The Limits to Libertarian Persuasion
Political persuasion is a slow process. Unless you stumble upon someone who truly is “already libertarian but doesn’t know it,” you will be disappointed and ineffective you expect to get people to change their minds during the course of a conversation. If you are trying to pitch the full libertarian program or significant fraction thereof, you biggest challenge it to maintain credibility and keep the conversation friendly, so it can continue on and off over months.
On the other hand I routinely get people to embrace proposals which reduce the size and power of government, by accepting my audience’s underlying value system and focusing on semi-libertarian steps which also further their values. The process of creating a full libertarian or even near libertarian is so slow and expensive that I no longer bother. Sometimes I succeed anyway, but that’s gravy. I am happy to work with progressives to replace the welfare state with a a universal stipend, with environmentalists toto replace our complicated tax system with a carbon tax and other externality taxes, with moral conservatives to allow more school choice, with good government reformers to replace plurality voting with Range Voting. I can cut the government in half at least just by giving non libertarians what they already want.
Were he alive today, Murray Rothbard would say I am no longer a real libertarian. By his narrow definition I am definitely not. Those of you who are real libertarians by said narrow definition have a bigger job ahead of you. Even if you are considerably more extreme than I, it behooves you to emulate my easy persuasion strategy and let your deep philosophical efforts be a background process until the easy issues are used up. I say this even if you are charismatic, good looking, and have a philosophical defense of liberty that is considerably more robust than either Rand or Rothbard. For when you demand radical political change you run up against basic human nature.
Fear is a more powerful motivator than hope or greed. This is a feature of the human psyche, not a bug. Overlook and opportunity and you can try something else later. Ignore danger and you can wake up dead.
Extreme change can be dangerous. Extreme political change is definitely dangerous. Even extreme change for the better has its dangers as the fall of the Soviet Union demonstrated. When you try to sell extremism, you face a stubborn customer: the primitive parts of the human brain. These parts do not fully develop until full adulthood. This is why teenagers are so reckless. Teach teenagers, or write propaganda novels teenagers are likely to read, and you can catch a few during that narrow window between political awareness and mental maturity.
Some minds are slow to mature in this respect. We call the affected people visionaries, nerds, science fiction geeks, weirdos, and attendees at a Libertarian Party Convention. This political concentration of interesting people has nothing to do with liberty per se. It applies to most extreme political factions. George Orwell wrote wrote “'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.” in The Road to Wigan Pier. (And yes, I wear sandals and experiment with natural cures myself.)
If you want to sell hardcore libertarian ideas to the majority, you have to include members of the main herd: the people who watch football, drink Budweiser, play golf, keep up with current fashion, and/or attend Rotary Club meetings. These people are not receptive to extreme political ideas. You will not win them over en masse with reason, logic, or even Michael Cloud’s NLP magic. For most of the human race you need hard evidence, not theory, to make the case for substantial political change.
And how do you get the hard evidence for some of the more interesting libertarian ideas without first persuading a majority to give them a try? We have a dilemma!
We might want to weigh our strategic options in the face of this dilemma.
