Why we will continue to lose until we are ashamed of being un-herdable cats.
Recently I experienced one of the most spectacular failures
of my activist career. I spent two
months living, breathing, dreaming, eating and of course promoting an event
called “Principles of Libertarianism”. This was my quintessential offering of enlightened
understanding and shortcuts to create spider hordes of libertarians throughout
the world…ok so Walter Mitty and I have a lot in common.
I had secured heaps of incredible libertarian promotional
products from over 10 national organizations.
These were for the anticipated capacity crowd and I overtly spammed my entire
world with the news and flyers. However,
the event fell a little short of
expectation.
The five homeless scarfing up the food and kombucha while
bagging the bottled water and anything they could sell outnumbered the real
attendees by two. And did I mention my
presentation was underwhemingly
received by everyone.
Oh, it gets better. I
did it all in front of a representative from our favorite political liberty
promoting organization who flew in from Virginia.
It was a costly and embarrassing experience: wonderful food but perishable and a loss; 93
copies of “The Law”, mountains of
fantastic promotional material to shoehorn into our 840 sq ft home and a tepid,
quivering ripple of response instead of the trumpeted arrival of the Holy Grail
I had foreseen. I literally had to
bootstrap my ego up just to get it into
the toilet.
But the greater tragedy, the big failure, wasn’t even my apparent mega-disaster.
How could what should have been a great promotional opportunity
become such a woeful NON-event? It was a
good date and time, a centrally located, well-known downtown location, easy to
get to/park with a well-appointed FREE room and then I publicized the heck out
of the thing.
It wasn’t enough. I
kept trying to get folks involved and actively excited, but the enthusiasm to get
involved just wasn’t there no matter how hard I tried.
OK, back to the drawing board and re-hone my skills to engage
people, figure out what would appeal more to volunteers, learn better how to
connect people to the ideas, get a new strategy, study my target market more….wait a minute! I just did all that stuff over the last two
years and I’m pretty damn good at marketing libertarianism in this Collectivist
Mecca called Portlandia so what went
wrong?
“What we have here is
a failure to communicate”. An excellent
line from a cool movie and it was a very apt description of the situation. Libertarians are big people, right? You just have to offer them a good thing and
they will recognize the importance of doing a big event publicizing
libertarianism, hand out libertarian gear and be at the ready to discuss any
topic from the libertarian perspective. They
would just jump right in, offers of help would flood my inbox, and everybody
would happily choose a task with “peddle” to the metal, expanding the influence
of liberty….yadda yadda yadda.
It didn’t quite work that way. It didn’t really work…at all!
The only parts that glowed with success were the four amazing
people who “soldiered up” for the experience and braved the day with me. For their help, I will be eternally
grateful. Without their stalwart pitch-in
ability it would have been a Chernobyl instead of just an annoying sinkhole.
However, despite enthusiastically promoting the event to tons
of libertarians months before, I wasn’t seeing anybody beat a path to my door
by a long shot. No enthusiastic
landslide of folks competing to offer help.
No “hey, I’ll post this for you”
or “give me some flyers” or even “here’s the list of members” from organizations
who should have jumped at the chance. While
everyone thought it was a fantastically important and much needed presentation
that would do a world of good, no one offered to get in and help get it done.
Now, this may seem like a whine-fest since you probably get folks
to sign on to your projects or workshops wherever you are promoting
libertarianism. You have to motivate and
entice, cajole and encourage. I get it
and I do it all. However, here in the
Northwest it must be the water or the air, but we have difficulty getting people
to do anything but talk, blog and pass out information about the problems.
There is, thankfully, Albert Jay Nock’s marvelous “remnant”
who consistently show up with their hearts, minds and hands in a determined CAN DO space, but most libertarians seem
to have too much on their plates to get involved. They all have important things to do like
running businesses, having families, getting an education, starting new careers,
taking care of parents. So, it’s easy to
see how hard it is for people who love freedom and donate generously to find the
extra time to also do the promotion and hands-on work.
I understand.
What I don’t understand is how come all those collectivists
who also have jobs and careers and college educations to pay for and businesses
and families manage to find all that time to do the volunteer work which is
creating the amazing success they have had marketing a seriously messed up
product.
And please don’t say “they
get all that money from the government and George Soros and all those state
employees to help them”. It’s SUCH
an embarrassing argument when we call ourselves rational business people. Imagine you’re little Umpqua Bank here in Portland
and you use those same excuses about having to compete with Bank of
America. Does the excuse sound a bit
more pathetic now?
You see, I’ve worked intimately with “the other side” on the
fluoride campaign here in Portlandia.
