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Title: Selling the Store?
Author: Kevin Carson
Date: April 11, 2005
Language: en
Topics: libertarianism, outreach, strategy
Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/04/selling-store.html

Kevin Carson

Selling the Store?

Interesting exchange on libertarian outreach strategy between Brad

Spangler and Thomas L. Knapp.

Commenting on the formation of the Libertarian Reform Caucus, Brad

writes,

....it is perhaps no surprise that Libertarians have collectively failed

to recognize one of the most important things they can control to

improve the situation…

Recognizing that a political party makes a damned poor educational

organization and vice verse.

Call me Mr. Obvious, but does anybody think that maybe part of the

reason that the Libertarian Party (an ideologically oriented political

party) is not more successful might be that conscious public allegiance

to libertarian ideology isn’t more widespread? It takes serious, hard

educational efforts to produce something like that — and a political

party isn’t necessarily the best tool to achieve it.

The Libertarian Party will start kicking more butt when we’ve got —

gasp! — a whole buttload of libertarians (and not before).

That doesn’t seem like a difficult point to grasp. Yet Libertarians are

perpetually exhausted from trying to run a political party on a skeleton

crew. That’s not an effective way to build a Libertarian majority. The

situation calls for activists educating themselves more thoroughly and

then going out and educating a lot more people — even if it means they

have to let the party not be the focus of their libertarian activism for

awhile.

Tom responds:

[Brad] thinks that what’s needed is not a “softening” of approach, but

rather a concentration on creating more people who like the party’s

ideology.

What’s missing here?....

Both the LRC and Brad seem to think that the party is the product. It

isn’t. It’s the store.

The platform isn’t the product, either. It’s the store’s mission

statement....

The party is the store. The products on the shelves are candidates,

policy proposals and such.

You don’t sell the store. You sell the products.

You don’t sell the store’s mission statement. You sell the store’s

products....

One of the basics of sales doctrine is that you sell benefits, not

features....

Any approach that focuses on:

a) selling ideology (feature) instead of policy outcomes (benefits); and

b) selling the party (store) instead of its candidates and policies

(products)

... is doomed to fail....

I tend to agree with Tom that priority should be given to pointing out

the benefits of libertarian policy, from the standpoint of the general

public’s existing interests and concerns. In the case of libertarianism,

any educational effort aimed at getting people to prefer libertarian

principles (e.g., and especially, non-aggression) for their own sake

will likely be both very long-term and uphill. On the other hand, an

educational effort aimed at reaching people where they are now, and

selling libertarian policies in terms of the things they currently

value, could be quite effective.

But there’s a fine line between marketing and education. Consider:

As I understand it, Tom’s sales strategy involves 1) pointing out to the

public, in some area of policy, how the existing evils they object to,

what they see as pressing concerns, are a direct result of the state’s

policies; and 2) pointing out how a free market order would reduce those

evils.

In each case, the libertarian argument shows that the forms of

government intervention which the court intellectuals sell as limits on

the power of big business, were actually started at the behest of big

business. In each area of policy, the regulatory-welfare state is shown

to be a system of government intervention on behalf of the rich and

powerful; and all the assorted evils they object to in our society are

shown to be its side-effects. Pollution is a result of subsidies to

polluting corporations and legal protections against internalizing

pollution costs; sprawl results from subsidies to outlying real estate

developments (and to politically connected real estate developers);

outsourcing from subsidies to the export of capital; the energy shortage

from subsidies to transportation and energy consumption; etc., etc.

Such case-by-case argumentation could well have, cumulatively, an

educational side-effect (for many, at least). Point out enough

individual cases showing that a policy (which the public has been taught

from grade school to view as an enlightened, idealistic, and “common

sense” measure) actually benefits the rich and powerful at the expense

of everybody else, and some people may take the next step of inductive

reasoning: making the generalized observation that benefiting the

privileged rich and powerful at everybody else’s expense is what

government does.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that such a libertarian outreach program

will lead to a majority of people adopting the non-aggression principle

and becoming libertarian ideologues. It is likewise unlikely to lead

many people to adopt, as an article of faith, that government is always

the “political means,” or a “zero-sum game,” or any other catchphrase

you prefer. It might, however, lead many more people than at present to

accept, on the basis of experience, that this is often (or even usually)

what government does. It might lead to an increased skepticism of the

good intentions of the “progressive” state, and a willingness to look

for the man behind the curtain when they hear “progressive” rhetoric.

In short, each specific libertarian policy proposal should carry with it

a little lesson in what government really does, and who it really

serves. Enough such little lessons, cumulatively and perhaps

subliminally, might lead to a big lesson.