How We Win

The Only Strategy We Have Left

I used to believe that if we just educated enough people about liberty. Handed out enough economics books, gave enough inspiring lectures, won enough debates… eventually the voters would “wake up” and demand freedom. Many well-meaning libertarians and conservatives still cling to this education theory of politics. But after years of political frustration, I have to face facts: this theory doesn’t match reality. Voters are not blank slates just waiting for the right seminar to turn them into Ron Swanson. In truth, most voters are politically ignorant by choice, and no amount of pamphleteering will change that in any reasonable timeframe. As one scholar delicately put it, political knowledge levels “have risen little if at all over the past several decades, despite major increases in education and the availability of information.” This persistent public ignorance, even as more Americans go to college than ever, is entirely consistent with “rational ignorance”, the idea that people remain ignorant because learning politics has near-zero payoff for them1. In a world where your individual vote has about as much chance of deciding an election as winning the Powerball, spending hours studying policy just doesn’t make sense to most people. Unsurprisingly, the average American invests far more effort in following sports or celebrity gossip than in following bills in Congress. (I can’t really blame them, watching Congress these days is about as fun as a being skinned alive by a swarm of rats.)

The grim truth is that the electorate’s knowledge of government and policy is dismayingly low, and it has stayed low for generations. Political scientists Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, surveying data from the 1940s through the 1980s, found no significant improvement in the public’s political knowledge over time.¹ The average American in 1990 was about as uninformed as the average American in 1950, despite the dramatic rise in schooling and the advent of the internet. It’s not that people can’t learn; it’s that they don’t want to. In a famous study, Scott Althaus observed that public opinion often fails to resemble any kind of rational “will of the people” at all, precisely because so many people lack basic information. What surveys often reveal is a mishmash of collective preferences biased by the fact that some groups are much better informed than others (and thus have outsize influence in polls), while vast swaths of citizens know next to nothing.² In short, democracy does not magically aggregate wisdom; more often it aggregates ignorance and bias.

To be clear, I’m not engaging in elitist snobbery here (well, maybe a little bit), ignorance of politics is an entirely rational response for someone more concerned with paying the bills and living their life than with parsing the Federal Register. As economist Ilya Somin documents, even very basic political facts elude most Americans. Many cannot name their representatives or identify major policy issues. A sizable chunk of voters literally don’t know what the three branches of government are. In one illustrative poll, 80% of Americans agreed that the government was hiding evidence of space aliens, and 50% believed aliens have abducted humans4. (I’d love to say that one is a fluke outlier, but given the popularity of retard-level conspiracy theories, it’s not far off the norm.) Huge numbers also hold wildly incorrect beliefs about budget priorities, economic data, and history. We are dealing with a populace that, by and large, does not care to learn the things we might consider crucial for responsible voting. And frankly, expecting that to change by means of patient education is bordering on delusional at this point. As Somin notes, the persistence of such ignorance despite rising general education levels and unprecedented information access is best explained by rational ignorance. People choose not to know.³ Supply of information isn’t the problem; lack of demand for information is. Most people figure (not incorrectly) that their individual political knowledge won’t make any difference, so they devote their attention elsewhere. And they’re probably right.

Even those who do pay some attention are not exactly wise sages. They tend to be “political fans” who follow the news the way sports fanatics follow the NFL, not to become better-informed citizens, but to cheer on their team and boo the rivals. They consume information in a highly biased way, seeking confirmation of their pre-existing views. (Sound familiar? It’s basically X in a nutshell.) So much for the dream of the vigilant, informed voter. We have to confront a painful reality: voting is not a graduate seminar, and most voters are not interested in learning what we wish they would. Piling more libertarian white papers on their desks will not change their behavior at the ballot box. As Philip Tetlock’s famous study on expert judgment showed, even supposed experts are often dismally bad at predicting political or economic outcomes, so imagine expecting average voters to absorb complex policy analysis. In Tetlock’s research, political experts scarcely did better than “dart-throwing chimps” at forecasting events, highlighting that more knowledge and credentials didn’t necessarily translate into better political judgment.⁴ If the PhDs and think-tankers are often wrong, the idea that we’re going to enlighten hundreds of millions of ordinary folks into consistently voting for liberty is a pipe dream.

Alright, so people are ignorant and likely to stay that way, grim but true. Where does that leave us, those of us who actually do care about doing policy the right way? It means that if we want to change the political status quo, we can’t rely on some mass public epiphany. We have to get a lot more practical and a lot less naïve. We need to think in terms of incentives and power, not just education and persuasion. In other words, it’s time to play hardball politics, what H.L. Richardson called “confrontational politics.” As uncomfortable as it might make our idealistic sensibilities, politics is largely a game of pressure and inducement. Policies change not because the majority suddenly achieves enlightenment, but because key players are pressured to fear the consequences of not changing, or enticed by the rewards of changing.