The City Council thought they could just shove a high dose in our
drinking water and call it good…no discussion, no vote. HALF the Democrats and two libertarians said “Hell No!”. And it was a right royal battle to behold.
I did a lot of data entry in the main database and spend hundreds
of hours in the office. Our ability to
choose to not ingest fluoride prevailed by a healthy margin but in this town;
all wins are only “for the moment”.
HOW we won that campaign was the Blue Ribbon eye opener.
What I experienced working with this all democrat crew was
the complete opposite of everything I’d been told about how the left operated. It was also unlike anything I had ever seen in
the boatload of liberty and conservative campaigns I’d worked on.
Below are a few things I learned when I worked for eight
months in the Portland Clean Water Campaign.
After that exercise in humility, I took a long, hard, unvarnished look
at the liberty movement over the last decade.
You didn’t need to be Sheldon on “The
Big Bang Theory” to see why our nonexistent strategy and lackluster efforts
had culminated as inch worm progress for liberty and an avalanche of
legislation for enslavement.
We are practically moving retrograde while the George Soros
Express to the Dark Ages roars past us at vision blurring speed. Maybe it’s time to take the noteworthy pages
from their playbook below and start making just a tad more progress.
1. Volunteers are their greatest asset. Leadership is ever mindful of this in all
they plan and do. Considerable time and
effort is made toward the “feed and caring” of the foot soldiers. This nurturing and mentoring attitude is the
magic glue that keeps their army coming back time and time again. They don’t have to continually get new people
to work because they have put off the ones they used before.
2. There are always several pop-up and scheduled, well
organized, high energy, fun and exciting events for volunteers and staff. They are always scheduled with specific
results and outcomes in mind and they usually achieve them.
3. A lot of time and effort goes into training
people to “do the ask” with role playing and scripts. Consequently, everyone is helped to feel
comfortable doing a direct ASK for
money or support, with or without a script.
They are particularly enthusiastic when thanking people for their
previous support…and then asking for more.
4. When offering tasks, the organizing people give volunteers
a sense of “turf” or ownership of either an area or a position. They encourage the feeling of responsibility
and commitment. The job or task becomes their
territory and they develop a proprietary interest in what happens there.
5. Excellent training is provided for whatever task
you are asked to participate in.
a.
Scripts for phone work are always provided and constantly
reviewed for success and
b.
People monitor the success of activities or
events, have criteria for success and change readily when their strategy isn’t
working.
6. Accurate record keeping is a hallmark. They keep copious and accurate records of
everything and pass on the gathered information and statistics to those within and
outside the organization.
a.
Keep track down to the level of who knocked where,
who they spoke to, how long, the outcome and how to follow-up.
b.
Keep locations of yard sign placement,
especially the larger ones.
c.
Constantly updated volunteer information about
what they work on, their success and failures on every project, how they work,
who they work well with, what they really like or are good at doing.
7. Focus their marketing efforts only on the
“serious voters” with a track record of participation in the process. They actively shop for their supporters and
quickly move on from those who aren’t.
They give up convincing the completely ignorant in the early stages of
the campaign.
8. Repeatedly offer an opportunity to sign a “pledge”
to promise to vote NO on the issue. There
were other activities that also gained a commitment to follow through from whoever
they talked to.
9. The “pledge” method also worked when they were
registering voters (which they had lots of people doing at every
event). There were a lot of people who
changed their registration from Non-affiliated to Democrat which indicates who
was doing the door knocking.
10. The fluoride issue split the Democratic Party and
the Democrats on the “no mandated fluoride in our drinking water” side got a
genuine slap in the face from the Nurses Union when they experienced some of
the aggression and negative pressure libertarians regularly experience. It was semi-sweet revenge but only for two
minutes because they immediately taught them how to respond in that kind of a
situation.
11. The majority of registered Democrats were NOT on
our side. Additionally, despite this
being the perfect political cross-over issues for many conservatives and
libertarians, extremely few from the liberty side ever came to help with the fluoride
campaign. They all voted with us but
never came to help. There were innumerable
opportunities to cross pollinate that went sadly un-taken. This may have been the greatest opportunity for
political cross pollination that has ever happened in Portland O.
12. People are held accountable for failure and leadership
doesn’t bother to go behind closed doors to do it. In front of an office full of volunteers, they
will politely upbraid someone with a
comforting smile on their face. There
are also interesting and subtle ways employed to let you know others followed
through on a project and you
didn’t.
13. Something we also do which is self-delusional; they
have endless ways to mentally justify an inconsistency so they can live with it. This is called cognitive dissonance. However, they “work through it” mentally, actively
embracing and nullifying their opponent’s viewpoint with creative perspectives
and specific, repeatable “understandings” on the subject.
