Greetings and a belated Happy President’s Day! It would be nice to have a decent president for a change. If we get the Libertarian Party fixed, we might just get one while we are still alive.
We had some technical difficulties getting the previous newsletter out. It had images of our ads for Liberty and Reason magazines. The mailman program held the messages for a day, so some of you may have lost it deep in your mailboxes. If so, you can read it online.
We have passed 360 members! Read on for why.
We have our first celebrity contributor to www.ReformTheLP.org. Best selling science fiction author David Brin, author of such works as “Startide Rising,” “The Postman,” “The Practice Effect,” and “The Transparent Society,” has written a four-part series entitled “Political Totemism and the Danger of Metaphors.” Deep stuff! (David Brin addressed the 2002 LP Convention in Indianapolis. You can find this speech here.
A new feature in this newsletter: a selection of new essays and platform proposals will be sampled as part of the newsletter. At the end of each there will be a link taking you to the rest should you find the article/proposal interesting. In order to make this work well, we have updated the site so you can log in through the voting box at the end of essays/proposals so you can vote on the proposal or rate the essay as you see fit.
Changing State Government from the Bottom Upby Joseph Swyers. As a small city councilman I learned what is possible for libertarians to change from the bottom up. The LP and nearly all Libertarians waste effort with national and state campaigns and ignore the much easier ways to get political change started—at the local level. This essay was originally posted on The Free State Project site in 2002 when I was a city councilman in Leadville, Colorado (pop. 2,800)
Models, Maps and Visions of Tomorrowby David Brin.
Most libertarians know—far better than others—that the hoary old left-right political spectrum is worse than useless. Alas, some of the “better alternatives” only serve to muddy the waters. Here, scientist and science fiction author David Brin suggests a few new models that may be helpful... if taken with a grain of salt. This is Part 1 of “Political Totemism and the Danger of Metaphors”
California Convention this Weekend!
Extremely important: The California Libertarian Party has its convention February 24-27! California gets the largest delegation of any affiliate, and since the convention is on the west coast this year, expect a full or nearly full slate from California. We need to recruit, mobilize, and get elected as delegates as many reformers from California as possible. This is a big challenge.
If you are interested in actively promoting the Caucus at this convention, please contact the webmaster, Carl Milsted, at manager@reformthelp.org, or call at 828-215-6816. It would be fantastic to have someone distribute fliers, or even work a table at this convention. We have PDFs of potential fliers at http://www.reformthelp.org/caucus/promote/table.php. Included here is a new tri-fold brochure based on the new home page and our ad campaign at…
Reason.com Ad Campaign Begins
Starting on February 8, we have an ad up on Reason magazine’s web site www.reason.com. Our home page has been updated to a new theme “A Rational Plan for Restoring Liberty.” This campaign is doing much better than our previous ads in LP News and Liberty. We are averaging a bit over two new members per day who site the reason.com ad as how they found us. We are averaging around 200 unique visitors per day now (using the new Statcounter), and reason.com is the biggest referrer by far.
Now, the scary news: Our bank account is down to less than $100. Unless we get some fresh donations soon, we will not be able to continue our reason.com ad after it runs a month. Please consider going to our donate page, printing our donation form and sending us a check. Even small checks are significant. This is a low overhead operation. There are no salaries to pay or offices to rent. If we get enough donations, we can expand our web campaign to other sites.
Platform Change: Never Mind the What, Focus on the How!
by Kristan Overstreet
Everyone has been asked the question: "What would you do if you had a million dollars?" It's a fun pastime, thinking of all the things you need to do, the things you'd like to do. Some of us even itemize the expenses and make detailed plans. It's a nice stretching of the imagination.
Unfortunately, unless you have some reasonable expectation of getting a million dollars, it's a waste of time.
The same thing applies to platform changes. The bulk of this caucus website is taken up by proposals for changes to the platform and essays on why the changes need to be made. Well and good- very few people who come here disagree that the Libertarian Party platform is more hindrance than help- yet not one word comes to my eye on actually making the changes once we decide on them.
Here are the hard cold facts:
Most platform change submissions sent to the platform committee by outsiders will be quietly buried. As a general rule, platform committees are made up by people with their own agendas to advance, with no time for anyone else's efforts.
