The small but growing New York State chapter of the Republican Liberty Caucus recently had a spirited debate on our Yahoo! group site as to the best way to respond to the New York Times and its writers.  My claim is that it is malevolent neglect. Don’t talk about them. Laugh when they are quoted.  Several other New Yorkers argue that a rational response is necessary.

Those who favor free minds and free markets gravitate toward reason and tend to assume that it is through reasonable debate that minds are changed.  Ayn Rand argued for reason as the cornerstone of morality and claimed that man is the “rational” as opposed to the “political” animal.  But Aristotle considered both to be critical, and was concerned with the inculcation of moral as well as intellectual virtue in the minds of his students. Whether he was successful or not can be judged from the success of his most famous graduate: Alexander the Great.

Putting aside Oscar Wilde’s observation that “man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason”, human rationality is a useful philosophical concept (and one on which the subject of economics thrives) but has limited practical use.  In the long run the rational survive and prosper, but in the short run psychological, political and symbolic behavior prevail.  The institutionalist economist Thorstein Veblen noted both conspicuous consumption and academic caps and gowns as symbolic phenomena that flourish in their respective arenas, even as we who are rational prefer to drive Hyundais and wear jeans.

The Federalist Papers and the debate about the Constitution reflected the highest degree of reason.  But we too often forget that in the late eighteenth century only a propertied minority was allowed to vote. Even so, the Founding Fathers put little stock in the voter’s rationality.  The Senate was to be elected by state legislatures and the President was to be elected by the Electoral College. Only Congress was to be directly elected.

There were three steps to the expansion of democracy. The first was the granting of universal white male suffrage in the Age of Jackson. The second was the Progressives’ institution of direct election of Senators and, in some states, referenda, recalls and initiatives, along with female suffrage.  The third was the fulfillment of the 15th Amendment in the 1960s, giving African Americans more equal ballot access.

By the time of the second extension of democracy in the Progressive era, Progressives were noticing public opinion’s malleability.  John Dewey argued that the public needed to be provided with simplified pictures of public issues and this was to be the responsibility of the press.  Walter Lippmann, the most conservative of the three founders of the New Republic magazine (the other two were Herbert Croly and Walter Weyl), was pessimistic about the ability of the public to make rational decisions. Lippmann was critical of the press as well. By the 1950s, left wing sociologists like C. Wright Mill were arguing that the centralization of mass media enabled a power elite to dominate public opinion.

The history of Athens reminds us that public emotion and demagoguery threaten democracy.  In part because the Founding Fathers were concerned with classical history, they favored republicanism as opposed to direct democracy. After a century of democratized republicanism, it is safe to say that the broad extension of democracy has dimmed the expression of public will. The majority is easily misled and manipulated, and finds itself supporting policies whose results are opposite of what it expects.  The symbolism of the New Deal and the Great Society is sufficient to generate public support for these policies even as they have caused diminishing real hourly real wages since 1970.

Conservatives and libertarians have debated rationally since the days of Ludwig von Mises, and instead of winning arguments they have been sabotaged in the mass media and academia. The New York Times has been instrumental in staunching the mainstream limited government viewpoint within the Republican Party and pushing the Rockefeller-Theodore Roosevelt-Straussian viewpoint. Of course, social democracy is inevitably the soup of the day at the Times.

Rational argument alone will not win in an age of mass democracy.  This point was brought home by Saul Alinsky, whom conservatives hate because Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis about him and because Barack Obama worked in organizations that Alinsky founded or inspired, including ACORN.

Alinsky sympathized with socialistic and left wing views, but his tactical theories are apparently derived from the 2,500-year-old military strategies of Sun Tzu’s Art of War.  There is no more reason to dismiss Alinsky because he was something of a socialist than there is to dismiss Sun Tzu because he may have supported Chinese warlords or have been one himself. Tactics are value free.

One of many tragedies of the twentieth century was that the social democrats brought the power of mass media to the political debate while the libertarians brought rational argument.  Victory is possible to the friends of liberty, but it is only possible if they develop a rational strategy, one which does not depend on rational argument.

In his book Rules for Radicals, which I highly recommend to all conservatives and libertarians, Alinsky offers a game plan for political action. Rules for Radicals is something like a version of Machiavelli’s Prince with two crucial differences. First, while The Prince offers advice to someone who already has power, Rules for Radicals offers ideas on how to obtain power. Second, Alinsky’s tactics contemplate the existence of the mass media.  He was among the first to recognize that media is a political tool.

His method is to go outside the enemy’s experience to devise unanticipated techniques. Chief among these is understanding and grasping the enemy’s “book of rules”. Find deviance from the rule book, and turn it into a moral issue.  Do things that are surprising to draw attention to violations or self-contradictions.  Make the enemy’s ethics the chief issue and magnify their ethical breaches, but do not allow yourself to be tactically bound to ethical concerns.  Do not dwell on a single strategy, but devise new strategies continually to draw media attention.

It is natural to criticize Alinsky’s disregard for ethics.  In recognizing that political competition is similar to warfare, Alinsky’s belief that the ends justify the means constitutes a warrior’s attitude. War is barbaric.  If the left considers itself fighting a war, and the libertarians consider themselves engaged in rational debate, I suspect that the left wing warriors will slaughter the libertarian debaters.

Many mourn the passage of the rationalism of the Founding Fathers. But I doubt that rationalism is possible in the context of mass media and universal suffrage. Rather, emotion and impression drive American democracy.

In thinking about the Times, for example, we might consider what tactics its publishers have never experienced.  My guess is that they have never experienced being ignored.  Rather, arguing against the Times and calling it names is a mainstay of American conservatism. I seriously wonder if the Times could survive at all if conservatives and libertarians simply dropped it and stopped talking about it. I don’t think it is a noticeably good newspaper any more, so it would not be much of a loss to anyone.

Mitchell Langbert can be visited at http://www.mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com.