Can’t we all get along? Why is the liberty movement so fragmented?

By David McElroy · October 13, 2011

Many people who’ve tried to organize libertarians or anarchists will tell you it’s like trying to herd cats. Sheep might blindly follow a leader, but cats all know what they want. It’s the same way with this crowd. Each one of us believes he knows everything — which is frustrating for those of us who really do know everything.

Yes, I’m kidding, but only a little. For those of us who want individual freedom, we’re frequently our own worst enemies. Even though we’re in a tiny minority — roughly 10 percent of the population — we’re so fragmented among ourselves that we seem to be even smaller minorities than we are. What’s even worse is that many of the people within the 10 percent do more shooting at each other than anyone else.

Part of the problem is that you can make so many (very different) rational arguments for how to pursue individual freedom. I’ve certainly run the gamut, so I’m familiar with most of them. You can make pragmatic arguments to get what you can through the existing system. You can make semi-pragmatic, but still principled arguments to try to transform the existing system through a third party. Or you can make principled philosophical arguments against the coercive state as a whole. Some people even combine bits and pieces of the different arguments. What they rarely do is overcome their differences in approach to work together for very long.

Some people are convinced that there’s no sense in doing anything other than working inside either the Democratic or Republican party. (They tend to choose sides there depending on whether they’re more interested in economic or social freedoms.) Others are overtly libertarian and believe they can somehow force the Libertarian Party (or an even smaller third party) to become relevant.

Then there are the people who choose sides between the approaches taken by the libertarian pragmatists at the Cato Institute and the more hardcore anti-statists in the Lew Rockwell and Mises Institute camps. (Many of those people seem to hate each other.)

Personally, I get along with all of these people, even though I think what most of them are doing is useless, at least as compared to the amount of effort expended. But I understand that other people are going to follow different paths in their attempts to get what we all want. Since I’ve pretty much taken every approach that other people have to one extent or another, I know why they arrived at the conclusions they did. I’m just convinced that none of the approaches that call for working within the system or even trying to save some form of an American nation are going to work.

There’s an old joke that asks what the difference is between a libertarian and an anarchist. There are different versions of the reply, but it’s generally something like, “10 years.” If you understand the need for liberty, you’re generally going to start trying to work within a framework you’re already familiar with. Over the years, though, you’re going to give up more and more of that existing majoritarian intellectual framework — usually arriving (eventually) at the conclusion that the state itself is immoral and that there’s no way to ethically compromise with it. Until you reach that point, though, nobody can convince you.

I’ve given up on the coercive state, for reasons that are both moral and pragmatic. If I believed the coercive nation-state were going to continue to be the only way of organizing the political world around us, I’d join the people who just want to hunker down and survive as best they can. But I believe the nation-state is going to collapse as the dominant system, because technological changes are going to make it easier for productive people to take their wealth and leave. The changes aren’t going to happen overnight, but the coercive state will find itself without the ability to milk the cash cows that subsidize everyone else. When that happens, frightened sheep will collapse the system. The independent-thinking cats will have their own plans and be scurrying in different directions by that point.

Over and over, I’ve made it clear that I see what we’re living in to be a slavery from which we need to escape. I’ve also talked a lot about free cities and charter cities and even things such as seasteading. There are going to be a world of new choices, but they’re only going to be available to those who have had the courage to think clearly and independently — and to think proactively about what is going to bring happiness for them and provide a foundation to build a better future for everyone.

We need to help each other. We are like independent cats, but we need to provide mutual aid to each other, intellectually and psychologically. Those in the 10 percent who generally support liberty need to find a way to quit fighting each other and accept that others have the right to be wrong in pursuing their own ends, even if we know they’re wrong. (After all, haven’t you changed your mind about it over the years? I certainly have.)

I’ve talked before about research that shows an idea has to simply reach acceptance by 10 percent of the people and it will eventually become the dominant idea. If we’re willing to concentrate on our basic idea — that freedom is good and coercion is bad — we have enough critical mass to do that. But it means we would have to give up our arguments among each other and just accept the fact that we’re going to disagree on how to implement it.

I’m not interested in people who want to fight ideological holy wars. I’m interested in people who want to find ways of working together to bring more choice to all of us. That should be our goal — for all of us to be able to pursue our own paths — not to prove to everyone how right we are.

Now … if I could only find a way to get the rest of you to listen to me.

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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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