Just because it hasn't been done, doesn't mean it can't be done; the establishment has never successfully created a one world government, but that hasn't stopped them from continuing to make strides in that direction, has it?
Ron Paul was one man standing alone, and Justin is soon to be one man standing alone. Our strategy is to take over the GOP infrastructure so we can deliver them an army of allies for once. You might be tempted to conflate all political strategies together and dismiss the differences between them, but this strategy is not some half-baked rehash of a path that has been tried unsuccessfully a thousand times. In fact, it's pretty unprecedented, except insofar as it's the same strategy the Rockefeller liberals (Fabians) and later the neoconservatives (Straussians) used to successfully obtain tight control over the GOP in the first place. The establishment is fighting back as hard and as dirty as they can, but that's no excuse to say, "It can't work." On the contrary, it can work, and it is working (slowly but surely), and it WILL work...but only if we can keep up and increase the pressure with enough grassroots activists who actually get physically involved.
Washington IS as evil as Amash says it is...worse actually, because you cannot fully express the touch of evil in words alone. You have to feel it to know it, but that is totally irrelevant to the effectiveness of political activism, because we are not asking these creatures for anything. We are pulling their legs out from under them (party infrastructure) so we can drive them out with an avalanche of well-funded, well-advertised liberty candidates.
You might cite Rand Paul as a counterargument, and say that we are getting down on our knees and groveling, but that would be (deliberately?) misunderstanding what he's actually doing. Even the political "compromisers," who I do not agree with by the way, are not actually begging for anything: For better or worse, they are attempting to nullify preferred establishment propaganda techniques by giving them fewer superficial vectors of attack. You can disagree with this approach all you like, because I do too, but it's still different from begging sociopaths to relinquish power, which all of us - regardless of our differences - obviously know would never happen (unless they thought they were days away from being lynched by an unstoppable mob, like the Soviet "leaders" likely did).
Furthermore, I should stress that Rand's style of political compromise is not the necessary or inevitable result of pursuing a political strategy: It depends entirely on the personalities of the people involved! If only people prone to political maneuvering are willing to actually get politically involved, then yeah, you're going to see a ton of it. If anarcho-capitalists and voluntaryists - and other extremely intelligent people that this world desperately needs to reach their full potential for influence - actually get off their asses and get involved themselves and refuse to get discouraged by the failures of others, there's going to be a hell of a lot less compromise going on. Use the power of your voice and your votes and the positions you achieve to slow and STOP the arm of coercion in its tracks.
This admonishment for libertarians to get off their asses is not meant to apply exclusively to other people, either. It applies to me too, or perhaps especially. I have squandered my time for too long, and I have sat idly on my potential for too long as well. We all owe more to ourselves.
Ironically, I came from believing what you believe: A couple years ago, I naively bought the popular an-cap dogma that a political route to liberty was impossible, because the system was too corrupt and too locked down, and there would be no way to gain positions of power in government or the GOP without becoming corrupt. Fast forward to today, when we've taken over local and even state chairman spots. Detractors point to every setback as proof that it's impossible, but that's silly; as with other things, you often have to try many times until you succeed. As it turns out, we have succeeded in capturing local and state chairman positions in several areas, and the fact that it's happened even ONCE is enough to believe it can be repeated. Once we have greater control of the state chairs, we can move in on the RNC...and once we have that, it will be far easier to field large numbers of liberty candidates at once, using party resources.
Right now it's a huge struggle just to get one or two liberty candidates in office, so it should come as no surprise that they are powerless against the tyrants who outnumber them so greatly. Do you really believe that the political strategy has anything to do with winning through "congeniality," or with begging the establishment for scraps? It doesn't. It has to do with laying the groundwork to flood Congress and state assemblies with a nonstop avalanche of liberty candidates, using the pulpit of the RNC. There is nothing "coercive" or "violent" or "evil" about joining politics to stop others from initiating force and violence as often as you can.
The truth is, I believed political action was futile because I WANTED to believe it, and that applied especially to political action within the GOP. Many anarchists and other hardcore libertarians may be willing to attempt a short-term political strategy, like registering Republican and voting for Ron Paul, but the thought of sustained association with the GOP brand (which we hold in contempt) and a sustained close-quarters struggle with warmongers and authoritarians makes our skin crawl. The same applies to people who came from a more left-wing perspective from the start. We feel tainted just being in the same room with these people, whether they're reachable and we're trying to persuade them, or whether they're higher-ups who we're trying to overpower with numbers and ground game. It's so far out of our comfort zone that we'd rather pretend it can't work, withdraw, and wash our hands of the whole thing. Ruling it out altogether, regardless of its merits, just gives us an excuse to avoid the ickiness...even if it means perpetual slavery.
