What we do need is for national to develop some interest in providing us a helping hand. I’m more than willing to work on literature. Fact is I have roughed out four or five piece that I could use at upcoming events. We do need national to assist on this so that we are getting out the same message across the nation. That is where we are falling down

If we were all using the same playbook that would be nice and national is responsible for designing that playbook .

Just my opinion.
MW

Let me reframe your question: If I were campaign strategist for the 2012 LP Prez candidate, what would his/her 5 key issues be…how’s that? Off the top of my head, it might be this:

1) Bottom up tax cuts
2) Across the board Federal spending cuts in discretionary program
3) 4 year plan to exit Nato
4) Expansion of IRAs for medical and education spending
5) Bill of Rights restoration review and implementation

Let’s start there.

MW

Whether lessarchism allows the LP to move forward (and even passed) socialists and statists, I can’t say for certain.

I’m all ears for another way.

A narrow ideological definition does not portend well for having enough numbers to do much, while a pluralistic approach suffers from a porous border: at what point does it cease being even close to libertarian?

Obviously, there is some such point, with everyone from George Bush to Bill Clinton to Adolf Giuliani to David Duke to Noam Chomsky calling themselves some kind of libertarian at least some of the time or being called one by others.

So, I don’t think you have necessarily solved that problem, but to be fair neither have I.

1 Accept a pluralistic approach to what the LP is all about.

2 Battle over a precise ideological definition of L-ism.

My take is the LP is paralyzed by having headstrong camps that each tend to think THEIR approach is best. More dysfunctionally, they tend to define L-ism very narrowly. Perhaps emblematic is the founder of the Radical Caucus refuses to define a Cato L as L. The camps want to control the very resource-constrained national apparatus to control messaging.

It should be no surprise that such an environment leads to paralysis and drift. Hence, the Rodney King Caucus was created.

Robert not everyone seems to think they failed. And my point is more that we need a consistent message. Year after year. That is a good part of what advertising is all about. Keep it simple and be consistent.

Look at your grocery ads in the paper. For the most part they are the same products, ones most likely to be used by households with a few other tossed in. Every week you get an ad and every week it is pretty much the same stuff being advertised.

Whether, or not Socialist failed is beside the point, but they were consistent in their messgae for much of twenty years.

The LP Has been poor at getting its point across. Our literature is inadequate and our website is a mess. The issues should be up front, but instead they are buried and out of date.

a few observations and alternative takes:

* Technically, my view is that hte US is drifting toward corporatist fascism/statism,

Agreed.

which has some overlap with socialism, but is different.

If we take socialism to mean worker-controlled social order, it has little to no actual overlap. Corporate-statist fascism is actually in essence and practice elitist control of social mobility, but justifies itself to the masses through cynical manipulation of bottom up class warfare, middle-bidirectional class warfare, and even some misdirected top-down compassion.

* If recall correctly, the Socialist Party ran far more competitively in races in roughly the 1920-40 period than the LP has been.

Correct again; but not so far out of the range of LP performance that we could not reach it without significantly altering our ideology or the general public mindset. SP level performance of that era can plausibly be reachable by intelligent and persistent organizing and outreach. Getting further than that may be possible only given some major crisis, change in the public mindset, or most likely combination of both. Of course, persistent organizing can contribute to a change in the public mindset in ways both big and small, direct and indirect.

The SP was more mainstream in that sense.

That depends on when. The socialist movement of the late 19th to mid 20th century was so far out of the mainstream that at times its adherents were jailed, deported, and even lynched solely for holding their out of the mainstream beliefs.

Since the 40s, the Socialist parties hve become LESS effective than the LP.

I take it you mean than the LP is now? If Henry Wallace can be taken to be socialist (enough) for this purpose, they were still fairly strong as late as 1948. Their influence
waned with a combination of the red scare and the adoption of many of their policies through the New Deal and Great Society (and the supposedly temporary truce with those policies that Republicans made supposedly in the greater interest of the cold war, since then made permanent).

