I picked up this biography of anti-slavery agitator William Lloyd Garrison in a used-book store a few weeks ago and it is truly inspiring. I recommend it to any lover of liberty.

While I’m not the moralist Garrison was (though if there’s any political issue deserving of stern moralism, slavery would certainly be it), his approach to politics has a lot to recommend it. For example, he didn’t vote for a single politician until Lincoln’s bid for reelection, by which time it was clear he was committed to ending slavery.

Garrison saw it as a tacit endorsement of a system perpetrating evil. But he did take pains to commend mainstream politicians when they took positions he favored, even if they may have fallen far short of the immediate abolition he so fervently advocated week after week in “The Liberator.”

In other words, Garrison attempted to nurture anti-slavery feeling until it could enter the realm of mainstream politics. There was no point, in his view, of attempting politics when the game was so far removed from where he thought the issue should be joined.

He also resisted other abolitionists’ attempts at third parties (the Free-Soil and Liberty parties, to jog a few cobwebs from your U.S. history survey class). His view was that abolitionists made for lousy politicians, and couldn’t possibly compete for office without toning down their radicalism, so why bother?

All of this makes a lot of sense to me, and I think applies very well to today’s liberty movement. Why support a lousy third party like the LP, which (1) won’t win in our two-party system and (2) only feeds egoes and distracts from the real work of promoting liberty.

What it takes to make progress is the heavy intellectual lifting the libertarian think tanks and litigation work that groups like Cato, Heartland, Reason and the Institute for Justice do.

And, too, maybe a little more outrage. On a lot of issues, we don’t quite have the black-and-white crystal clarity of an issue like slavery or civil rights, but there’s a lot of hurt and suffering out there done at the pleasure of our government and at the bidding of our politicians. That’s something to be outraged about. And I don’t think there’s any shame in saying so, in a way that can be felt and appreciated by people without doctorates in economics.

(Also posted to Circle Bastiat.)