Gatekeepers
(posted by FreeDem)
This post is a “sibling” post to my post on political gatekeepers at Freedom Democrats. Please check it out as well, although the theme is the same the points are different. This post focuses on gatekeepers in the libertarian movement, or the lack thereof, while the Freedom Democrats post focuses on liberal gatekeepers online.
The scene is New Orleans sometime in March, 2008. The leaders of the Religious Right are meeting to discuss the outcome of the Republican primary . . .
Michael Farris of the Home School Legal Defense Association, an early supporter of Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, chided the group for cold-shouldering his candidate until it was too late. Others, including Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, disagreed. The meeting quickly threatened to dissolve into accusations, rebuttals, and recriminations.
Then, venerable Paul Weyrich—a founder of the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the Council for National Policy (CNP)—raised his hand to speak. Weyrich is a man whose mortality is plain to see. A freak accident several years ago left him with a spinal injury, which ultimately led to both his legs being amputated in 2005. He now gets around in a motorized wheelchair. He is visibly paler and grayer than he was just a few years ago, a fact not lost on many of his friends in the room, some of whom had fought in the political trenches with him since the 1960s.
The room—which had been taken over by argument and side-conversations—became suddenly quiet. Weyrich, a Romney supporter and one of those Farris had chastised for not supporting Huckabee, steered his wheelchair to the front of the room and slowly turned to face his compatriots. In a voice barely above a whisper, he said, “Friends, before all of you and before almighty God, I want to say I was wrong.”
In a quiet, brief, but passionate speech, Weyrich essentially confessed that he and the other leaders should have backed Huckabee, a candidate who shared their values more fully than any other candidate in a generation. He agreed with Farris that many conservative leaders had blown it. By chasing other candidates with greater visibility, they failed to see what many of their supporters in the trenches saw clearly: Huckabee was their guy.
In 2007 and 2008, the gatekeepers of the Religious Right failed their movement. As leaders of a political faction, it was their job to send the signals to their followers on whom to support. Instead, failing to make a firm decision, the followers sent the signal to them: Mike Huckabee. The Religious Right may well learn from its mistake and change its strategy in the future, but this failure to unite around one candidate is just one recent example of the failure of established gatekeepers to manage their flock . . . and keep out the wolves.
Old school politics, back before Barack and blogs, was a often seen as a system of factions forming alliances in order to control party nominations. Union presidents, African-American pastors, Religious Right leaders, and city-machine bosses picked their horse in the race and sent the message down to their followers on the ground. The rise of a more post-modern political system has complicated this system, and will continue to do so. We now have clothing lines endorsing political candidates. And that’s only one of the acts in our political circus.
It remains to be seen if the gatekeepers of the Religious Right will rally around John McCain–some of the signs aren’t encouraging for the former maverick. More important is the question of gatekeepers from for libertarianism . . .
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Where are they? Hello?
Write David Boaz and David Kirby:
Campaign field directors know where to find other voter demographics. You find gun owners at the gun range or through the NRA, churchgoers at church, business owners through the Chamber of Commerce, union members through unions, black voters in churches and neighborhoods, and so on. Where do you find libertarians? There are no libertarian equivalents of the Christian
Coalition or MoveOn.org.
Note, interestingly, that Boaz and Kirby throw out the name of MoveOn.org, a specific creation of the new Internet style to politics. When it comes to faith and ethnicity, both libertarians and liberals/progressives (the specific online version of this unique species) are more secular and more white than their other political peers. If libertarians are going organize they’ll benefit a lot from learning from the liberal blogosphere.
So far, Ron Paul has failed to show an ability to divert his fundraising base to libertarian Republican congressional candidates. The start of his presidential campaign showed a great potential for Ron Paul to become a gatekeeper of the libertarian movement even in defeat, but the revelation of his newsletters to the public at large and the disgraceful xenophobic tactics of his campaign left a sour note at the end. With this in mind, I turn to look for libertarian gatekeepers elsewhere.
My idea (and I post this largely to encourage discussion, so disagree where you do) is that the libertarian movement online will eventually grow to the point in which there will be “blogger gatekeepers” with libertarian versions of DailyKos, MyDD, OpenLeft, and the like. This is not to imply that the libertarian blogosphere will be hierarchical; I view the liberal blogosphere as very egalitarian and fluid–just look at the quick rise of OpenLeft and the decline of MyDD. Rather, the national libertarian blogosphere of the future may well suffer from too much information on candidates, issues, and causes. While Ron Paul was able to grab our temporary attention during the presidential primary, just imagine a congressional year where many libertarian candidates running–and even more locally. Simply flooding Digg would no longer be sufficient to get the word out.
The role of the major liberal blogs is to aid in the synthesis of information and to act as a platform of organizing. Blogs where the main blogger takes an unpopular stance, for example favoring an unpopular Democratic nominee, see their fortunes decline. Libertarians should embrace this free market of political news and encourage their own blog sites where people can congregate to share news and information. Perhaps we’ll even see a blog specializing in the intersection of liberalism and libertarianism . . .
Tags: gatekeepers, liberalism, libertarianism
May 12th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
What’s your take on Bob Barr seeking the LP nomination?
