Libertarians make up 5-10% of the population depending on how stringently you define "libertarian".
Since there are so few libertarians diffused across the US, electoral politics has largely proved to be a waste of time. The LP was founded 50 years ago, and still struggles to even remain on the ballot in many states.
Yet, if the Libertarian Party is a futile waste of time, what strategies should libertarians pursue?
Short term, I think the Free State Project and seasteading are the ways forward. Twin studies suggest that political values are heavily influenced by genetics (see below), and libertarians are a minority strain. Therefore, efforts at persuasion are likely to continue to prove futile.
IMO, the best we can do is a) establish a campaign to identify and recruit those who naturally identify as libertarian b) concentrate our forces into a defensible area, such that we're the dominant force in that area. And then become so well-armed that it wouldn't be worthwhile to try to conquer us. (Akin to Switzerland.)
Long term, I think libertarians need to figure out a way to out-breed the other ideologies. So, figuring out the genetic precursors of libertarianism and having lots of offspring who carry those genetic precursors forward will be essential to ensuring libertarian survival. (Though AI and robotics are advancing so rapidly that biological reproduction may be supplanted by industrial reproduction.)
"The twins used in Funk and her colleagues’ study were all born from 1947 to 1956 (a subset of the larger twins sample). They were asked batteries of questions that measured personality traits, social and political values and political ideology. A total of 1,192 respondents who were part of a matched twin pair were surveyed by researchers in 2008 and 2009.
They found that somewhat more than half of the difference in self-identified political ideology (56%) is explained by genetic factors. The remainder was explained by unique factors affecting one twin and not the other. A second measure of ideology based on 27 questions produced a similar result (genes appeared to explain 58% of the difference between individuals)."
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/09/study-on-twins-suggests-our-political-beliefs-may-be-hard-wired/
Since there are so few libertarians diffused across the US, electoral politics has largely proved to be a waste of time. The LP was founded 50 years ago, and still struggles to even remain on the ballot in many states.
Yet, if the Libertarian Party is a futile waste of time, what strategies should libertarians pursue?
Short term, I think the Free State Project and seasteading are the ways forward. Twin studies suggest that political values are heavily influenced by genetics (see below), and libertarians are a minority strain. Therefore, efforts at persuasion are likely to continue to prove futile.
IMO, the best we can do is a) establish a campaign to identify and recruit those who naturally identify as libertarian b) concentrate our forces into a defensible area, such that we're the dominant force in that area. And then become so well-armed that it wouldn't be worthwhile to try to conquer us. (Akin to Switzerland.)
Long term, I think libertarians need to figure out a way to out-breed the other ideologies. So, figuring out the genetic precursors of libertarianism and having lots of offspring who carry those genetic precursors forward will be essential to ensuring libertarian survival. (Though AI and robotics are advancing so rapidly that biological reproduction may be supplanted by industrial reproduction.)
"The twins used in Funk and her colleagues’ study were all born from 1947 to 1956 (a subset of the larger twins sample). They were asked batteries of questions that measured personality traits, social and political values and political ideology. A total of 1,192 respondents who were part of a matched twin pair were surveyed by researchers in 2008 and 2009.
They found that somewhat more than half of the difference in self-identified political ideology (56%) is explained by genetic factors. The remainder was explained by unique factors affecting one twin and not the other. A second measure of ideology based on 27 questions produced a similar result (genes appeared to explain 58% of the difference between individuals)."
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/09/study-on-twins-suggests-our-political-beliefs-may-be-hard-wired/