Comments Elsewhere

Holmes,

I don’t think you’re fixated on winning elections, and I can’t find anywhere that I made that claim. What I think you are fixated on trying to influence people through electoral means. But as I’ve already tried to explain at some length, electoral politics is structurally ill-suited to the kind of influence that you want to exercise. The message you’re trying to spread is fundamentally antagonistic to the very process you’re trying to use, and the dynamics of electoral campaigns are such that they tend to drum up a lot of noise and very little concrete progress.

As for the success of the Socialist Party’s domestic platform, I’m familiar with the story. But I think that its success depended much less on electoral pressure politics than it depended on shifts in the surrounding culture outside of the electoral arena. It is also had the advantage of a domestic platform which would enhance the power of the American political class rather than antagonizing and undermining that power. Any consistent form of libertarianism lacks the latter “advantage,” and so has a correspondingly much worse chance at any kind of uptake in political circles.