Proposals made by committee members will have to compete against those proposals from other members- who, as mentioned before, have their own agendas. Furthermore, these are likely to be longtime LP activists, which is another way of saying anarchists; moderate Libertarians tend to burn out fast.
Proposals which make it into the committee report will have to face the convention... a convention which will concentrate the power of the devoted purists and anarchists and dissolve the power of the less committed, less enthusiastic moderates and reformers. Any group which makes up more than one-quarter of the delegates in attendance has the power to stop new proposals dead... and although simple deletion only takes a majority vote, there tends to be greater enthusiasm for scheduling votes on adding new proposals than taking old proposals away.
Proposals made from the convention floor must be heard... but only if there is spare time in the convention. Anyone who has attended a political convention can tell you this: there is NEVER free time in the convention. Odds on a floor proposal even coming to a vote, much less passing, are very, very long indeed.
Our free country is broken because Americans have increasingly become a culture of ever more dependence on government and of using government power against one's neighbors for nearly any issue, great or small. It may be an innate characteristic of humans to use power to the maximum extent they can get away with.
In America the abuse of power has been predominantly enabled by the state governments. Power has been gathered by the federal level because the states have permitted it by abdication of their states' rights. The states have directly used power against individuals, families, and communities. And the states have given or mandated ever more power to local governments—which, in turn, have often used that power to the maximum extent permissible by state statute. Often they tax to the statutory limit and impose all the building, planning & zoning and other codes that statutes permit.
How can a relatively small cadre of liberty-minded activists begin to reverse this trend? Such small groups are effectively marginalized to ineffectiveness at the federal level. This is also the case in most, if not all, states. Top down attempts have not worked. Liberty-minded people have been unable to win and persevere in state or federal offices which could enable a top-down approach to work. Winning one or a few seats in a legislature of dozens or hundreds of representatives or senators results in marginalization of liberty-minded legislators. The few who make it that far find their efforts vastly outweighed by not only other legislators but by immense, entrenched, control-minded bureaucracies. Even the smallest of state governments presently are generally too big for a relatively small cadre of liberty-minded people to successfully influence except by voter initiatives and expensive campaigns to pass those initiatives.
Voter initiatives have been often successful where they are permitted by state statute. In those states where voter initiatives are not permitted, how do liberty-minded activists get that freedom? The legislatures are quite unlikely to give away their power and risk being undermined by voter initiatives. And a voter initiative to gain the ability to have voter initiatives is the proverbial chicken and egg or Catch 22.
Attempts at the state level, whether by initiative or by the legislature, to restrict government at the state or local level are met with fierce resistance by state and local governments. As we've seen with Colorado's initiatives, fear mongering by community 'leaders' and their supporters is common. Sheriffs, police chiefs, fire chiefs, chambers of commerce, city councils, school boards, and county commissioners are enlisted by their state-level organizations and by each other's organizations to fight such initiatives. Often the only initiatives that survive such a full court press are tax limitations because taxpayers will nearly always vote for lower taxes (but not fewer services—regardless of these conflicting goals).
Because of the entrenched power of local government leaders and the voters who listen to such leaders' advice, and because of the addiction of people to laws that tax and regulate their neighbors, I propose a bottom up solution to change this culture of dependence and abuse of power at the grassroots level.
continued...
Models, Maps and Visions of Tomorrow
by David Brin
Ever notice how sometimes a vehement argument can rage for hours, only to have the parties find out they were in agreement all along? Small differences in nomenclature—in definitions or logic—can make apparent bitter foes out of folk who might have been natural allies. One reason for this recurring and sometimes tragic irony is the way we take to labels.
If, say, one person claims to be a Democrat, a self-identified Republican is likely to hear that person's statements through a filter of preconceptions—What are Democrats like?—or—How should a good Republican react? Often, we hear exactly what we expected to hear, whether or not that was what the other person really meant. Thus we make strawmen of others, and deny ourselves the wisdom of complexity.
It has been proposed that human beings are unique in being pattern-recognizing animals. I would rephrase this. Humans are creatures who crave patterns. The same drive that lets us see animal shapes in clouds, and discern underlying laws amid the chaos of physics, also enables us to stereotype each other, painting over intricate issues in stark shades of perceived good and evil.
Subjectivity causes each of us, from time to time, to think—“My opinions are reasonable and well thought out reactions to the world as it is. But, of course, my opponents have no rational basis for their positions. Rather, they are enslaved to illogical points of view, subject to the winds of emotion, or trapped behind the blinkers of narrow self interest.” When pressed, most people will admit that their opponents must feel the same way in reverse. Only, of course, they are wrong!
