I asked 34 people what they thought of Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson. I should add. I asked people that were not already libertarians, of the 33, most were democrats. The results are interesting.
Of the 34 people I talked to, 33 people had not heard of Gary Johnson.
- One person knew of Gary Johnson but had no idea what he stood for.
I asked a follow-up question. What do you think the Libertarian party stands for?
My answers were all over the map on this one. I've grouped them by themes below.
- They want to over throw democracy. (40%)
- They do not believe in America (a states rights response). (22%)
- The party died out in the 90s. (10%)
- Libertarians are a branch of the Tea Party. (10%)
- Libertarians are like Republicans but without the religion (10%)
- The rest were, "I don't know."
My analysis: We don't do a good job getting the message out. What do you think?
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The Barefoot Bum · 650 weeks ago
Y'all have a message?
Dale · 650 weeks ago
Maybe they weren't the best examples but they were what I had. And of course Ron Paul has said some amazingly stupid things over the years.
From this I've found that I have to agree with PZ Myers - "libertarianism, that reactionary political movement that seeks to elevate greed and selfishness as a ruling principle" - " the institutionalized selfishness, petty small-mindedness, and bourgeois values run amuck of the libertarians represent the worst of America"
If you are trying to get out a positive portrayal of libertarianism then you are quite correct. That message isn't getting out.
v1car 40p · 650 weeks ago
What you're missing is that pretty much every big-L Libertarian who has achieved anything like reasonable public recognition, from Ayn Rand to Ron/Rand Paul, has made it pretty clear that they consider "fiscal conservatism" -- which would more accurately, in most cases, be phrased "no taxes" -- to outweigh "civil liberties" by several orders of magnitude. This... confusion (let's be generous and assume that these people are all evil weasels, which is not hard to do) is reinforced by the fact that big-L Libertarians have voted for Republicans fairly consistently for decades, which is to say that as far as the voting record goes, most Libertarians have been willing to vote for the promise of "less taxes" instead of the promise of "more civil liberties". (And note that I don't consider that either the Democrats or the Republicans are ever going to actually come across with a smaller government or more civil liberties. But those are generally the directions in which they make promises, and Libertarians have voted based on those promises.)
In the public mind, therefore, your group has kind of self-defined as greedy poseurs, more likely to be in favor of cutting vital social services to save a penny than to make efforts to actually fight for civil liberties. It doesn't help that the most widely-known Libertarian works are The Fountainhead ("a designer gets prissy because the people who did the actual labor to build his designs actually challenged his decisions, and decides in his psychotic rage to destroy the buildings with dynomite") and Atlas Shrugged ("A guy who breaks the laws of physics and his rich friends destroy all of civilization, killing millions both directly and indirectly, out of pique at not being given absolute control over everything").
I can see two ways to combat this PR problem, one easy and one hard.
The easy one is for big-L libertarians to rally around civil liberties violations, which are never in short supply, and temporarily more or less give up on small government. Join the ACLU if you haven't already (and get your big-L buddies to do the same) and donate your time and money. Start going to as many local government functions as you can manage to do without dying of a surfeit of Robert's Rules of Order, and watch for the inevitable (trust me) minor violations of civil liberties, and write letters to the papers which -- without getting shrill and critical -- explain why these are bad. Hang around the local police station and do the same for criminals being brought in. And shut up about taxes and government programs -- we hear enough of that from the Republicans. If you do a good enough job, you can perhaps succeed in getting people to think of you and your buddies as "the New Libertarians". Then you'll only have to face the backlash from the Old Libertarians, who are anti-tax small-government stooges who have lucrative jobs working for think tanks funded by large corporations and will give you the blinding hatred of a million suns, and they have the money, media connections, and utter lack of scruples necessary to ensure that you are never heard from again.
The other way is demonstrate that an end to positive government programs is possible. Most Libertarian reaction to big government social spending is "we don't need this because people should be able to get the assistance they actually NEED from private charity and get themselves a decent life via their own hard work". At present, this is not only false but obviously false. If you want people to stop thinking of this as being motivated by pure greed, then you must work to make the assertion true. And that means working really, really hard at private charity. Nobody will complain if Social Security, for example, is rolled up if, at the same time, there really is enough private charity that the old in poverty won't have to undergo privation. So put together massive charity operations which would render government programs needless. (Told you this would be hard.) Of course, by forgoing the organization of the government, your pseudo-social programs will be much less efficient, and thus you'll have to spend more money and effort on making them work than you end up doing by paying taxes, but if you succeed people will listen to the small government talk afterwards.
Or, of course, you can follow the well-worn big-L Libertarian career path of going to work for a think tank funded by big corporations and accept a huge paycheck in exchange for trying to come up with ways to mislead the public and cut taxes for your sponsors while complaining about how the chunk taken out of your paycheck by the taxes, despite leaving you with vastly more than you could possibly need, is too much. That one must be attractive, considering how often it's been done.
Mojoey 107p · 650 weeks ago
I'm a firm believer in change the message. Libertarianism has some good ideas that can help solve our nations problems. But we tend to cloud the message by yelling for massive and unachievable reforms. It drives me nuts. Small change moving the issues in the right direction is the way to go.