Sharing links that mock a caricature of the Other Side isn’t signaling that we’re somehow more informed. It signals that we’d rather be smug [jerks] than consider alternative views. It signals that we’d much rather show our friends that we’re like them, than try to understand those who are not.
In The Three Languages of Politics, I also discuss political discourse that is designed to close the minds of the people on your side, as opposed to opening their minds or those of the opponent.
Blanda linked to another piece, from 2015, written by self-described leftist Fredrik DeBoer, who wrote,
Right now I just think there’s this fundamental problem where so many people who identify themselves as being part of the broad left define their coalition based on linguistic cues, cultural overlap, and social circles. The job of politics, at its most basic, is finding common cause with people who aren’t like you. But current incentives seem to point in the opposite direction — surveying the people who are just like you and trying to come up with ways in which that social connection is actually a political connection.
The essay ended with a plea
You have to be willing to sacrifice your carefully curated social performance and be willing to work with people who are not like you.
Now, apply those thoughts to libertarians.
“Now, apply those thoughts to libertarians.”
Hmm, well, I’d say that libertarians (especially of the ‘small L’ variety) tend to adopt that stance out of necessity, (given that they’re very unlikely to wield much political power independently) trying to work with Democrats on social issues (gay marriage, the drug war, immigration, police abuses) and with Republicans on economic issues (minimum wage) and liberty issues (2nd amendment, Citizens United, the nanny state) . It seems the biggest obstacle to this approach is finding that they are treated with suspicion by the red and blue teams, for example:
http://reason.com/blog/2013/09/11/gay-marriage-recognition-efforts-in-ariz
All the “issues” are designed by master marketers solely to defeat the other side. Who wants to bet me that Hillary will be pursued legally by Trump? She should be prosecuted, but it was only ever emphasized for political effect. Of what common cause is there? What do I have to bargain with?
Why should they? Trump barely scraped by via electoral college targeting. Get a better candidate or wait another 4/8/12 years until demographics make losing impossible.
The only way to get the other side to learn anything is to force them to learn. The only way to force them is to take away demographic inevitability.
“Now, apply those thoughts to libertarians.”
If applied to Normative Libertarians, those thoughts (and others from TPL) fit very well.
Normative Libertarianism is framed by the impacts of the functions of governments on Liberty and thus to limit those impacts by limiting those functions.
I made a similar comment here a few days back. If a self-described libertarian is immediately set upon by other self-described libertarians on a self-described libertarian blog, libertarians will never get anywhere.
Not only is it similar to the typical leftist mindset, I think the causes are the same as well. Libertarians skew heavily academic. It’s basically the socially and professional acceptable means of saying you’re not a Democrat or “Progressive” in the academic and government dominated world. It exists not because Libertarians are substantially different from most Republicans, but because they’re extremely cowardly, impractical, and incapable of operationalizing their political theories into political realities.
Thus do “true” libertarians decry anyone who’s not for open borders as anti-immigrant xenophobes and anyone who’s not for immediate, unilateral and unconditional free trade as inveterate protectionists.
That raises the question as to whether ‘Trumpism’ (or whatever you want to call the collection of political sentiments modal to his support base, or more broadly the current international anti-globalism phenomenon) represents something different enough from traditional ‘conservatism’ that it has it’s own new axis and language of politics.
Libertarianism often seems to provide a refuge for those who would go unsullied by the ugliness of the US political process. It is very nice to have a perch from which to sit and tut, tut over those awful unenlightened statists.
Unfortunately that is about all that a 2 party electoral system has to offer dissenters from popular orthodoxy.
A convention of states could fix that though by replacing our presidential system that serves to exclude minority voices from governance to a parliamentary system which would serves to include minority voices, giving them a seat at the table however limited that might be proportionally.
For this libertarian, each election is like having your nose rubbed in dog droppings. Nevertheless I can appreciate that supporters of the status quo fear modern democracy as practiced elsewhere in the world. Some may have genuine pride in the US heritage and national tradition or appreciate the potential for unforeseen consequences that change might bring.
Nevertheless, I do not believe that TLP, for which I have great respect, demands that I be happy about the status quo.