Socialist ideas saw a revival with the 1960s counterculture, but did not channel themselves into much in the way of sustained alternative political party activity – rather, some small militant
sects, the Democratic Socialists of America and other activism within the Democratic Party, and as you say,

Socialist INTELLECTUALS switched their activities to academe, journalism, and the public sector. The influence of socialism as an ideology shifted away from the Socialist Party and its splinters LONG AGO.

And for libertarianism to succeed as socialism has, libertarians need to do the same (creative arts are also vitally important). As I said, left-oriented libertarianism is much more attractive to academics, journalists and artists – they often find themselves “on the left” primarily due to civil liberties and peace issues, and many (especially the younger ones) are open minded towards a bottom-up perspective on free market economics.

- While attractive to me personally, the notion of narrowcasting to such micro demographics as “artists and musicians” seems prohitibitively expensive, since that subset is TINY. I see NO evidence that “educators” are L leaning or inclined as a group.

Think of artists, musicians and educators as a lever in reaching far greater numbers of people; after all, communication is what they do.

Interpersonal communication and outreach also happens to be what those people the LP has typically attracted so far do most poorly; not a good formula for party or movement growth.

As for group – no. It’s all individual.

In my experience, many students, professors, artists etc. oppose the military-industrial complex, the socially reactionary agenda of the religious right, and corporate-government collusion. They want a healthy environment, and equal opportunities for people of all racial and economic backgrounds, and for women and sexual minorities to be treated fairly. Many are persuadable that laissez faire economic policies are the best way to achieve goals such as a healthy environment, equal opportunities, etc, and logically and historically intertwined with opposition to big government on social issues and foreign policy/military spending. However, that persuasion largely fails to take place, because we do very little outreach, and also because we present our ideas in a right-leaning fashion when we even bother to present them at all. Thus, all they ever hear as a solution for their economic concerns are big government solutions, and naturally they accept them as part of a package deal with opposition to coercive imposition of patriarchal/traditionalist social mores and military expansionism.

Aside from narrowcasting, I think my point was more that presenting libertarianism in left-friendly ways would naturally draw more of these elements.

- Conceding right-leaners seems highly contra-inidicated. Economic conservatives who are socially liberal is a VERY large percentage of the pop. This is especially true among the more affluent and educated quintiles.

Who’s conceding them? We can run off sheer inertia on that front for quite some time, if nothing else.

The problem is that this is essentially the only libertarian-leaning segment we are not conceding, which is basically suicidal (see my previous comment that you are apparently responding to as to why).

- In short, why would be want to model ourselves and our tactics after the failed Socialists?

Virtually every position they took in the 1920s and 30s is now law, with most of it a solid part of the bipartisan agenda.

I’ll take “failure” like that any day.

* Technically, my view is that hte US is drifting toward corporatist fascism/statism, which has some overlap with socialism, but is different.
* If recall correctly, the Socialist Party ran far more competitively in races in roughly the 1920-40 period than the LP has been. The SP was more mainstream in that sense. They were allied with the labor movement, but labor ultimately switched their alignment to the Ds. Since the 40s, the Socialist parties hve become LESS effective than the LP.
Socialist INTELLECTUALS switched their activities to academe, journalism, and the public sector. The influence of socialism as an ideology shifted away from the Socialist Party and its splinters LONG AGO.

- While attractive to me personally, the notion of narrowcasting to such micro demographics as “artists and musicians” seems prohitibitively expensive, since that subset is TINY. I see NO evidence that “educators” are L leaning or inclined as a group.

- Conceding right-leaners seems highly contra-inidicated. Economic conservatives who are socially liberal is a VERY large percentage of the pop. This is especially true among the more affluent and educated quintiles.

- In short, why would be want to model ourselves and our tactics after the failed Socialists?

Assuming a single issue can galvanize success for the LP, which issue would you venture to say would be a good one for us?

It depends on timing, but in general, we need to stress peace and civil liberties issues and bottom-up ways of explaining our economic positions that appeal to people coming from the left, especially young people.

