By garnering around 4 percent of the national vote, Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson received more votes than any other LP presidential candidate in history. Nonetheless, 4 percent is still a far cry from winning the presidency, a fact that has caused some libertarians to succumb to feelings of despondency, despair, defeat, and depression, especially since much of the 4 percent that Johnson received were likely just protest votes against Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
The problem with such reasoning, however, is that such libertarians are measuring the success of the libertarian movement by presidential vote totals. If one measures success that way, it becomes tempting to succumb to negative feelings about the prospects for achieving a free society in the near term.
If we consider a totally different methodology for advancing freedom and a completely different measure of success, then the situation and the prospects for achieving a genuinely free society look entirely different.
What is that methodology? It’s the methodology that The Future of Freedom Foundation has relied upon for its entire 27 year-history — introducing and spreading sound ideas on liberty within the general, overall marketplace of ideas.
This process is necessarily based on a person’s having faith in the power of ideas to influence others and to bring about major shifts in society. If someone lacks faith that ideas on liberty can move the world, it’s much more difficult to rely on them as a way to advance liberty. That’s because oftentimes such ideas have consequences that no one can foresee or predict.
For example, just before I was set to deliver a talk at a conference that the Ron Paul Institute recently hosted here in Virginia, a young woman introduced herself to me. She told me that when she was in the 8th grade, she discovered a quotation of mine that so intrigued her that she actually translated it into Spanish so that she could discuss it in her Spanish class. That led her on a quest to explore libertarianism. Today, she related to me, she is a full-fledged libertarian, a freshman at Harvard, and fluent in Spanish. And when we met, she was attending a Ron Paul Institute conference that was setting forth the libertarian non-interventionist paradigm on foreign policy!
The point is that there is no way I could have anticipated that when I published that quotation. The fact that she read the quotation and that it impacted her life in favor of libertarianism is a testament to the power of ideas on liberty. (The quotation: “If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all.“)
In fact, that’s the way I myself discovered libertarianism! When I was a young lawyer in my hometown of Laredo, Texas, I discovered four little books in my local public library that had been published by The Foundation for Economic Education twenty years before. If someone had asked FEE’s founder and president, Leonard Read, to provide a measure of success for those books in the 1950s, he could not have said, “Twenty years from now, these four books will influence a young lawyer in Laredo, Texas, to become a libertarian and ultimately to found an educational foundation named The Future of Freedom Foundation, which, in turn, will later influence a young woman to become a libertarian who will end up studying at Harvard.”
That’s the power of ideas on liberty! The process necessarily involves unforeseen consequences.
Thus, we have long held here at FFF that the best thing every person can do to advance freedom is simply to spread ideas on liberty. This can be done by sharing articles, speeches, videos, podcasts, and the like with everyone you know. We shouldn’t be overly concerned about how they are received. We should just do whatever we can to introduce sound ideas on liberty into the marketplace of ideas and then just let the power of the ideas take over.
For example, I recently came across a fantastic article in the Los Angeles Times entitled “For U.S. Foreign Policy, It’s Time to Look Again at the Founding Fathers’ ‘Great Rule’” by Texas A&M professor Elizabeth Cobbs. It is so good that I continue to recommend it to everyone who is interested in libertarian foreign policy.
In fact, that’s the point behind our FFF Daily (subscribe here for free), which we have been now publishing for more than a decade. Six days a week, we carefully look for articles and op-eds that present the libertarian position on various issues of the day. We then share these articles with you in FFF Daily, which sort of serves as a libertarian op-ed page that arrives in your email box every day and is posted on our website.
Why do we do this? Because of our faith in the power of ideas on liberty! By introducing these articles, which present sound ideas on liberty, into the overall marketplace of ideas, we have faith that they will have a favorable impact on other people’s lives, which then brings us closer to a paradigm shift in favor of liberty, especially on specific issues.
Is Elizabeth Cobb, the author of that LA Times piece on foreign policy, a libertarian? I don’t know and it doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that her op-ed presents the libertarian case on foreign policy.
And the same holds true for most of the authors and editorial writers whose articles we link to in FFF Daily. Undoubtedly, most of them would never call themselves libertarians. That’s fine by us. What matters to us is what their articles say. If they express libertarian perspectives, we are going to share their articles with you.
That raises another critically important point with respect to methodology. To achieve a genuinely free society, it doesn’t really matter if the vast majority of Americans ever become libertarians or that a libertarian president is ever elected. What instead matters is whether we can garner a critical mass of Americans to support libertarian positions on specific issues.
A good example of what I’m describing is the drug war. When FFF was founded 27 years ago, pretty much the only people who were calling for drug legalization were libertarians, including Milton Friedman, who authored two great pieces on the drug war in Newsweek in 1972 and in the Wall Street Journal in 1990.
Today, drug legalization is on the table and is actually being endorsed by people from all walks of mainstream life, including judges, prosecutors, policemen, and editorial writers. In fact, given that many states have legalized marijuana, the drug war is clearly teetering.
Are most people who favor ending the drug war libertarians? I’d say no. I’d estimate that only a small percentage are libertarians. But who cares about that? If we can eradicate the drug war from our society, that would be a monumental victor for libertarians (and the American people).
How do we push the drug war over the edge? By garnering a critical mass of Americans who favor drug legalization! Once such a critical mass is reached, public officials will buckle and end the war.
How do we reach such a critical mass? Not necessarily by converting more people to become libertarians (although that would be good!) but rather by convincing people that the drug war is a super-bad thing. If they agree, that brings us closer to ending the drug war, which would bring us closer to a free society.
In fact, a statistic that Cobb cites in her LA Times article is another example of the power of ideas. She cites a Pew Research Center poll that states that 57 percent of the American people now believe that the U.S. government should start minding its own business in foreign affairs and let other countries work out their problems on their own. That’s up from 53 percent just three years ago. Like the drug war, that’s a testament to the power of ideas on liberty. Imagine if we can get that number up to 70 percent simply by sharing her article and others like it with others!
It’s with the spread of sound ideas on liberty that libertarians can do so much to accelerate the achievement of a free society. If you like an article that you see in FFF Daily, please share it with others. Or if you come across an article you feel advocates a libertarian position, share it with others and with us here at FFF too!
If we can continue garnering support from a large number of different people on a wide array of libertarian issues, we can achieve the free society even if a libertarian never comes close to being elected president.
