Liberty Blog
Politics is a numbers game, so we have to start filling the tent.
With four months left to my second term as chair, I’ve had a front-row seat on the thrill ride of libertarian politics. Serving as chair forces one to think hard about how this all works and whether it works. The party has experienced yet another upheaval in the past year with yet another takeover and yet another schism. I’m left to wonder if it’s not all just more sound and fury, signifying nothing. At the end of it all, will we actually elect more candidates? Will we become an influence on the local, state, or national scene?
I am today and have always been more concerned with spreading the message of our party and our philosophy not to ideologues, but to the average citizen — the ones with jobs and homes and families, who face a growing burden of taxes and regulations, but who are not spending their idle moments in Signal chats debating conspiracy theories and which pedo to toss into the wood chipper.
How do you get people to show up to meetings and events, people who have a sense that something’s wrong with the country, who at heart believe in the concepts of liberty and self-sovereignty, but struggle to find a practical path to bring that to society? I can tell you from experience, the monthly business meeting is perhaps the worst possible method.
The MontcoLP committee has had a good run over the past couple of years with monthly attendance averaging between 15-20 people per meeting. Of that number, I think it’s safe to say that only about half that are hard-core regulars. Typically, we might see one or two new faces at most meetings, and then we never see them again.
One brutal assessment by a prominent libertarian of the current state of the LP, calls it “a giant, internal debate society, designed to help people feel the cheap thrill of appearing to be activists, while draining their energy and money on what is, essentially, a form of entertainment strictly for the participants.”
I know that one of the reasons for this is because they come — as I did — because they want to meet people like themselves. They don't want to listen to bickering over bylaws. Spending two hours of that for someone not a political wonk makes me reluctant to invite libertarian-leaning friends.
Many of us believe that our mission is to run candidates in an attempt to disrupt the two-party system. After about 50 years, the Libertarian Party has yet to crack 5% at the national elections. We’re lucky if we get 2%. At the local level, we have some success, mostly with open offices at the lowest rungs of government. I support this effort, but mainly precisely because it picks the lowest fruit hanging. They aren’t true races. We win those positions by default, and once we win them, what’s the plan?
We rightly exert a great deal of effort opening up ballot access for third party candidates, but again, with such tiny numbers behind us, no judge — an elected official in this state — will feel the least bit cowed by our efforts, no matter the righteousness of our cause.
At the county level, we need to cast our net broadly to attract more of what some in this party derisively refer to as “normies”. We need volunteers with backgrounds in marketing, the law, and event planning, just to name a few. We need to attract those who just want to be a part of the group, and to do that, we need a far more hospitable entry point.
To that end, our committee now stages a monthly social event we call the Prickle, which is a gathering of porcupines. Though I have believed in this concept since before I became chair, this idea was backed up by fellow Libertarian Perry Willis, who sent me the following comment on this topic:
“I have often thought that local groups would do best by focusing on [social events]. At some point you will grow so large that you will need multiple social events per community per month. At some point you will also reach critical mass and spontaneous actions of great importance will start to happen. But you have to be constantly inviting people to your social events, and then make them feel welcome and interested once they are there.”
Perry cites the book The Rise of Christianity in which author Rodney Stark cites similar strategy that lead to the church’s establishment in ancient Rome.
Perry explains, “Stark argues persuasively that Christianity gained traction first as a socializing phenomenon where friends and family gathered in small groups that gave them emotional shelter from the storm. It then grew further through the network connections (6 degrees of Kevin Bacon) that exist between friends and family. Eventually, this made it so large that it was able to become universal through its partnership with the Roman state.”
Critical mass, to me, is key to our success. Action springs from motivated groups, and the larger the group, the greater the potential impact. A larger group further gives us a broader pool of talent and backgrounds as well as more voters checking our box.
The Prickles we’ve so far had have taken place at local brew pubs and taverns, but there’s no reason they can’t also include picnics, hikes, sporting events… further showing to the county that libertarians are just like everyone else. We love our families, we work hard, and we care about our communities. We just think it’s time to try a better way.
Even if this doesn’t immediately bring about the structural change to the political process this country needs, at least we’ll have a lot more fun trying.
Our next Prickle is on November 3 at the von C Brewery in Norristown. Click for more info.
Randy Garbin is the current chair of the Montgomery County Libertarian Committee. The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the MontcoLP Board of Directors or of the MontcoLP committee.
