Libertarian Reform Caucus Newsletter

Volume 2, Issue 3

Sent April 5, 2006

It’s springtime. Time for sunshine, green leaves, warm fresh air—and spending a weekend cooped up in a hotel debating your local state’s Libertarian Party platform and national delegate allocation. That’s right, we need to get to our respective state conventions and get ourselves nominated to be delegates to the LP national convention in Portland Oregon.

In theory, this is worth doing because we now have over 500 members! If we all get to the national convention, we will have the power to make changes. In theory, there can be up to 1400 delegates, but in reality the total number of delegates will likely be around a thousand, since this is a non-presidential year. If we can get everyone over to the national convention, we will most likely have enough votes to eliminate any plank in the platform that we don’t like (since it takes a majority to retain).

OK, back to reality. Many of you are not going to the convention. This means we need to keep recruiting. So please:

• Consider going to your state convention and try to recruit like-minded people to be in the Caucus. Try to get them nominated as delegates to the national convention.
• Consider promoting the Caucus on your blog, or on a message board. (But only the subject is relevant; please, no spamming.)
• Consider making a donation to the Libertarian Reform PAC so we can buy more advertising. Thanks to Chuck Moulton, we now have an online PayPal form to make this easy.

Also, it’s time to get voting! We need to achieve consensus well before convention time so we can lobby the platform and bylaws committees!

In this issue:

• PAC Financials
• Analyzing the Effects of Our Ads
• Schedule of State Conventions
• The Ultimate Goal Different political philosophies can have the same goal while prescribing different paths. Here, author and scientist David Brin makes the case that incremental improvement in a context of general individualism may be part of a long process of transformation that was first envisioned by Locke, an evolutionary process of gradually shifting from implicit to explicit social contracts. This is Part 2 of "Political Totemism and the Danger of Metaphors"

PAC Financials

Analyzing the Effects of Our Ads

However, in order to apply these lessons, we need more money. Donations dropped off badly in March. If we are to advertise enough to have an impact before the convention, we need donations very soon. We now have an online form to make donating easier. If we receive a few small donations, we can use them to run some blog ads. If we receive over $500, we can run ads on a major libertarian site like Tech Central Station. If we receive several thousand dollars, we can saturate the libertarian web space and do some more print ads.

This is a low overhead operation. Your dollars go to advertising.

Schedule of State Conventions

Don Willis has gone through the effort to look at all the state LP web sites and found their convention dates. He even sorted the conventions by date. Please look for your state in this list and get to your state convention if your schedule permits.

Not all states had a convention date listed. If your state is not listed here, check with your state chair. If that fails, it could be that your state is so dormant that you can end up representing it by default. Check with national HQ to find out.

State	Date
Arizona	January 29
Oklahoma	February 17-18
Nevada	February 18
California	February 24-26
Missouri	March 3-5
Pennsylvania	March 4-5
New Mexico	March 10-12
Oregon	March 10-12
Florida	March 24-26
Iowa	March 25
Maryland	April 1
Tennessee	April 7-8
Alabama	April 8
Delaware	April 8
Wisconsin	April 8
Wyoming	April 8
Washington	April 8-9
Minnesota	April 15
Georgia	April 22
Virginia	April 22
Indiana	April 28-30
South Carolina	April 28-30
Kansas	April 29
New York	April 29
Utah	April 29
Vermont	April 29
North Carolina	May 5-7
Ohio	May 5-7
Alaska	May 6
Michigan	May 13
Hawaii	June 4
Texas	June 10

The Ultimate Goal

by David Brin

In the previous section, we covered a short list of unconventional questions designed to avoid the stereotyped totems of typical political argument, and instead dive much deeper, to explore root attitudes. No doubt there are many other questions which might illuminate the opinions of diverse people heretofore trapped by the old, linear (left v. right) model. The objective was to provide room so that differences and quirks, as well as various styles of madness, might stand alone for inspection, unshaded and unsheltered by their neighbors.

Note: reference to Part I has appeared in an article in the "Issuepedia" at: http://www.issuepedia.org/index.php/Quantifying_Political_Ideologies

(For an extensive exploration of this kind of assumption-checking, try taking "An Informal Questionnaire Regarding Fundamental Assumptions of Politics, Ideology and Human Destiny" http://www.davidbrin.com/questionnaire.html.)

But let's say you don't have this checklist with you. Say you've forgotten (or don't particularly agree with!) the multi-dimensional models described in the previous section. Is there one simple question you can ask, to get a good idea where another person is coming from politically?

Ideally, it should be one that avoids standard rhetorical positions and postures. If possible, you want not to trigger automatic Republican or Democratic or Libertarian slogans. A better target lies at a deeper level: the level of myth.

For example, you can tell a lot about people by asking what they think of Robin Hood, Galileo, Henry VIII, Czar Nicholas, Plato, Pericles, Nat Turner and George Armstrong Custer, none of whom we readily relate to present-day politics. Without a pantry already filled with stock answers, the responses may lay open insights to attitudes about aristocracy, nobility, free inquiry, free speech, social obligation, charity, taxation, religious, sexual and ethnic tolerance, property rights, authority... and vanity. There are scores of other possibilities, providing only that your objective is to listen and understand the other person, not to take turns haranguing each other.

Here is my favorite question of them all.

“If you had your way, and your revolution succeeded, what would the world of your great-grandchildren be like, in a hundred or two hundred or a thousand years?”

Failure to ask this simple question in detail led to some of Karl Marx's worst errors. Making this basic inquiry allows one to discover astonishing commonalities and differences among people today.

To illustrate, let me offer up an answer of my own—in the allegorical form of a science fiction story I once read. How you react will tell a lot about, among other things, your position on the model political spectrum we discussed a little while ago.

In this story, a mad scientist manages to project the mind of a “volunteer" far ahead in time, into the brain of a person living in the 35th century. The subject finds himself suddenly occupying the body of a wonderfully healthy human specimen, walking through the most beautiful park-city he could have imagined. Wildly varied architecture mixes tastefully with lovely countryside. And many other handsome, healthy people of all ages and colors are moving about as well... dressed in a plethora of styles, laughing, playing, making music, or poring together over blueprints for brave new ventures in science or art.

This is no land of lotus eaters. There is even plenty of argument going on, though apparently nearly always even-tempered and friendly.

“A utopia?" the man speculates. Can it be? This appears to be a nation of vigorous, free, happy people. He wonders how they govern themselves.

At the edge of the park he encounters their House of Law—a small, slightly dusty building with only a few people lounging around, disputing amiably. And there, carved over the arched portal, can be read the society's only two laws.

1. Thou Shalt Not Offend Others.
2. Thou Shalt Not Allow Thyself To Be Offended Too Easily.

To his amazement, the time traveler finds over the course of his stay that the system works quite well. Whenever citizens are in dispute over a moderately serious matter—and in the unlikely event they cannot come to an agreement by themselves—they simply call on six randomly chosen individuals to hear them out and decide the case.

“Oh, was I being offended too easily?" one disputant says, on hearing the ad-hoc jury's considered opinion. Then, because it is the way a polite person behaves, and because he so chooses, he accepts their ruling and apologizes.

I will not go into the rest of the story. What matters is only that the allegory stuck in my mind. continued...

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