14. When they find opposition, they don’t just
marginalize or dismiss it. They develop
tactics and strategize for their hopeful resolution. They always assume whatever it is they are
fighting will crash and burn and their good
idea will ultimately prevail.
15. They keep a very clear vision of what they want
and stay in focus and on task every day.
16.
I observed and overheard a lot of serious
mentoring from more experienced folks usually over the phone but also in person. This supposedly grass roots movement had a lot of very sophisticated campaign
strategies, e.g. they targeted libertarians with robo calls highlighting a
local libertarian policy group which said “even
Cascade Policy Institute was for a NO vote”. They seriously understand the difference
between having a teacher give people
the truth and having a mentor help them discover it for themselves.
17. They excel at treating people as if they were
diamonds and gold. They encourage,
listen to, commiserate with, patiently wait for and sincerely complement each
other for work well done or needed. They
talk to each person on the phone like they have a valued, personal relationship
and that person is very special…and not just to ‘the cause’. We have no clue and treat volunteers and even
paid staff as dumbass disposables, replaceable-in-a-heartbeat.
18. Leadership is constantly pumping people up with
what they had done or will do (sometimes a little over the top but then who
doesn’t like having their exploits exaggerated, right?)
19. There was an often stated and very clear vision
of what they wanted, why they wanted it and how they plan to get it. This was reinforced a lot.
20. They are:
a.
Organized
b.
Dedicated
c.
Focused
d.
Practice follow-through
e.
Provide consequences
f.
Offer NO excuses---NONE (not what we keep
telling ourselves they do, is it?)
g.
Market to the max every time and to every one
h.
They have a very clear vision of their future.
21. They bust their butts continuously. They work REALLY, REALLY HARD and
expect everyone else to do the same. They
do expert peer pressure but most of the pressure to excel is internal. They use the specter of the other side to
motivate volunteers by fostering a sense of urgency and potentially dire
consequences. They consistently
reinforce how “the other side is really
powerful and we have to hurry up and work really hard to keep the vision or our
shared future interact”.
22. One great advantage we have but seldom use is the ability to promote the concept of choice
in the discussion. They are always very
careful to stay away from anything that includes the choice thing as a prime
motivator – it was last on their list
“Reasons to Vote NO on putting fluoride in drinking water”. According to their market research, “having a
choice” didn’t resonate that well with the target audience. That’s a bit scary in itself.
The single most important thing they do which we blow off as
totally unnecessary is amusingly ironic considering who most of us pride
ourselves on being. They know how to build and maintain effective, cohesive and
extremely long-lived teams.
We, on the other hand, relish and groom our seemingly
eternal image as a bunch of cats incapable of even agreement on the basics let
alone voluntarily being
“herded”. We have demonized team
building in the political arena as
some outside attempt to control us. We
feel completely relaxed and righteous about how little we do in service to a
common goal we all say we desire and value.
The unintended but completely justified consequence is we
are exactly where we deserve to
be. And nothing will really change until
more people start picking up shovels, work as a team and achieve strategized
goals.
Policy lobbying is not cutting it. Serious seekers (those willing to pick up
shovels and do the necessary grunt work) are hungry for “get your hands dirty”
tasks that empower us to further success.
We want passion, commitment, serious and fulfilling work and FUN.
We also want a sense of connection with
a purpose, a goal and a team. We want some
plans of action that will empower our daily lives, not another plea for our
money so “those who know how” can elect the right people, organize the right
project and promote the right policy for
us.
The top down solution model is no longer serviceable. You can work forever to get the apex of the
pyramid of power to move a hair’s width or you can go to the base of the
pyramid, enliven the potential ocean of libertarians and they will, in no
uncertain terms, gently tsunami the whole pyramid, including the apex, exactly
where the greatest number of choices dictates—yayyyyy!
Why not start creating and employing our own strategies for
success instead of empowering those of our enslavers? We know we are completely capable of
obliterating the web of self-replicating chaos created by their passion for
conformity. With focused intention, we
will dissolve the current reality we helped them fashion with our passive acceptance. No longer will we excuse our lack of
accomplishment and success with the supposed advantages of the other side. We will own up to the humbling fact that the
real cause of all our ills is we did a very shabby job of marketing what
Michael Cloud calls “the greatest product
on earth”.
In my near future I see the time when we will finally
shoulder the responsibility of remaining as vigilant of our freedom as
Jefferson cautioned so long ago. We can
tip the scales in our favor only when
libertarians become as passionate about our values and access to choice as some
folks were and still are about the Spotted Owl.
Renee Daphne Kimball released 8 August 2017, Portland,
Oregon