Libertarians and principled conservatives have traditionally been lousy at this game. We figured truth was on our side and that would be enough; we’d win by the force of superior ideas. Meanwhile, the other side brought a gun to our knife fight (sometimes, literally). The activist Left has spent decades mastering the art of political confrontation: they form tight interest groups, they make loud demands, they punish politicians who cross them and lavish support on those who toe their line. And it works. As Richardson observed from his time in the California State Senate, small, organized factions can wield power far out of proportion to their numbers by using carrot-and-stick tactics. A labor union with a few thousand members can intimidate a legislature of millions because it shows up, delivers votes and money to its friends, and mercilessly attacks its enemies. “They punish and they reward…thus, they are listened to,” Richardson quips about such special-interest leaders.⁵ A tiny cadre of motivated activists can “father” candidates (recruiting and bankrolling those who support their agenda) and destroy incumbents who don’t. Consider how a relatively small group like, say, organized environmental lobbyists or teachers’ unions, manages to get its way even when polls show the general public is lukewarm or opposed: it’s because they show up with pitchforks and treasure chests. Meanwhile, how often have we seen vast swathes of Middle America, the proverbial silent majority, completely ignored? It wasn’t that their values were truly a minority view; it’s that they weren’t organized to either punish or reward the politicians. Silent majorities might as well not exist in politics. (If a majority falls in the forest and no one is mobilized to push its interests, does it make a sound?)

For a stark example, look at the difference between two constituencies: the Christian conservative community versus the LGBTABCD+ lobby. Traditional Christians are far more numerous in raw numbers. Yet for a long time, their political influence was meager. Why? Because, as Richardson wryly notes, most were politically passive, content to pray and hope rather than plan and act, “delegating to God all political action” as if expecting divine intervention at the ballot box. The result: politicians took them for granted or even openly maligned them. By contrast, LGBT activists, though a much smaller fraction of the population, became a force to be reckoned with. They formed well-funded organizations, ousted lawmakers who opposed them, and rewarded those who advanced their agenda. The outcome was predictable: within a couple of decades, they achieved policy victories (from marriage laws to anti-discrimination rules) that the passive moral majority could only gripe about on talk radio. This is not about who had the better or correct arguments in some abstract sense, it’s about who applied power effectively.

The lesson for libertarians and liberty-leaning conservatives is clear: we need to get off the soapbox and into the trenches. Education alone, without organization and confrontation, leaves us perpetually preaching to a choir that never swings into action. We must start behaving like a disciplined political faction that rewards its friends and punishes its enemies. This means marshaling votes and dollars in a targeted way. It means not voting for the “lesser evil” unless that lesser evil has earned our support with real concessions, and being willing to politically kneecap the people who take us for granted. We have to cultivate politicians who depend on our backing, and make it painfully obvious to any would-be turncoats that betraying liberty principles will end their careers.

Does that sound harsh? Good. Politics is harsh. I’m not suggesting anything immoral or uncouth, only that we use the same levers of incentive that every successful political movement uses. We of all people (as students of economics) should understand that incentives matter! Ideas do not win just by their merit; they win when attached to incentive mechanisms. Politicians, for the most part, do what will get them elected or keep them in office. So we must make supporting our agenda the rational choice for them. That might involve, for example, flooding a primary to oust a big-spending Republican with a liberty-minded challenger. Or it might mean withholding support in a general election to teach a lesson to a GOP candidate who treated the liberty wing with contempt (I’m looking at you, Neocons). Conversely, it definitely means vocally and financially backing those few courageous elected officials who do stand up for our principles, letting them know we have their backs, so that they can more effectively fight on the inside. Incentives aren’t just about punishment; they’re also about rewards, building reputational and electoral benefits for doing the right thing.

Now, part of this strategic reorientation involves a question: What vehicle should we use to exercise this influence? Some libertarians insist on independence from the “two corrupt parties” and cling to the Libertarian Party (LP) as the pure expression of our ideals. I admire the intention there, but as someone who wants actual political change in my lifetime, I have to be blunt: the Libertarian Party has been, at best, a noble dead end. When it comes to wielding power (even at the local level, let alone nationally), the LP just hasn’t delivered. Meanwhile, working within the Republican Party has yielded some genuine inroads for liberty advocates. Think of Ron Paul’s insurgent campaigns, which awakened millions of people and put “End the Fed” on the national radar. Ron Paul ran as a Republican. By running in a major-party primary, he injected our ideas into the mainstream debate in a way no third-party candidate ever has. Hans-Hermann Hoppe even pointed out that the so-called Alt-Right figures who attended Phis meetings knew and respected Ron Paul and Murray Rothbard. Hoppe once dryly noted that the Libertarian Party’s recent presidential candidates were so out of touch that one “had never even heard of Rothbard,” whereas every one of the Alt-Right speakers he interacted with was well-versed in Rothbard and had supported Ron Paul’s GOP run.⁶ That should tell us something. The libertarian instincts among the public (and even among anti-establishment right-wingers) find expression through Republican mavericks far more effectively than through LP doctrinaires.