It's curious how some people strongly opposed to this strategy go out of their way to dissuade others from attempting it though. A ton of people have been looking for any excuse to trash the GOP takeover strategy from the very start (and unlike other strategies, it's quite new), and I suspect they subconsciously fear the personal implications of it working: It takes a ton of patience to engage with local country clubbers and gradually persuade them to embrace liberty (somewhere between pulling teeth and total futility), and it takes a lot more courage to stand up for your principles in a room full of neocon lackeys month after month until you and your friends grab a chairman spot than it does to bicker with people over minor differences on the Internet. I think a lot of detractors want to believe that refusing to use the GOP makes them more principled and morally superior, but part of them fears that if it actually works, they'd have to face the possibility that they simply didn't have that courage, when others did.
On the subject of corruption, I want to issue a few words of encouragement: No movement before us, no one EVER, has attempted large-scale political action with the grounding starting point of concretely defined objective principles. For all their ties to the Enlightenment, even the Founders and Framers did not share this advantage with us. It's worth referencing Justin's message again to understand something: Most who seek power are evil from the start. Research shows that power really does corrupt, but I would argue that our sorry political state is more a result of sociopathy than the corrupting influence of power. Research also shows that power primarily corrupts when people in positions of power convince themselves their power is justified (entitlement complex), and people who resist this kind of thinking or place bounds on it have a tendency to resist corruption and behave fairly. The truly interesting thing is that nearly every single one of us has internalized hard limits on our actions that others before us have not.
Many have come before us with the intention of using power for the vague "greater good," but they were virtually all unfettered utilitarians with no principled reference point or limits to equivocation. From the very start, their ideologies assumed that only subjective value judgments could determine whether the ends justify the means...is it any surprise that they were corrupted, one by one? They never had a reference point to compare themselves against or return to. We do. Nearly ALL of us do. Some of us have extremely strict principles, such as the NAP, and others have less comprehensive principles, such as Constitutionalism, but virtually all of us have a concrete reference point to measure ourselves against, and so each of us knows precisely where we started and how to come back to that spot if we ever lost ourselves. I am totally against the tone of the recent message on Ron Paul's Facebook page, because it's so vaguely supportive of "compromise" without specifically distinguishing the good kinds from the bad kinds (and there are several discrete categories separated by more than degree), but that post is nevertheless correct about one thing: We can take our principles into the thicket and keep them.
First, most people are not emotionally ready for real education (elaboration). awake, most people are not like you and never will be. I have little doubt that you're a 98th percentile at least, and I wouldn't be surprised if you were a 99.9th percentile. This entire movement so far is disproportionately comprised of above-average and near-genius intellects, ESPECIALLY the hardcore libertarian/voluntaryist wing. We will never successfully transform the entire population into thoughtful, intelligent, principled libertarians steeped in philosophy, but we CAN eventually persuade them to agree with us...once they're emotionally ready. It's unfortunate, but most people's emotional psychology and desire to "fit in" will make them unreachable until they actually begin to see us as a "winning team" through social proof.
Second, education alone is not enough, even if literally everyone but the government goons agreed with us (elaboration). Actually winning liberty back requires people to ACT on that education sooner or later. Barring violent revolution, that means one of two things: Political action, or a massive overt tax revolt. A tax revolt would require a lot more courage and sacrifice from people than voting third party en masse, which would require a lot more mindshare (people already on our side) than a few thousand activists swarming local GOP meetings and taking all of their posts. Agorism is not enough, because there will always be an above-ground economy large enough to tax (there has to be, because real production relies on large capital goods that cannot be permanently hidden from the state).
I should also highlight a truth that a lot of people seem to gloss over: If this country collapses, we could head into abject totalitarianism, or we could head toward peaceful dissolution of the union and pockets of freedom. Ron Paul has sparked enough of an intellectual awakening in this country to make the latter option possible, but even then - even then - it will depend directly on our political action. Pockets of freedom will not magically sprout from collapse if we passively sit by and watch and pass out pamphlets and pontificate on the Internet. Even the liberty-inclined portion of the public is nowhere near ready for anarcho-capitalism or any other kind of anarchism, and so they WILL create a state (or multiple states, depending on the territories involved), and the vast majority of people WILL view it (or them) as legitimate. What kind of state(s) we're talking about depends on the extent of our political involvement in that process. If a collapse occurs, there will be Constitutional conventions of sorts, and we will have to do everything in our power to GO to them and be powerful delegates. We will need to exert every ounce of our political influence to become as involved as possible and restrict the size and scope of their new state(s) as much as possible, or we may just be handed something beyond our worst nightmares.
This is a great post, and I absolutely 100% agree with you. I do not know how to upvote on this forum (I probably do not belong to the 99.9th percentile
), but you definitely deserve one. I salute you, Sir!
