On majorities and moving forward:

1. I agree that anti-statists are in the minority. But, perhaps unlike you, my primary goal isn’t to convince a majority of people to believe something like what I believe. Of course, it’d be nice if more people believed in some form of antistatism, but achieving anarchistic goals is not generally a matter of winning an election, and so does not necessarily depend on winning majority support.

2. What I am interested in doing is radicalizing and working together with a smaller, somewhat self-selected group of people and encouraging them to act on the beliefs that they mostly already have. As a matter of strategy, I am interested in equipping and organizing the minority so that we will become ungovernable by the majority, not in convincing the majority to stop supporting government. But in order to radicalize you need to be radical and consistent; dropping out the critique of monopoly policing or government war or government borders just as such, and redirecting my outreach towards praising smaller-government candidates, or talking about only the subset of issues where I can agree with an LP voter or an Oath Keeper or Ron Paul’s presidential platform, hobbles my ability to actually communicate what I’m trying to communicate to the folks I’m trying to communicate it to.

3. As a teacher, setting aside questions of political strategy, I would of course like to educate more people about the right views. But to the extent that I’m not talking about strategy anymore, and just talking about education, I think that the core principles are the most important for people to learn, and I’d rather someone who really understands what freedom is and rejects it, than have someone who thinks they believe in freedom, but only because they continue to be confused about what it entails, and to believe in myths like “limited government,” or to believe that police and taxation are compatible with individual liberty. My goal here is not to jump into the debate just as it is and try and nudge them towards some confused approximation of libertarian ideals; rather, it’s to change the terms of the debate, and reorient it towards the fundamental issues at stake.

IOZ: The problem is not that many libertarians are unwilling to consider the broader implications of their philosophy, but rather, that libertarianism is not a philosophy, not even a “political ideology,” as the more careful bet-hedgers might have it. … It is instead a lame, purely American third-party movement that sometimes appropriates the trappings of ideology in order to justify self-perpetuation in the face of a plurality-takes-all electoral system wholely inimical to minor parties.

That’s an interesting series of assertions about what libertarianism is and what it is not. Could you say a bit more about what all of it is based on?

Is this just your own personal stipulative definition of “libertarianism”? Is it supposed to be a definition that reflects common use? Is it supposed to be an account of what Kerry Howley is referring to when she calls what she believes in “libertarianism”? (If so, what’s your evidence that that’s what she means?) Is it supposed to be an account of what most libertarians, other than Kerry Howley, mean when they call what they believe in “libertarianism”? Or an account of what most people mean when they mention “libertarianism”? (In either case, if so, what’s your evidence that that is the sole common usage of the term among the population that you’re concerned with?)

I ask because you seem awfully sure that “libertarian” is more or less identical with “member of the Libertarian Party U.S.A.,” and “libertarianism” means nothing more than a libertarian’s partisan proclivities. Which is an odd position to take on a word that was first coined — by a Frenchman, not an American — 115 years before the U.S. Libertarian Party was ever founded,

Of course, there is such a thing as the Libertarian Party, and some people who identify themselves as libertarians (or Libertarians) support it. But there are also plenty of people who self-identify as libertarians who want nothing to do with it — either because they have problems with the organization as it is, or because they are opposed to all forms of participation in political parties or campaigns for government office. And there were, of course, a lot of people who took that position back when the Libertarian Party was being founded, and who have continued to take that position throughout its career of miserable electoral failures.

Of course, if you want to focus on one narrow meaning of “libertarianism” — your own personal stipulative definition, or one of the many meanings in common use, or whatever — you’re welcome to talk about any meaning of “libertarianism” you want to talk about. But why think that Kerry Howley is using the word in the same way that you are?

Amp:

Thanks for the link, and for the kind words.

I also think that Bartlett’s case about CATO is fair. Since CATO and the Libertarian Party are hardly small and irrelevant parts of American libertarianism, I don’t think it’s true that Bartlett’s argument is, as Rad Geek says, a “ridiculous strawman.”

Well, I don’t dispute that CATO and the LP are significant parts of American libertarianism. But you don’t have to find some crazy-ass Red-card-carrying left-mutualist anarcha-Dworkinist like me to find self-identified libertarians who speak out vocally and repeatedly on the specific political issues that Bartlett claims libertarians aren’t speaking out about. You can find that standpoint among many people in the LP (including pretty much all LP presidential candidates prior to Bob Barr), or in any issue of Reason, which is not even remotely a radical publication, which you can find on the newsstand at any Barnes and Noble, and which is, as far as I know, the highest-circulation libertarian publication in the United States. These aren’t small or irrelevant parts of American libertarianism either, and if Bartlett can’t find the kind of libertarians that he’s looking for, then my suspicion is that he’s not looking very hard.

The claim that libertarians don’t speak out often enough about the War on Drugs, of all things, strikes me as particularly loopy and ill-founded.