In terms of raw strategy, fusionism with the Republican Party is simply a more viable path for us. The GOP is a big, fractious tent that already houses a substantial constituency that is skeptical of big government, people we can work with, persuade, and if needed, leverage. Yes, the establishment Republican leadership often stinks. Yes, many Republicans are hawks or crypto-socialists with whom we vehemently disagree. But that party is the field where the game is being played. If we pick up our ball and insist on playing in the LP’s empty sandbox, the game goes on without us. By contrast, if we organize within the GOP, especially at the local and state level, we can become the kingmakers in primaries and a feared bloc in general elections. Just as the radical Left succeeded by becoming the “base” of the Democratic Party (eventually pulling it ever leftward), liberty lovers can become the deciding base of the Republican Party if we commit to that path. We’ve already seen glimpses of this: a staunch libertarian-ish contingent in Congress (like the House Freedom Caucus) has at times forced leadership to reckon with issues like auditing the Fed, curtailing surveillance, or ending endless wars. Those victories, modest as they are, utterly dwarf anything the Libertarian Party has achieved in policy terms. And they came because liberty people worked within the GOP framework. Even Richardson, writing in the 1990s, argued that conservatives should pragmatically choose the Republican Party as their vehicle, because it offered the best shot at gaining leverage and ousting entrenched leftists: “The selection of which party to register must be a pragmatic choice… At the present time, the Republican structure is the one where the Conservative has the best ability to consolidate control,” he wrote, noting that opportunities for influence were far greater there than in the Democrat Party8. That insight still holds. The two-party system isn’t fair or ideal, but it is the battlefield. We either fight on it, or we relegate ourselves to spectator status.

A fusionist strategy doesn’t mean surrendering our principles; it means finding common cause with allies and using the existing machinery to advance shared goals. Libertarians and principled conservatives actually have a lot of overlap, certainly more with each other than either has with the progressive Left. We all want to be left alone to run our businesses, raise our families, and cling (peaceably) to our religion or lack thereof. We all distrust centralized social engineering. We all prefer personal responsibility over government paternalism. These common values form the basis of a potent coalition, if only we seize the opportunity. And crucially, working within the GOP gives us the numbers we need to matter. Politics, at the end of the day, is a numbers game, as the leftist strategists understood when they systematically took over institutions. The faction that can reliably deliver votes will get the policy concessions. The Left spent years making the Democratic Party their instrument; they didn’t waste time on hopeless third parties. We must be equally ruthless in playing the long game on the right. That means sometimes swallowing the imperfect in order to move the ball forward. It also means not falling for the old GOP establishment trick of coopting us with rhetoric and then betraying us, we have to be willing to “throw the bums out” whenever they double-cross on core issues like spending or gun rights. We reward conditionally and punish mercilessly. That is how political movements earn respect. Politicians, like dogs, respond to training. Time to get out the rolled-up newspaper (or in this case, primary challenges and well-funded PACs) when they shit on the carpet.

Beyond electoral mechanics, we should also focus on localism and parallel institutions. Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s strategic insights in What Must Be Done are especially relevant: he argues that we will never achieve liberty by begging for scraps from Washington, DC. Instead, we should concentrate on decentralizing power and creating pockets of freedom that can thrive on their own. This might involve pushing for devolution of authority to states and localities, nullification of unjust federal laws, and even private community-building outside the direct purview of the state. Hoppe suggests a “bottom-up revolution,” whereby libertarians take over smaller jurisdictions like towns, counties, maybe a state or two, and implement radically free-market policies there, creating showcase examples of how liberty works in practice. He even advises that we stop wasting energy on doomed national races like the presidency, and focus on places where a committed minority can actually win.⁷ It’s hard to disagree: I’d rather see 10 libertarian mayors and governors actually governing according to our principles than one libertarian presidential candidate getting 2% of the vote. If we can establish even a few “free zones” that flourish (imagine a city with no income tax, minimal regulations, school choice, etc., that experiences a boom), we create real-world proof that can’t be ignored. Success breeds success. People vote with their feet, as Hoppe reminds us, and the more we can allow for political competition between jurisdictions, the better. This aligns with the basic idea of federalism that conservatives hold: let Texas be Texas and California be California. Well, I say let’s make some parts of America actually free and see which model attracts more residents and investment. (I have a strong hunch how that experiment ends.)

