So, branding threads are pretty common here. Complaints about lefty friends and professors … we’re all trying to figure out what works.
Instead of trying to theorize what to call ourselves or what we should have said to win the argument (l’esprit d’escalier), post successes here! It can be things you’ve done, or seen other people do.
It does not necessarily have to be pro-capitalism either. I want to know how the left wins. How the right wins. We can learn from their examples.
Get to it!
I have always felt the left has the moral high ground on the right. And I largely still do. But when I was introduced to the NAP, it was like a kick in the face. I could no longer justify my love of social welfare based on taxation, as I then lost the moral high ground by putting a gun in someone’s face. Most people are not so logical, so that may not work, but it did on me.
I don’t really debate to win, more to better understand, so it will be much harder for me to think of successes. But that was definitely a failure.
I once explained Say’s Law to my mom and she really liked it and said “I never thought about it like that before.” Pretty cool.
I once tried to explain how deregulating the military would be a good thing but conservatives would bring up some minutae like how china would then be in control of the production of military equipment and we couldn’t fight back. Now one cannot have a logical and correct argument on a subject one doesn’t really know so I dropped the matter. The reason I lost the argument was because I was forced to answer a very specific “real-life” question that I didn’t really know much about. I suppose there would have been many consistent answers that would’ve been thinkable but not as many “rhetorically effective answers” at that point. Which is why I think libertarians sometimes loose on rhetoric:1) anarcho-capitalist is not something you want to say at the beginning of an argument -that just opens things up for ad homs, 2) libertarians have logical principles and their logical consequents not necessarily “feel-good” consequents so it’s difficult to persuade someone using feel-good tactics (who needs appeals to emotion anyways though?).
That being said though, I get the feeling that libertarians and marxists are some of the best debaters -I’ve never seen a conservative get converted to a liberal before through pure argument but libertarians do tend to make a surprising number of converts through that alone.
just my 2 cents.
Work hard. Share ideas. Provide material, ideological and emotional support to your peers.