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A Theory of the “Libertarian” Bernie Sanders Supporter
If you’re a libertarian who considers them self ideologically sound, you’re probably tearing your hair out at the sight of ostensibly libertarian friends sharing memes with the face of Democratic Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders. He is an avowed socialist, perhaps the ideology least likely to be associated with free-market libertarianism. It doesn’t seem to make sense — have they all misplaced their brains?
If you think back to four years ago when the Ron Paul movement hit its zenith, you probably had friends of all stripes getting involved and excited about what he was saying. Even the raging liberals found something to like, and gave up on more mainstream candidates to pledge support to Paul.
It was an exciting time. Few candidates found supporters from all backgrounds and sympathies. But as the campaign ended and Mitt Romney was selected for the Republican nominee for President, the excitement dwindled.
Some of the Paul campaigners began calling themselves libertarians and were involved in the movement for a while, but without the urgency of an election, it was difficult to maintain the enthusiasm.
Now some of these same people that so passionately followed Ron Paul and advanced his ideas have switched allegiances. As per usual, there is no reasonable mainstream candidate, so many are now ‘feeling the Bern’ and acting as if they had never gone through that libertarian period.
I have a theory of why this happens.
I believe it is something to do with the fact that logic alone cannot convince people of liberty. Anti-liberty positions are fraught with contradictions and difficulties, but there’s little we can do to make people realise that if they are firmly convinced they are true.
Books like Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind have been invaluable in defining the moral tastebuds of different ideological persuasions. Libertarians are advanced systematisers and are therefore pre-disposed to receiving the argument, whereas liberals are more likely to be turned on by things like altruism, empathy and out-group preference. In turn, conservatives get persuaded by arguments for tradition and existing institutions.
Very few people, when presented with a logical argument, suddenly change their minds. They must first be persuaded by intuition or feeling.
Sanders is very good at this emotive populism, and his campaign is getting heaps of support from individuals donating small amounts, convinced by convincing allusions to fairness. He also presents himself as the anti-establishment type. This appeals to the mild Ron Paul supporters who were particularly interested by the fact that he said what he mean and was a bi-partisan critic of the established political class.
For these kinds of people, the substance of the ideas themselves are secondary. Those that did not follow up what Paul said with further research are particularly at risk of being persuaded back towards statism.
Thankfully this can happen in the opposite direction too. Maybe a new figure will arise that will inspire young people towards liberty. If trends are to continue, the movement will be much bigger than it is now, and there will therefore be a stronger base for solid ideological change. The movement is not getting smaller by people abandoning ship to get behind Bernie, as these people didn’t have their heart in it in the first place. They were only transient supporters of charismatic candidates, and they can be won back again, hopefully in a way that lasts.
Once the Bernie moment is over, we can work on bringing those people back on the right side by pointing out the self-evident heinousness of the current political system.
But this is important: we must remember that presenting this information in a populist way to persuade people towards liberty is only the first step. As we have seen by the rise of the “libertarian” Sandersbot, people are fickle, and can easily switch to the other side. One’s intuition can only take you so far — it is a gateway to the truth but not the truth itself.
Once they’re in the door, it is the job of writers and speakers to re-affirm the new libertarian’s convictions with tight thinking and sound economics so that they are equipped to deal with their friend’s objections.
That’s why I am a huge supporter of websites such as Liberty.me, which presents a community of like-minded people to welcome newcomers into an exciting new world. Here they can hone the ideas and gain a deeper appreciation and understanding of why freedom is important whilst giving them their own voice, and opportunity for discussion.
I also endorse Liberty Classroom, a fantastic way to get the real history and economics that was not taught in school. Brilliant writers and teachers such as Tom Woods, Bob Murphy, Gerard Casey, and Brion McLanahan and others distill the key texts into advanced but digestible lectures for your commute. To listen to the Introduction to Austrian Economics module is to inoculate yourself against Keynesianism forever.
When the election is over (I’m counting the days), and your friends are all Bern’d out, do them a favour and swish them over to the sign-up pages and guide them back home — away from dull, insipid socialism and towards freedom and property rights.
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12 CommentsThoughts? Comments?
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Martin Brock February 8, 2016 , 1:54 pm Vote1
I have no horse in the race, as usual, and if forced to choose, I might choose a bullet in my head, but I’d more likely choose Sanders over Clinton and most of the Republican pack as well. That’s not because I’ve abandoned my libertarian principles. It’s because I’m forced to choose.
Sanders is no peacenik, but he’s not a rabid imperialist either, and he’ll pursue his welfare state agenda over the warfare state when push comes to shove. I don’t like his welfare state agenda, but I like the warfare state even less. I also prefer Trump to his Republican rivals for similar reasons. His warfare rhetoric can be rabid, but he’s more interested in dealing with geopolitical rivals than in waging war on them.
I don’t want a Canadian or U.K. style, single payer healthcare system, but I don’t want the corporatist monstrosity we have in Obamacare either. I have experienced both systems, and what’s left of “the market” in the U.S. healthcare system is a joke. I want a market in healthcare, but politics in the U.S. doesn’t offer this choice.
If forced to choose between Obamacare, with its health care sharing loopholes, and a Canadian style alternative with similar loopholes, I’d choose the alternative. That doesn’t make me a halfhearted libertarian. It makes me someone with regrettable options.
To be clear, I’m not supporting Sanders in any way, though some of my millennial children are, but I don’t want libertarians perceived as “closer to Trump than to Sanders”. We aren’t close to either, but the former association seems more likely to repel potential libertarians at this point. We have plenty of paleocons, who aren’t purist libertarians either, already.
