Incrementalating 102
In my travels I am often cornered by starry-eyed fans asking me in tremulous
voices, “Incrementalator! How do you do it? How can you be a principled Libertarian
while at the same time publicly advocating politically viable partial measures?
It defies the fundamental laws of metaphysics!”
At this point, I am obliged to show off some of the items in my utility
belt. “Here are my Fuzzy Logic Fog Bombs, very handy when encountering undead
lawyers and lesser horrors. And here is my Mirror of Contradiction, it allows
both A and not A to be true at the same time. It provided the margin of victory
when Earth was invaded by the Randroids from Mars…” You see, just as a police
officer has to break the speed limit when chasing down bad guys, a metaphysical
super hero has to, well, bend the rules a bit…
“But what can I do?” is the usual response to this explanation. Ah yes,
sometimes it seems like everyone wants to be a junior member of the League
of Metaphysical Super Heroes. Very well, listen up.
Consider if you are a Libertarian running for political office (and you
don’t have super powers): If you publicly espouse carrying out the entire
LP platform, or even just the 85% you agree with, you are guaranteed to fail
at the polls. Thus, running on the entire LP platform is equivalent to conceding
the election to a non-libertarian. Even worse, those few votes you do receive
are taken from the legacy party opponent who is closest to being a libertarian.
We are left with a disturbing lemma: running as a pure libertarian is effectively
an endorsement of the greater of two evils.
It would appear that we then are left with an even more unpleasant theorem:
the way for a truly libertarian candidate to advance the cause is to be dishonest.
This can be rather painful for those Objectivist libertarians whose moral
system consists of self interest constrained only by an extreme adherence
to rules of self-consistency. (Brittle armor has limited effectiveness; just
ask Captain Quartz!).
Fortunately, there is a false premise built into this dilemma: when you
are running for public office, you are not running as yourself. A politician
is a representative of other people. This is true as a candidate or as an
office holder. In a republic, you are running to implement the will of the
faction that voted you in office. You are not given a license to be god-emperor
for a year or some such; you are not expected to do whatever you want. Rather,
you are expected to implement the platform you ran on and emulate the values
you exposed to the voters.
A politician is an actor. This is completely honest if the part played
during the campaign is the same part played when holding office.
This is not to say a politician has no say on issues. To the contrary,
an office holder does have more say than any individual he represents, but
this is still tempered by the will of the people as a whole that he represents.
Your job as candidate is to find the subset of your beliefs that matches
the will of enough people to win an election, and then try to carry out those
beliefs while in office. Likewise, your job is to play the part of an idealized
person that excites the admiration of the voters while still approximating
yourself sufficiently so you can manage to continue to play your role during
your entire term in office.
Alter-egos are not just for superheroes!
Granted, these are not easy things to do. But the rewards are great. When
your term is done, you can go back to being yourself in a freer land. Or,
you can run for reelection and up the ante for more freedom yet. Since reelection
is generally easier than getting into office in the first place, you can
then afford to expose a bit more of your true self during your second campaign.
And once the people have experienced a few bits of the LP platform in action,
the next few bits will seem far less radical.
And as a final reward, you will experience the intoxicating pleasure of
being in power. Enjoy it, yes, but beware that it doesn’t corrupt your true
self. This is why I also have in my utility belt the Rotary Agonizer—it hurts
real bad…
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