So, to summarize our strategic framework: Refute the myth that simply enlightening enough people will fix our politics (it won’t). Replace it with a confrontational, incentive-based approach: use pressure, coalitions, and political hardball to achieve tangible victories even with an inattentive electorate. Fuse with allies on the right in a pragmatic way, because dividing our strength is a fool’s errand (the goal is to win, not to hold hands in pure isolation as the ship goes down). Reward those who advance liberty, punish those who impede it, make politicians fear losing our vote more than they fear CNN calling them names. And build liberty from the ground up: strengthen local bastions of freedom, encourage secession of mindset even if not of territory (yet), and make our enclaves so prosperous and vibrant that even the indifferent can’t help but notice. This is not a quick or easy program, but it’s one grounded in reality and historical experience. It beats waiting around for a “Libertarian Moment” that never quite materializes because, shocker, most people weren’t studying their Mises.

And we should be bold. As Murray Rothbard and others have often emphasized, there’s no point in trimming and shuffling with half-measures. Our job is to make the state’s representatives worry about us (not the other way around). When they consider some new tax or regulation, we want them looking over their shoulder, hesitating, remembering the last time they got burned for crossing that band of fanatical liberty voters. Politics at its core comes down to that old question: “Who, whom?” (Who rules whom.) Right now, despite our superior ideas, we liberty advocates have been the “whom” far too long, on the receiving end of the ruling. Time to. If we do this right, we’ll not only gain the power to roll back government overreach, but we’ll also have a lot more fun doing it. And nothing confounds the statist busybodies more than a liberty movement that is effective, unapologetic, and maybe even a little confrontational. They expect us to be aloof think-tank gooners or naive idealists; let’s instead be cunning, gutsy political entrepreneurs.

Libertarians often quote Economics in One Lesson, but perhaps we need to heed Politics in One Lesson: People (and politicians especially) respond to incentives. If we want a freer society, we must create the incentives that make freedom the rational choice for those in power. That means wielding sticks and carrots, not just chalkboards and lectures. We can still educate the willing, but let’s dispense with the fantasy of mass conversion. Instead, let’s identify the leverage points in the system and apply force. We’ll educate ourselves, deeply, so that we know what to fight for and how to articulate it, but when it comes to the masses, we’ll focus on delivering results they can appreciate (like a booming economy in a low-tax town) rather than abstract theory.

I know this sounds like a tall order. It is. But the alternative is to keep doing what we’ve been doing (and getting what we’ve been getting): namely, nowhere. I refuse to accept that fate. We have the right ideas, and now we’re crafting the right strategy to actualize them. I’m done waiting for the average voter to see the light. I’m ready to grab the light switch, along with a coalition of the willing, and flip it on ourselves. If that means a little confrontation, so be it. I’d rather libertarians be known as the principled fighters who get stuff done than the brilliant wallflowers who “educate” while the world burns. So let’s embrace a superior model of political action: one that doesn’t rely on mass enlightenment at all, but rather on good old-fashioned pressure, incentives, and alliances to make liberty win. We’ll educate those who want to join our cause, but for the rest, we’ll speak in the only language they truly understand: victory. And once we’re winning, who knows? Maybe then the education theory of politics will finally come true: nothing educates the public quite like the example of success. When we start rolling back government and people tangibly benefit, even the ignorant will take notice. And if they don’t, well, we’ll free them anyway, whether they know it or not. As I often remind my libertarian friends who fret about the unenlightened masses: we’re not trying to have coffee with every voter; we’re trying to take power and change the damn policies. The rest will follow. That, in a nutshell, is how we will advance liberty in our time: by confronting the system head-on, using incentives wisely, and never losing sight of the strategic big picture. It’s time to leave the lecture hall and charge the arena. Let’s get to it.

1. Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, “Stability and Change in the U.S. Public’s Knowledge of Politics,” Public Opinion Quarterly 55, no. 4 (1991): 583–592.

2. Scott L. Althaus, Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 10.

3. Ilya Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance, 77–78.

4. Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton University Press, 2005), 19–20.

5. H. L. Richardson, Confrontational Politics (Gun Owners Foundation, 1998), 122–23.

6. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Libertarianism and the Alt-Right: In Search of a Libertarian Strategy for Social Change,” in Getting Libertarianism Right (Mises Institute, 2018), 81–82.

7. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “What Must Be Done” (speech delivered at the Mises Institute, January 1997), published in The Bankruptcy of American Politics proceedings.