The Libertarian Party (LP) is the third largest political party in the United States, with a membership that’s twice as large as the Green Party and twenty times as large as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Unlike the Greens and DSA, which draw a significant support from urban areas, the LP is significantly more popular in suburban and rural areas. Some believe this distribution of support is inevitable, as city residents rely on government more than rural their counterparts—but, it isn’t. The Libertarian party can reframe its values for urban populations, and develop an urban agenda rooted in social tolerance, good governance and urban empowerment. This will allow it to emerge as the most viable alternative to the two-party duopoly gripping municipal, urban politics around the country today.
Social Tolerance
Many people think that libertarian culture and the culture of our nation’s biggest cities are at odds because libertarianism is so often framed as a philosophy rooted in “rugged self-reliance” and urbanites are anything but “self-reliant” since they rely on large-scale, networked, complex supply chains to sustain themselves. In reality, libertarian philosophy is much more focused on people’s ability to self-organize complex systems to meet their own needs through the “market” than it is on the notions of “self-sufficiency”. The same market forces that libertarians are so interested in understanding and utilizing are also the forces that make modern, urban life possible. As such, “Big City” Libertarianism should sideline aesthetics and notions of self-reliance and instead focus on how market forces and technological innovation can be best utilized to benefit all city residents.
Libertarians also need to interpret urban experiences from a libertarian lens to show urban residents that they share have libertarian tendencies and values. The core principle of libertarianism is that individuals should be free to do as they please as long as they don’t harm others. Sometimes this is called the “non-aggression principle”. Other times it’s referred to as just plain old “tolerance and acceptance.” Residents of big cities like New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Miami know that if their neighbors didn’t have tolerance for (and even love of) diverse lifestyles, races, genders, ethnicities, cultures, philosophies, religions, etc, their cities simply couldn’t function. While Democrats attempt to talk the talk of “social progressivism”, the Libertarian Party has walked the walk: nominating the first female Vice-Presidential candidate in the 1970s, supporting gay rights in the 1980, fighting to end the drug war in the 1990s and opposing the war in Iraq in the 2000s. Big City Libertarians should highlight the progressive history of the Libertarian Party and not be afraid to denounce regressive cultural elements in the party’s past and present.
To win hearts and minds in our nation’s cities, Big City Libertarians should focus their energies on issues where urban “progressives” are more aligned with the Libertarian Party than they are the Democratic Party. The “Drug War” and the resulting mass incarceration and police militarization it has spawned presents such an opportunity.
The drug war has fallen out of favor among intelligentsia concerned with public health because of an increasingly broad body of research showing that the Portuguese and Northern European approach of decriminalization and risk reduction is producing superior outcomes in every way: less drug use, less crime and less healthcare costs. The drug war is also falling out of favor among the young and “social justice progressives” because they recognize it as a method of social control – oppressing the most vulnerable and marginalized populations throughout the US. The numbers are staggering: black men are incarcerated at rates over 5x that of whites, even though they use drugs in comparable quantities. While many Democrats now support some type of marijuana decriminalization, almost all still support the drug war’s prohibitionist approach to “controlled substances.” Big City Libertarians should lead on issues of mass incarceration and police militarization, and offer something no political party has yet — a powerful solution: Ending the Drug War.
Good Governance
New York City, like many large cities throughout the US, is dominated by the Democratic Party. That means political bosses and party elite pick our politicians, and voters have little power to challenge the status quo. That’s one reason why NYC’s voter participation rate in local elections is under 25%. New Yorkers want more political options, but they certainly aren’t coming from the Republicans who maintains a hierarchical party infrastructure that benefits from maintaining the status quo. Many politically active urban residents have invested significant time in the project of reforming the Democratic Party, but their success has been minimal and frustration is high. Big City Libertarians should present themselves as the anti-corruption, good-government party.
By organizing local Libertarian Party chapters around values of openness, transparency, participatory governance, and by utilizing appropriate technologies to run themselves faster, better and cheaper than the competition, local LP chapters can become more effective effective political operations while also training their members in the same type of technology-enabled reform that we can pitch to voters as a solution to corrupt local politicians and lethargic, bloated bureaucracies.