*Left-center-libertarian is THE largest single cluster in the 18-30 age group. 90% of voters never change parties after age 30.

*Every demographic factor which tends to make people more conservative also tends to make them less likely to change parties.

*Continuous right-packaging of our message and right-outreach (mostly passive) means that:
….the low hanging fruit on the right has already been picked.
….we’re making it harder for people from the left/demographically diverse to feel at home.

*Cato survey: African-Americans are more prone to be broad-spectrum libertarian than European-Americans.

*Ron Paul campaign was able to successfully recruit from the left and was much better demographically balanced than LP, despite right-deviation on several social issues.

*Key groups for increasing outreach potential – artists, musicians, educators, etc – have left/libertarian leanings.

At my first “Candidate Training Seminar” in ’82 run by Michael Emerling (of all people), he said that candidates cannot expect people to just hear about our candidacy and overwhelmingly vote for us. Several candidates expressed surprise at this notion!

This tactic has somewhat worked for just one libertarian candidate, Ron Paul in the last election cycle.

I have never believed that our message was wrong. The only thing we have done wrong is not getting our message out to the voter(s). No amount of “moderating” our message is going to bring victory.

The only tactic that will work is actually getting our message out. Some of us still have a problem with this.

PEACE

Her partner said, “They’re just littel Republicans”. And they walked away.

We gotta define the difference.

No, I don’t know of any ideal “velocity from center” measurement, nor can I identify the “single galvanizing issue” that might work for us.

There probably aren’t any silver bullets, and we do face a more difficult set of barriers than either of the two existing “major” parties did in their day.

And please, please, PLEASE understand that I am NOT positing adoption of a radical ideological orientation as a SUBSTITUTE for doing real political work.

We can be right on the issues all day long, but we’ll get nowhere if we don’t successfully reach, persuade and mobilize large numbers of people.

We can do outreach, persuasion and mobilization work all day long, but we’ll get nowhere if we aren’t offering a distinct alternative to, a real departure from, the Big Two (i.e. small differences aren’t going to be enough to put a dent in the major brands).

Even if we get both parts right, we may fail anyway. But we have to get both parts right to have any chance of long-term persistent success.

Robert what’s the matter you, huh?

One issue may not make a party to you, but a number of parties have focused on a single issue and seen some degree of success. Whether they leverage that success into something else is another story.

In the back of Milton Friedman’s book “Free to Choose” is a list of the Socialist Party’s program of which most have been inacted into law in some form or another.

Should we try something like that? Maybe, but in recent years we have become vague on almost everything. We’re like putty. Hey! what shape do you want me to be?

Personally I would put some effort on ending our foreign deployment of U.S. troops and explain to the public how this has run up the national debt, debased the currency and added to our international problems, but I’m just a shmuck. Wadda I know?

And, you cite single issues that galvanized the Rs and Ds respectively WAY back in the day. Assuming a single issue can galvanize success for the LP, which issue would you venture to say would be a good one for us? Or, do you think that a new model can be created that involves multiple issues?

I’m not sure which two political parties you’re talking about, but it sure as hell isn’t the Democrats and the Republicans.

Both of those parties became successful by moving AWAY from the center, getting at least somewhat radical (the Democrats on the issue of the national bank, the Republicans on the issue of the extension of slavery into new territories and states).

Those two parties have SINCE substantially sewn up the system to make it harder on new parties (Australian ballot with access restrictions, etc.) … but I’ve seen no evidence that his has produced a situation in which a new party can succeed by positioning itself as moderately reformist.

In my opinion, a radical party has only a very slim chance of a success — and a moderate party has no chance whatsoever.

I said the LP needs to win elections to become relevant so it sounds like you actually agree with me. I’m talking about elections on all levels.

And while local politics may be “easier” to get elected, they still are not easy.

Minor parties do not need to win elections to influence policy.

No, they do not. On that I agree. However, simply influencing a few policy decisions here and there isn’t what I consider relevant or successful.