Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane turns 81 today, which is a good time to talk about him and how he has helped to shape how we think, view policy, and ideally how we will vote in the future. There’s got to be something better than the two-party system we presently endure.
Trite, “know your customer” aphorisms have never informed Crane’s actions. He was not infrequently told by people inside and outside the organization that if Cato would just align with the Republicans, and shed its non-interventionist stance on military matters, that the money would flow in. These people clearly didn’t get Crane. Asking him to compromise his principles was like asking Apple co-founder Steve Jobs to boost sales by shedding the elegant qualities of Apple devices in favor of Windows and the PCs most associated with the latter. Not a chance. Crane’s libertarianism wasn’t nor is it a choice as much as it’s a state of mind.
As is the case with all entrepreneurs, Crane wouldn’t tailor the ideas of libertarianism to focus group polling, or in a Republican or Democrat-friendly way, he would just promote libertarianism. Entrepreneurs lead, as opposed to meeting the needs of individuals. There were lots of libertarians out there, they just didn’t know it yet.
It all seems so obvious now, but not so much then. Crane’s view then and now is there’s a plurality of Americans who want the federal government to be constrained by the Constitution’s strict limits so that people can choose their legislative bliss in cities and states, who want national defense to be about national defense, and who feel that what happens in bedrooms is not the business of legislators or the courts. The bet here is that more than a few reading this would nod along to most, if not all of what they just read.
What a change relative to the 1970s. Crane jokes that the original libertarian gatherings from then were seemingly populated with as many lifestyles as there were choices. It raises an obvious question: how did a very Republican-looking asset manager like Crane see a movement in what initially attracted the eccentrics from all walks of life?
The answer explains why Crane could never tie up with the GOP, or the Democrats for that matter. As entrepreneurs do, he saw libertarianism not for what it was, but what it could be. He saw a much bigger tent for libertarianism that would include all the alternate lifestyles, and surely more, albeit in the same room with doctors, lawyers, investors, CEOs, and top academics.
Time would vindicate Crane’s vision. By the time he retired as CEO of the Cato Institute in 2012, he could claim present and past board members that included Charles Koch (his co-founder), Ted Forstmann, Rupert Murdoch, John Malone, and Fred Smith. That the affiliations of those listed requires no telling is the point. Libertarianism was never fringe, but it took an entrepreneur like Crane to show the world that it wasn’t.
Fast forward to last month, and the newly created Independent Center filled a room in downtown Washington, D.C. for what it hopes will be the next phase of Crane’s vision. As was the case in the 1970s, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are leading or even meeting the needs of voters. Founder Adam Brandon believes there’s electoral gold to be mined in this truth.
While the two major Parties flip the traditional script at times in their forever effort to find themselves, Brandon senses a growing estrangement. He sees the potential to build around the wasteful, xenophobic, protectionist, and big government embrace of the two-party system. His vision is economically themed.
Much as Crane saw it decades ago, Brandon believes that as the size of the U.S. upper middle class balloons, the need for a third Party grows with it. Crane saw the ‘80s “Yuppie” as logically libertarian back then, while Brandon sees a much more sizable version of that same Yuppie voter today. In other words, Brandon sees the plurality that Crane sensed long ago, views it as expanding rapidly, and intends to carefully build an electoral movement around it.
Notable about the gathering was that Crane himself was in attendance. The importance of this wasn’t lost on Brandon, and hopefully he gathers from it that free thinking is once again a state of mind, not a poll. Forget what the polls say, Brandon and the Independent Center must tell voters what they don’t yet know they want. Crane proved that a sophisticated, highly committed, and extraordinarily affluent base of voters existed beyond the fringe face of 1970s libertarianism, and it’s now Brandon’s turn to take Crane’s vision and make it electoral reality.
