As sowing comes before reaping, culture comes before politics

By David McElroy · June 24, 2012

Why don’t libertarians win elections? Simple. Most people don’t want the things that libertarians promise. They don’t believe in the things that libertarians believe in. So the question is why libertarians bother to run campaigns.

This has been a question I’ve heard debated ever since I became a libertarian 20 years ago. It always seemed like a contradiction to me. When I was active in the Libertarian Party, it felt as though we weren’t clear on what we were doing. Were we trying to win elections? Or were we just trying to educate people?

Every libertarian campaign suffers from the same confusion. Some people try to talk themselves into believing the candidate can win, but more realistic people understand it’s not going to happen. Those people tell themselves that the campaign is worth it anyway, because they’re educating people and “spreading the message of liberty.”

Both groups are lying to themselves, but they don’t realize it. If they read what I’m saying here, they will be certain that I’m wrong. But if I’m wrong, I’d like someone to show me the successful libertarian campaigns that are changing people’s minds and then winning elections. Here’s a hint. You won’t find any.

It took me years to figure out the reason that libertarian campaigns are so useless. It’s simply that a libertarian campaign is trying to reap a harvest where we haven’t really planted. Campaigns are not about educating people or changing minds on basic principles. Campaigns are about convincing people that you are the candidate best in alignment with what they already believe.

How do people’s beliefs change? In a small minority — which would apply to almost all libertarians — it happens because of a reasoned decision that their old beliefs are wrong. This tends to be the case with people who have a strong interest in politics and are very rational. If you’re going to come to a libertarian conclusion in modern America, this is probably how it happened for you. But — contrary to what most libertarians believe — this isn’t the way most people change their views. They change their views for emotional reasons that they’re not entirely conscious of. Their views change because the culture around them changes — and they don’t even realize it.

Campaigns are about going out and collecting votes. It’s like harvesting crops that are ready to be gathered. If the fields have been properly planted and tended — and the culture has changed — people will be receptive to a view that would have been foreign before. But if the sowing hasn’t been done — and the culture hasn’t changed — there is no harvest to reap. And that’s why libertarian candidates lose every time.

You can’t combine sowing and reaping, not with crops and not with votes. Any effort to do that is going to meet with spotty “success” in limited individual cases — enough for the campaigns to say, “See?! It’s working!” — but not enough to ever win an election. The sowing has to be done through changing the culture. That takes time and it takes work of an artistic type, not an intellectual type.

How did race relations change in this country? To the extent that they’re better, was it because of laws? Or was it because culture changed? I think it’s plain to see that for the most part, the laws changed because the national culture changed. (There was still regional resistance, but it couldn’t withstand the national culture, which dictated the laws.)

The culture about race relations and many other things started changing in the ’60s and ’70s because people who held liberal views on those subject put themselves into positions of influencing the culture — through movies, television and music. They weren’t overtly pushing their ideas, but they did it through entertaining art that was able to change how people saw certain things. I’ve said before that “All in the Family” did more to change ideas about race in the ’70s than all the legal and political efforts to change during the ’70s.

Until libertarians are willing to put their time, money and energy into changing the culture — through supporting writers, directors, actors, comedians and songwriters who share their views — libertarian campaigns will continue to be the sad spectacle they are today.

Politics today doesn’t matter to us. Or it shouldn’t. Doesn’t it bore you? You know what’s going to happen. You know that people with the same old statist views are going to get their way. Why do we waste as much time as we do following it? Why aren’t we concentrating on finding the ways to change popular culture? If we do that — and if we’re still living in a place that holds elections — people will be receptive to our views after we’ve changed the culture. I don’t believe in any form of the state or voting, but if you do, you need to understand that until the culture changes, elections are irrelevant to us, even on a pragmatic level.

If you’re trying to collect votes from people who don’t agree with you, you have to change what they believe. You don’t do that by arguing with them or lecturing them. You do that by changing the culture. If you do that, you’ll find crops that are ready to be harvested. If you don’t do that, you’ll continue finding barren ground and continued disappointment.

If you enjoy fighting and begging people to listen — only to be disappointed — you’re on the right course if you’re trying to get people elected now. If you’re ready to actually change the world, get serious about changing the culture. When that happens, people will be looking for ways to be free. But not until then.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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