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/trailhead/archive/2008/05/12/who-is-bob-barr.aspx
I was willing to give Barr a chance when he first became a Libertarian, but since he’s entered the race he’s stuck to standard politician doublespeak. I’m not impressed. He’s just a johnny-come-lately to libertarianism who only joined the LP after they helped run him out of his House seat. A classic case of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”
I liked Ron Paul just fine. No, he’s not the ideal revolutionary leader, but he was sincere in his opposition to the US Empire and the federal police state. He had the track record to back it up.
May 12th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Bob Barr has long been a militant drug warrior, and one of his aides a year or two ago told Radley Balko, prior to an interview, don’t ask Barr about his support of drug prohibition. You see, it pisses Barr off.
Lately, he’s claimed to be reexamining drug policy. But fuck that — I’m voting Obama.
May 12th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Anyone who thinks Obama is going to change politics is a fool.
What “disgraceful xenophobic tactics of his campaign” are you referring to?
May 12th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Anyone who thinks Obama is going to change politics is a fool.
No politician — or pundit, blogger or movement — is going to change the fundamentals of politics, which is about power. But in my view, Obama holds the best prospects for doing some of the more important things right, while being less likely to do significant, off-setting bad ones.
But I could be wrong.
May 13th, 2008 at 12:13 am
Here’s an example…
May 13th, 2008 at 10:44 am
Disgraceful xenophobic tactics take two:
http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/02/25/is-this-libertarianism.aspx
May 13th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Disgraceful xenophobic tactics take two:
If illegal immigrants pay into Social Security, I don’t see any justice in not letting them then collect. But if they do not pay in, is Paul’s point an example of “disgraceful xenophobia”?
May 13th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
I think the graphic was out of line, and picking illegal immigrants receiving Social Security benefits–already illegal–as a campaign issue when there are bigger issues out there (Iraq, frex) seemed like a poor choice.
May 13th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
What puzzled me about those ads is that they’re openly contradictory to the rest of his views. Seriously, a “libertarian” whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment by pointing at supposed drain on “public services”? That’s like a vegan complaining about some marinade because it doesn’t go well on pork chops.
May 13th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
Paul signed the Numbers USA pledge.
http://www.numbersusa.com/index
http://people.ronpaul2008.com/campaign-updates/2008/02/04/ron-pauls-immigration-pledge/
May 13th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
FD, most,or at least a significant majority, of the libertarian blogosphere is anarchist. Certainly the best minds in the movement are anarchists and could give a rats ass about political organization. Maybe if plurality, winner-take all voting systems were replaced by more proportional voting systems, you would see an effort that would rival the liberal side. Until then, I doubt it…
May 13th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Ka1igu1a,
I don’t know how much of the libertarian blogosphere is anarchist. Certainly not the majority of Ron Paul supporters? I also sometimes wonder if my perception is bias because I have been so heavily influenced by left-libertarians and agorists, to I just seem to know more anarchist libertarians online than the population as a whole.
May 13th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
FreeDem, I don’t have evidence to back it up, but I don’t think most libertarians are anarchists. At least that is my experience of 30 years as a self-identified ‘tarian. And with all due respect to Ka1igu1a, a lot of great writing and thought come from non-anarchist libertarians such as the folks at Reason or Cato. Not to mention the late Hayek.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:18 am
Mona,
If most libertarians are anarchist, the direction of talks about libertarianism and liberalism together should focus on direct action ways in which liberals can accomplish liberal goals through libertarian (in this case specifically anarchist) means. I remember a while back I looked at the campaign waged by Ben and Jerry to encourage people to write their Congressman to support an effort to cut military spending a small percent and use that money for education, health care, etc. I worked it out that if liberals gave the same amount to charity that conservatives did, they’d be able to pay directly for all of those improvements they wanted to pay with the military spending.
This is not a defense of the military budget, just pointing out that maybe instead of a political discussion about libertarians voting for liberals, we may need a discussion about how liberals can accomplish their goals through libertarian means.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:44 am
FreeDem,
I’d have to say that recent experience on this site is leading me to believe that for at least some liberals, they care more about the means than the ends. If there is a possible conflict, they will reflexively support the means (enlarging and centralizing coercive state powers) and sacrifice the ends (social safety nets, civil liberties, an end to the imperial military industrial complex). I have repeatedly made arguments that the problems bemoaned by liberals have, as their cause, government interventions from a generation or more ago. But instead of entertaining the idea that ending that intervention might help solve the problem, the common response is “better to give the institution that created this problem more power and hope it will do what I want it to do!”
I had a similar hope as you - but so far, such suggestions have at best been misconstrued into strawman arguments, and at worst, have been rejected as “utopian” out of hand. I’m sure that there are a few liberals out there who approach this project with an open mind - but don’t expect it to be the dominant response.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:15 am
Seems both anarchists and Ron Paul supporters have something in common: horrible odds of “winning”. So yea, I put the RP bumber sticker on my car mostly for symbolic purposes.
I’ve grown accustomed to an underdog, what-the-hell-did-he-just-say status, and even kind of like it.
May 14th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
“I’ve grown accustomed to an underdog, what-the-hell-did-he-just-say status, and even kind of like it.”
Hear, hear!!