A safe somewhere might have a recording from when I was on Al Franken’s radio show, but I couldn’t find the episode anywhere on the Internet. It was broadcast in 2005, before the first Saturday evening live The writer and future senator from Minnesota had already applied for office. I guess once he decided to run, one of his handlers realized that it wouldn’t be helpful to have a few years of radio comedy just there for the researchers to OPPO can dig into it. Or maybe the archives simply dried up and disappeared, as old World Wide Web files do. tend to do.

But this show comes to mind, because I just published a article looking at how the political spectrum has been upended over the past two decades, and one of the topics I touched on was this sudden explosion of discussion, in 2005-2006, about what might happen if liberals and libertarians could put aside their differences and come together for a while. Like virtually everyone else in the freedom movement, I wrote a couple of blog posts laying out my thoughts on this idea, but it wasn’t one that caught the attention of a pro-libertarian supporter. producer on Franken’s staff. He contacted me because I had written an article called “The hippie and the redneck can be friends“And even though this article was about drive-ins and country music, not partisan politics, it was close enough for a radio job – Al Franken wanted to know how Democrats could appeal to freedom-loving redneck voters , and the title of this article seems to have qualified me for the position.

How did the show go? I’m not sure: as I said, I can’t find a recording, so I have to rely on fragmentary memories from 19 years ago here. I know Franken kept making jokes about mullets. I know that I made a perhaps injudicious allusion to my host’s speech. small role In Places of commerce. And at one point I pointed out that if his party wanted the Libertarians take it more seriouslyhe should do more than pay lip service to civil liberties where Democrats were supposed be good. It was good, I said, to see bloggers and radio hosts highlighting these issues, but it would be better if party leaders did too.

Well, that was life in the Bush years: by 2005, the liberal dream was widespread enough that someone could spot it even in an article on a completely different topic. In the 2020s, by contrast, it is possible to read something that was explicitly about liberal-libertarian cooperation and completely miss the context that gave rise to it.

In A Among the articles on this subject that I wrote in 2006, you see, I included this comment:

I really don’t see much hope of moving Democrats in a libertarian direction (although I’ll encourage anyone who’s willing to try), but I know a lot of people who reflexively vote Democrat (when they vote) but are easily 80% libertarian in their own attitudes. Call them Whole Earth Catalog libertarians, libertarians of the Santa Fe Institute, boing boing libertarians. They value spontaneous order, entrepreneurship (many of them are entrepreneurs themselves), decentralization, freedom of expression and peace. The die-hard DIYers among them (and New Left veterans) also value widespread private gun ownership. They might not agree with everything in (one New Republic article called “Liberals”), but hey, me neither. It’s a big tent.

In 2021, a Harvard historian named Erik Baker cited this message in the opening of a acclaimed paper (“The Ultimate Think Tank: The Rise of the Santa Fe Institute Libertarian“:

In 2006, Jesse Walker, editor-in-chief of the libertarian web magazine Reasonidentified a new political identity that was forming in his social environment. “Call them,” he wrote, “Santa Fe Institute libertarians.” These were people, Walker said, “who reflexively vote Democratic (when they vote) but are easily 80 percent Libertarian in their own attitudes.” Despite their weak cultural affinity with the liberalism of the Democratic Party, the core values ​​of the Santa Fe Institute libertarians were the same as those of Walker and his colleagues. Reason colleagues: “spontaneous order, entrepreneurship (many of them are entrepreneurs themselves), decentralization, freedom of expression and peace”. Walker hoped that the Santa Fe Institute libertarians, with their liberal and benevolent energy, could help the libertarian movement penetrate a mainstream audience that viewed libertarianism as the sole province of Scrooge-type billionaires. “It’s a big tent,” he insisted (Walker, 2006).

From time to time I remember Baker’s diary and wonder how anyone could have thought that my musings on crusty non-voters and former gun-toting New Left activists had been about “incursions into the great public,” not to mention “liberal and benevolent energy” or “Scrooge-style billionaires.” Remember: this was 2005-2006. One of the reasons this discussion happened in the first place was because some Netroots liberals thought calling themselves “libertarian democrats“would do them it looks more populist. If I had written a story called “The Hippie and Ebenezer Scrooge Can Be Friends,” Al Franken’s people probably wouldn’t have extended an invitation. (Nor was I describing a “new political identity.” Baker clearly missed the reference to Whole Earth Cataloga publication founded in 1968.)

But I don’t want to waste time complaining that someone missed the historical context of a document, even though reading things historically is something you can expect from a historian. I’m just fascinated by how quickly historical context can disappear in the first place. It would be fun to go back to 2005 or 2006 and talk to some Democrats who wanted to work with Libertarians to defeat people like Vice President Dick Cheney; I could tell them that in 2024, a Democratic presidential candidate would work with Cheney to defeat the star The apprentice. I doubt this story will get me on the Al Franken show, but maybe I could win a place on Art Bell.