Urban Empowerment
With Trump as president, many city residents have awoke to the fact that there are many layers of government – and these various layers don’t always agree or collaborate with each other. They’re realizing that they’d much prefer a structure where the federal government has less power and municipal governments have a lot more. This emerging “municipalism” is entirely consistent with libertarianism for two reasons. First, it localizes power and decreases the number of people each politician represents, making politicians and government more accountable. Second, it reduces the size and scope of the federal government, which is something every Libertarian supports.
By advocating at the national level for more local control of tax revenue, Libertarians can be inclusive of their rural and suburban bases, while maintaining a flexibility that allows them to advance in urban politics. Local control shouldn’t simply mean more policies are determined at local levels (although this is obviously a part of it), but should result in restructuring the tax system to shift the destination of tax revenue from the Federal government to state and local government.
Let’s call this “flipping the pyramid.”
Currently, the federal government gets most of the tax money, then states and lastly cities. This status quo should be flipped on its head so that the federal government receive the least amount of tax revenue, allowing states and local governments to gain significantly more. Now, many rural and suburban localities don’t want or need big local governments, and voters in those places can direct their governments not to raise taxes – leaving them with a significantly lower tax burden than city residents.
For example, a New York City resident who currently pays 20% to the Feds, 10% to the State and 5% to local government (for a total of 35%), would instead give 5% to the Feds, 10% to the State and 20% to the city (total remains 35%). This restructuring would allow New Yorkers to achieve more local control, sustain or even increase the level of services they receive, while still paying the same total amount in taxes. Meanwhile, a resident of Grafton, New Hampshire, who is currently paying 20% to the Feds, 7.5% to the State and 2.5% to their county (30% total) could then be paying 5% to the federal government, 5% to the state and 5% locally (15% total) – resulting in a massive tax break for them. So, for the New York City resident, the Libertarian plan might not lead to a tax decrease, but instead lead to a drastically better funded city government, while to the rural Grafton resident, the Libertarian plan does lead to a massive tax break. Big City Libertarians and small-government Libertarians can collaborate deeply on “flipping the pyramid” at the national level, and then both achieve their separate goals at the local level in their own communities.
The “regional differentiation” that will naturally arise when localities have more power to determine their overall tax rate is something we should all embrace. Instead of imposing our ideals on everyone in the country through the federal government, we should view people’s residency as a political choice. If people chose to live in a city or state with high taxes, they’re voluntarily accepting the high taxes. If they don’t want to pay those taxes, then they can move to a place with lower ones. This act of voting with one’s feet is the oldest manifestation of democracy, and the idea that people should actually get up and move from places that don’t share their values to places that do should be embraced, encouraged, supported and maybe even subsidized.
While that might sound drastic or raise the specter of places becoming truly inhospitable to certain types of people in ways that they currently are not, we should recognize that (a) this process is already well underway for middle and upper class people who can afford to move, and (b) our nation’s structural resistance to regional differentiation has led to over a decade of Congressional gridlock and a vicious culture war that put a reality-TV show host into the presidency.
This doesn’t mean that the federal government should stop performing critical functions such as upholding the civil and human rights of US citizens, investigating corruption of state and local officials, regulating interstate commerce, helping with disaster relief and more. Rather, it means that the we must begin in earnest a visioning process that redraws the appropriate scope of local, city, regional, state and federal powers. While working to implement this new vision, we should also be investing our time and resources into upgrading the capacities of local layers of government so they’ll be able to absorb new responsibilities and effectively allocate more resources. Anyone involved with local politics knows that it can be just as corrupt, and even more so, than national politics. That’s why our strategy must also include a movement to transform local governments into open, transparent and participatory institutions that good people want to join and lead.
With over 135 million Americans living in metropolitan areas of over a million people, the Libertarian Party has everything to gain by creating a space for “Big City” Libertarianism to flourish.
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