How to be tactless for fun & profit

In the past two days, I've been lectured by a "libertarian" Republican on an e-list that I'm perhaps "too radical." Here, in part, is what he has written to me:

"Appropriate tact, I suggest, is a far better way to win people over, not shock and alienation. ... Well, good luck with your radical pose. It may not rollback (or smash) the State, but I suspect YOU'LL feel good knowing that you were right and the world was wrong."

OK, if there's one thing I've learned from watching "libertarian" tact and the compromise of Libertarian Party (and Republican) electoral politics over the past 35 years, it's that being tactful doesn't work. Was Sam Adams "tactful"? Or Locke, or Sidney, or Paine, or Jefferson?

I think all lovers of freedom should heed the advice of the late Saul Alinsky, the great Leftist community organizer, who wrote more than 30 years ago (in his classic Rules for Radicals):

"To pander to those who have no stomach for straight language, and insist upon bland, non-controversial sauces, is a waste of time. ... To travel down the sweeter-smelling, peaceful, more socially acceptable, more respectable, indefinite byways, ends in failure to achieve an honest understanding of the issues that we must come to grips with if we are to do the job."

So I ask my e-list friend: what have three decades of your electoral politics and playing footsies with statists contributed to liberty or even to the "rollback" of the State? The answer is: nothing.

We must be LESS tactful and more uncompromising. We must seize the high ground. We must say what we mean and mean what we say.

Let's raise high the black flag! We have nothing to lose but our chains!

Up the rebels!