The staffers are the people who stand behind the candidate, doing the hard work of getting her on the ballot, raising money, advertising her stands, and turning out the vote. Except in very local races, a candidate without a staff is going to have to work very hard to win.
Beyond the staff, we need volunteers. Volunteers are the people who will spend time on a campaign, but will not devote their lives to it. They will carry a petition and collect 50 signatures. They go out for an evening walk, Friday before the election, and leave campaign leaflets on every door. They put a sign on their front lawn, or show up at the polling place, march out the legally appointed distance, and hold high a banner supporting their party.
Candidates, staffers, and volunteers all have the same objective. They are the people who get us voters. Remember: We can have the most wonderful candidates, the most perfectly polished platforms, and the greatest campaign staffs ever assembled. If the other guy gets more votes, we still lose. To win, we must assemble voters.
How do we get volunteers and staffers, the people who will get us the voters? "Build it and they will come" is a risky strategy for business investment. "Run and they will help me" is a risky strategy for a budding politician.
What is the safer strategy? We must go to libertarians of every sort! We must persuade them to get active in politics! We must ask our Libertarian friends - - not just LPUS members, but gun owners and gay activists and opponents of the insane war on drugs -- to help us. Our message is "Our campaigns are your campaigns." "Our victory is your victory."
"Base the campaign on asking Libertarian friends to help" is internal outreach. A campaign based on internal outreach goes to our members, the people who do a little for the Libertarian movement. Internal outreach gives members of every libertarian group concrete reasons to transform themselves into volunteers and activists. Internal outreach gives our campaigns a second purpose beyond winning, namely developing the campaign staffs who will bring us victory in future campaigns.
Summary
How do we best reach members' hearts and souls? How do we make activists of them? There is no more effective way to change a person's behavior than to put them in a community that teaches right behavior by example. How do we get libertarian members into a community? We enlist them in a local organization, so they see activists working to Make Freedom Happen! The effective path to members' hearts and souls is through Local Organization. When members see they personally can make a difference, say in a friend's campaign for local political office, they too may Stand Up for Liberty! and become activists.
Members, specialists, and activists each have their role in the Libertarian Party. Member-voters will eventually put us into office. Specialists and activists will create the situation in which we have enough member-voters to elect us. Local organization will mobilize our members, turning them into the specialists and activists that we need. Local Organization at the same time will generate the new members who are our future activists and voters.
Members, specialists, and activists all have roles to play in Local Organization. Members are the bedrock on which the Libertarian movement will be built. They contribute their votes, their moral presence, perhaps a little money, and in a variety of ways their good names. Specialists take the roles they choose for themselves. Some roles are more important than others. In the construction of liberty, a specialist may be a load-bearing column or the baroque gargoyle atop the parapets. In the Libertarian edifice, activists are the tie rods and the mortar, holding together the Local Organization and providing its walls, floor, and ceiling.
Local Organization and local campaigns provide the basis for internal outreach. Internal outreach recruit staffers for our local candidates. Local Organization takes maximum advantage of our one real strength: Our supply of highly motivated, intelligent, passionate believers in freedom. Local organization and internal outreach will generate the candidates, the staff, the volunteers, and the votes needed for election victory.
We do not have the incumbents or the masses of money, but we do have our most important resource. We have our people. We have people who can be persuaded to join a campaign, especially if we ask them to perform a well-defined task in a well-explained way. We have people who are ready to collect signatures, distribute leaflets, and maintain web pages, but only if we convince them that this year they should become active in the party. Local Organization is the strategy that mobilizes our members, transforming them into the activists and specialists who will bring us Libertarian Victory.
We are the outsiders looking in, so we do not have the hordes of incumbents waiting for near-certain re-election. We oppose corporate welfare and massive government spending, so we will never receive the special-interest donations that the duopoly parties enjoy. It is through the people-based local- organization strategy that we will win.
[Aside: Local Organization and Internal Outreach mobilize people. In order for Libertarians to be strong candidates and effective campaign staffers, their Party must provide effective support and educational tools. We need to convince members that they should Stand Up For Liberty! by petitioning for our candidates. We equally need to teach members how to petition effectively. Education and technical support of Libertarian volunteers by local, state, and national organizations are a key element of the Local Organization Strategy.]