The irony is that most of the opinions we pronounce with such gravity aren't really our own. To a regrettably large extent, they are all-too often the pre-digested, passed around, agreed-upon totems of whatever sub-tribe we have joined—phrases and slogans we picked up and adopted from others who happen to be on “our side.”
(To explore your own independent-mindedness, try taking a survey: “An Informal Opinion Poll Regarding Certain “Fundamental Questions” of Politics, Ideology and Human Destiny” at http://www.davidbrin.com/questionnaire.html)
This article, while purportedly about political philosophy, is actually about laziness... the way we frequently let ourselves accept other peoples' metaphors—their models of the world—without stopping to think or ask, “Hey, what are we talking about?”
Such laziness is comforting of course. It's pleasant and reassuring to identify one's self with a group, to share their mantras, and feel virtuous in a sense of common rightness. A shared indignation against both the dullard masses and nefarious authorities. But it is hardly the way that adults go about seeking solutions to the world's problems.
Worst of all are the ground rules we all seem to take for granted. Let's start by taking as an example one of the most venerable of all hoary icons—one accepted almost without question by people of nearly every political persuasion—and one that is demonstrably absurd.
The One Dimensional Political Spectrum
The Left-Right model of modern politics has reigned long and unchallenged. Despite the fact that the paradigm is ill-defined and impossibly contradictory, people continue aligning themselves along a single, narrow line from the so-called “far left” to the so-called “far right.”
In fact, this layout had its origins long before the birth of Bolshevism. It began in Paris, during the chaotic National Assembly of the French Revolution. Since then, this murky metaphor has been applied to everyone from Karl Marx to Adam Smith, from Mao to Reagan to LePen, yet I have never seen anyone give a decent definition of these axes, one which can be boiled down to a few clear, distinctive sentences. Indeed, consider yourself dared. Gather ten of your friends. All of you take three minutes to write down a definition of "left vs. right." Compare the results. Was there any overlap? At all?
To paraphrase a famous physicist—Nobody truly understands a concept unless he or she can explain its esthetic essence, simply and briefly, to a nine year old. If that test works in the arcane, convoluted realm of black holes and spacetime, it ought to stand as well in the world of politics.
Just what do news reporters mean when they speak of “right wing Shiite militias”? Or when they refer to Putin's opponents alternately as “reformist leftists” and “the conservative (ex-communist) right wing”? Mostly, it is space-filling jabber, meant to gloss over the fact that the old model doesn't work, and never has.
But let's take a close look at it. Consider, for instance, what strange bedfellows it creates.
THE LEFT(?)
THE RIGHT(?)
Stalin?
Mao?
Chinese entrepreneurial communists?
Lyndon LaRouche?
Peruvian Drug Cartels?
Radical Muslims?
Jesus?
Liberation Catholics?
The Vatican?
Western Labor Unions?
Anarchists?
Nazis?
Royalists?
Chinese entrepreneurial communists?
Dick Cheney?
Columbian Drug Cartels?
Radical Muslims?
Radical Christians?
The Vatican?
Capitalists?
Libertarians?
Figure One: The Classical One-Dimensional Political Model
In the days of the French Assembly, there might have been simplicity and some elegance to this metaphor of a one-dimensional political landscape. In 1789 the “far right” represented those wanting to preserve elements of an old order of inherited privilege. On the left were those sharing one key theme—tearing the old system down in order to liberate people... or “the People”... back when early enlightenment thinkers imagined these concepts were the same.
But what does left-right axis mean today? How does it apply to today's complex antagonisms?
In figure one we have placed just a few names and groups in niches widely-accepted by the press. And indeed, we do see a few old-fashioned aristocrats on the right, and some on the left who stand for hatred of moneyed classes. But who are those others grouped with them? Anti-state anarchists are lumped on the left with dictators like Stalin, although they share virtually no beliefs or behaviors. Nazis and Libertarians and fundamentalist Christians would seem to have very little in common with each other, let alone with classical aristocrats, yet they are all called “right-wingers.” And what, exactly, does one do with Lyndon LaRouche and Manuel Noriega, who have been called far-left and far-right?
Is this a useful model? Does it tell us anything at all?
continued...
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