That time Al Franken talked about mullets and libertarianism on his radio show

There may be a recording of my time on Al Franken’s radio show somewhere in a vault, but I haven’t been able to find the episode anywhere online. It aired in 2005, before the first Saturday Night Live writer and future senator from Minnesota ever sought the position. My guess is that once he decided to run, one of his handlers realized that it would be no good to have several years of radio comedy just sitting there for oppo researchers to dig up. Or maybe the archive just dried up and disappeared, like old files on the World Wide Web. inclined to do.

However, this show has been on my mind because I just posted article looking back at how the political spectrum has been turned inside out over the past two decades, and one of the topics I touched on was the sudden surge of debate in 2005–2006 about what could happen if liberals and libertarians could put aside put aside your differences and come together for a while. Like almost all participants in the liberation movement, I wrote pair from blog posts I’m giving my thoughts on this idea, but it was not one of those that attracted the attention of libertarians. producer at Franken’s headquarters. He contacted us because I wrote an article called “Hippies and rednecks can be friendsAnd while this particular article was about drive-in movies and country music rather than party politics, it was close enough to the radio work – Al Franken wanted to know how Democrats could appeal to freedom-loving country voters, and, obviously, the title of this article qualified me for this job.

How was the show? I’m not sure: as I said, I can’t find the recording, so I have to rely on some fragmentary memories of 19-year-olds. I know Franken kept making jokes about mullets. I know that I may have made a rash allusion to my master’s words. cameo role V Trading places. And at some point I noticed that if his party wanted libertarians take this more seriouslyhe must give more than lip service for the civil liberties that Democrats enjoyed. supposed be good. I said it was good to see some bloggers and radio presenters highlighting these issues, but it would be better if the party leadership did too.

Well, such was life during the Bush era: in 2005, the liberal dream was so widespread that someone could even notice it in an article on a completely different topic. In the 2020s, by contrast, one can read something explicitly about liberal-libertarian cooperation and completely miss the context that gave rise to it.

IN one You see, from the posts I wrote on this topic in 2006, I included this comment:

I don’t really see much hope for the Democrats turning in a libertarian direction (though I will support anyone who is willing to try), but I know plenty of people who reflexively vote Democrat (if they vote at all) but are easily 80% libertarian in their views. Call them Whole Earth Catalog 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. Among them, avid DIYers (and New Left veterans) also appreciate the widespread adoption of private gun ownership. They may not agree with everything about (and New Republic article called “liberaltarians”), but hey, me too. This is fine. This is a big tent.

In 2021, Harvard historian Eric Baker cited this post in the introductory article to recognized paper (“Premier Think Tank: The Rise of the Santa Fe Institute Libertarians“):

In 2006, Jesse Walker, editor of a libertarian online magazine. Causedefined a new political identity emerging in his social environment. “Call them,” he wrote, “the Santa Fe Institute Libertarians.” According to Walker, these were people “who reflexively vote Democratic (if they vote at all) but are easily 80% libertarian in their own views.” Despite their weak cultural affinity with the liberalism of the Democratic Party, the fundamental values ​​of the Santa Fe Institute libertarians were the same as those of Walker and his colleagues. Cause 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 virtuous energy, could help the libertarian movement penetrate a mainstream audience that saw libertarianism as the sole preserve of billionaires like Scrooge. “It’s a big tent,” he insisted (Walker, 2006).

Every now and then I think back to Baker’s article and wonder how exactly anyone could think that my musings about the hot-tempered non-voters and gun-toting ex-New Left were about “invasion of the mass audience,” not to mention “liberal virtuous energy” or “Billionaires Like Scrooge.” Remember: this was 2005-2006. One of the reasons this debate even arose was that some Netroots liberals felt that calling themselves “libertarian democrats“would do them sounds more populist. If I had written a story called “The Hippie and Ebenezer Scrooge Could Be Friends,” Al Franken’s people probably wouldn’t have invited me. (Nor did I describe a “new political identity.” Baker apparently missed the reference to Whole Earth Catalogpublication founded in 1968.)

But I don’t want to waste time complaining that someone missed the historical context of a document, even if you expect a historian to read historical events. I’m just fascinated by how quickly historical context can disappear. It would be fun to go back to 2005 or 2006 and talk to some of the Democrats who wanted to work with the Libertarians to defeat people like Vice President Dick Cheney; I could tell them that in 2024, the Democratic presidential candidate will work with Cheney to defeat the movie star. Student. I doubt this story would get me on the Al Franken Show, but maybe I could earn a spot on Art Bell.