James Smith February 9, 2016 , 10:27 am Vote1
It’s definitely important to make a distinction between libertarians who vote for the least-bad guy of a bad bunch and people who seem to have abandoned libertarian principle to get behind and drum up support for a particular candidate.
Mike Reid February 8, 2016 , 3:54 pm Vote2
Martin, I made a similar decision this year in the Canadian election. There was no even vaguely libertarian option in my riding, so I cast a symbolic (Quixotic?) vote for the socialist-ish NDP, on the grounds that I think they are the least likely to start or continue foreign wars.
Jerry Taylor at Niskanen (https://niskanencenter.org/blog/news/the-collapse-of-rand-paul-and-the-libertarian-moment-that-never-was/) seems to concur with James here that the Ron Paul movement was only partly about the ideas of liberty and was in a big way driven by “emotive populism.” Some people (me) did the follow-up research and became ardent converts to the principles of a free society. Lots of people didn’t, and so off they go to support Sanders or Trump.
James Smith February 9, 2016 , 10:18 am Vote1
Ha ha, the first comment on Taylor’s article says ” . . . the intelligent people from the Ron Paul movement are now Berners”
Mike Reid February 9, 2016 , 3:08 pm Vote1
Ouch.
Martin Brock February 9, 2016 , 3:38 pm Vote1
I don’t believe that all Ron Paulis have become Trumpists or Berners, but insofar as they have, I’ll go along with Taylor. Trump explicitly appeals to know nothings. He repels intelligent voters regardless of his more appealing rhetoric on interventionism.
Taylor asserts that Ron Paul offered “distasteful dog whistles” to truthers and racists and other “extremists”. He didn’t, in reality, not in the ’08 and ’12 elections anyway. He was and is an apocalypticist on the economy, predicting hyperinflation and economic collapse that never arrives, and he tolerated appeals to know nothings in his name decades ago, and he could have distanced himself from them more than he did in the last decade, but he was never remotely close to Trump’s naked appeal to know nothings. A hostile media misrepresented Ron Paul this way and possibly encouraged Trump in the process.
Rand’s problem was not that he refused to offer these dog whistles. He refused to take the principled positions on imperialism that his father took. He never galvanized an enthusiastic base. He banked on his father’s supporters but alienated them with appeals to a party establishment that never would have accepted him anyway, so he was never the anti-establishment candidate that his father was and that Sanders and Trump (unfortunately) are now.
Rand wanted to be a “serious” candidate, with a real chance of “winning”, and that’s why he failed. He didn’t sell out nearly enough to be “serious”, but he made his potential supporters wonder how much further he’d go.
Kevin Victor February 8, 2016 , 4:50 pm Vote0
“But this is important: we must remember that presenting this information in a populist way to persuade people towards liberty is only the first step.”
I wonder if this dilutes the ideas to the point anything deeper is seen as irrelevant or too strict, eventually defeating the whole purpose. Perhaps you can get people to that stage, but most aren’t willing to dive into the whole logic of it all. Are libertarians willing to compromise principles in order to create a mass movement?
James Smith February 9, 2016 , 10:25 am Vote0
I don’t think being populist dilutes the ideas, it is just a different way of presenting the ideas. I feel there needs to be a balance between drawing people in (populism) and then keeping them in (the logic and economics).
I fully appreciate the need for strong principles, I’m pretty much a libertarian extremist myself, but I’ve been getting tired of debating the ills of the minimum wage law and the inefficacy of socialism with committed leftists, and persuading basically nobody. What I have had success in is helping people that have already been turned on by the ideas of liberty hone their thinking by elaborating on the philosophy and economics.
Then the question is: how do we turn people on to liberty? I think that’s our next step for further research and thinking.
Ned Netterville February 8, 2016 , 7:54 pm Vote1
Voting is immoral. It’s as bad as paying taxes. My only “political desire is the demise of the nation state. To that end, I am sometimes–moments of insanity–tempted to vote for Sanders or Trump on the theory that either one as president would hasten the demise. However, not voting seems to me the clearest possible statement people can make about what they think of their government. Voting merely confirms putative rulers in their belief people want to be ruled.
Marchella February 8, 2016 , 8:40 pm
Yay another non-voter! The ballot box is a gun and when you vote you’re loading it with bullets that will be used against you. @nednetterville
Ned Netterville February 8, 2016 , 10:55 pm Vote0
Oowee! Thanks, marchella, and taxes buy the bullets.
Ross Jensen February 15, 2016 , 10:12 pm Vote0
As a full-time student of academic philosophy, I can attest to the fact that even people trained to reason well don’t always respond rationally to sound arguments. In the case of the “Libertarian” Bernie supporter, though, it seems to me that the real contested issue (in some cases, at least) has to do with practical political strategy. Consider Will Wilkinson’s recent article on the “libertarian case” for a Sanders presidency: https://niskanencenter.org/blog/is-there-a-libertarian-case-for-bernie-sanders/. Ultimately, I think that Wilkinson misses the point when he appeals to a particularist methodology to ground his claims. At the end of the day, after all, Wilkinson’s case must assume that “direct engagement in the policymaking process,” as the Niskanen Center puts it, makes sense as a libertarian political strategy. Since I don’t think that such a strategy makes sense, Wilkinson’s case doesn’t move me. He hasn’t argued for his underlying assumption (i.e., that libertarians ought to or at least can rationally pursue political change via, say, voting in a national election), and he hasn’t argued against my underlying assumption (i.e., that libertarians ought to pursue political change via methods not expressly sanctioned by the state for such a purpose). Nonetheless, for someone who agrees with Wilkinson about political strategy for libertarians, supporting Sanders might make good sense.