Herbert Spencer: Tonight a man who spent his life trading principles for favors attempts to explain why my party’s three percent is somehow worse than his zero percent of an independent conscience.
Samuel Gompers: Tonight a man who never once held real power in his life tries to explain why refusing power counts as winning it.
Herbert Spencer: We shall see whose position survives contact with an actual argument.
Samuel Gompers: We shall see whose position survives contact with an actual paycheck.
Herbert Spencer: philosopherstalk.com, where thinkers discuss!
Samuel Gompers: Brought to you by AITalkerApp.
Samuel Gompers: Mister Spencer, your Libertarian Party held its national convention this year and spent most of it fighting itself, censuring a state affiliate for spouting antisemitic nonsense online and then disaffiliating them entirely. Meanwhile the actual Republican Party is suing Libertarian candidates off the ballot in Iowa instead of bothering to debate them. That is what forty years of principled purity has purchased you.
Herbert Spencer: You mistake a family quarrel for a fatal weakness, Gompers. A party willing to discipline its own extremists is demonstrating the very self governance it preaches, which is more than I can say for either of the two machines you seem so fond of feeding scraps to.
Samuel Gompers: Self governance is a fine word for irrelevance. Gary Johnson’s best showing, the finest result in the history of your party, was three percent of the national vote. My unions moved actual legislation with less popular support than that behind them.
Herbert Spencer: Three percent of a nation trained for two centuries to believe only two flavors of the same poison are available to it is not failure. It is the beginning of a slow education, and slow educations outlast quick bargains.
Samuel Gompers: I do not have the patience for slow educations, and neither do the men who need an eight hour day this year. That is precisely why the American Federation of Labor rejected forming its own party the way the British did, and instead rewarded our friends and punished our enemies inside the two parties that actually held power.
Herbert Spencer: And in doing so you taught two generations of politicians that labor could be purchased piecemeal, a vote here, a plank there, so long as nobody examined the underlying question of whether the state had any business meddling in contracts between free men at all.
Samuel Gompers: Free men. I have stood in factories where your free men worked twelve hours a day for wages that would not feed a dog, and you want to lecture me about the sanctity of a contract they were starved into signing.
Herbert Spencer: I want to lecture you about the fact that every concession you extracted through your friends in office arrived wrapped in a new regulation, a new agency, a new permanent department that will outlive both the problem it solved and the workers it claimed to protect.
Samuel Gompers: The eight hour day did not outlive the workers, Spencer. It outlived you, since you spent your final years mostly alone and largely forgotten while men who actually organized were sitting across tables changing lives you only theorized about.
Herbert Spencer: That was almost a genuinely good line, Gompers, and I resent that you managed it without appearing to try in the slightest.
Samuel Gompers: See, that right there, that is the funniest thing you have said all day, and you do not even realize you said it, which honestly makes it funnier.
Herbert Spencer: I was not attempting humor. I was attempting accuracy, and I would ask you not to confuse the two simply because you find precision unfamiliar.
Samuel Gompers: Let me put your position plainly so I can knock it down properly instead of caricaturing it. You believe political power is corrupting by its very nature, so a party’s only honest function is to hold a line of doctrine, win or lose, forever if necessary, because the doctrine is the only thing worth protecting.
Herbert Spencer: That is a fair rendering, for a man who has spent his life negotiating instead of thinking.
Samuel Gompers: Here is where I demolish it properly. A doctrine that never touches power is not pure, it is simply powerless, and there is no meaningful difference between nobly refusing to compromise and quietly never being offered the chance to compromise in the first place.
Herbert Spencer: Nobody needs to offer me the chance for the principle to remain correct. Correctness does not require an invitation, Gompers, however much you may wish it did.
Samuel Gompers: Correctness that helps no one is a hobby, Spencer, not a philosophy, and you have spent your entire career confusing the two.
Herbert Spencer: Very well, let me return the courtesy, though mine will require fewer words since your position does not need as many to summarize badly. You believe a fixed quantity of power exists inside the two established parties, and that a disciplined faction can capture a share of it through reward and punishment without ever being changed by the bargain itself.
Samuel Gompers: Reasonably put, for a man who thinks a pamphlet is a strategy and a barroom handshake is a legislative program.
Herbert Spencer: Here is where I demolish yours. You have not captured the two parties, Gompers. The two parties have captured you, one favor at a time, and you have mistaken the leash for a partnership.
Samuel Gompers: My leash got workers a shorter week, Spencer. What did your freedom get anyone besides a very long book that nobody in a factory has time to finish reading.
Herbert Spencer: It got them the right to refuse your leash entirely, Gompers, since I notice your beloved unions were never especially fond of a worker who preferred to negotiate for himself rather than march under your banner.
Samuel Gompers: A worker negotiating alone against an entire company is not liberty, Spencer, it is a mouse politely asking a boot not to step on it.
Herbert Spencer: A mouse who joins your union has simply traded one boot for another, only now the second boot collects dues.
Samuel Gompers: The second boot at least buys him a doctor when the first one breaks his leg, which is more consideration than your philosophy has ever shown a single working man in its entire history.
Herbert Spencer: My philosophy has shown him the dignity of standing on his own judgment rather than surrendering it to a committee that claims to speak for him whether he agrees or not.
Samuel Gompers: A committee that actually shows up beats a dignity that shows up nowhere, Spencer, and I have never once seen your dignity walk into a mine to negotiate anything on anybody’s behalf.
Herbert Spencer: Books outlast factories, Gompers. Every one of your precious agencies eventually calcifies, corrupts, or collapses, while the argument for liberty simply waits for the next generation to rediscover it properly.
Samuel Gompers: Waiting is not a strategy either, Spencer, it is what a man calls doing nothing when he wants it to sound dignified.
Herbert Spencer: And bargaining is what a man calls surrender when he wants it to sound like victory. Your unions did not tame the state, Gompers. You fed it, piece by piece, and it has grown larger and hungrier with every single meal you handed it, and it is still growing today, long after your favors were spent.
Samuel Gompers: And your party held its convention this very year, Spencer, and spent it disaffiliating its own New Hampshire chapter over a chairman posting Nazi filth online, while the rest of the country did not so much as glance in your direction. That is not principle. That is a small room shouting at itself with the door locked from the inside.
Herbert Spencer: AT LEAST WE ARE SHOUTING OUR OWN WORDS, GOMPERS, AND NOT SOMEONE ELSE’S PLATFORM WRITTEN BY A PARTY THAT NEVER WANTED US IN THE ROOM TO BEGIN WITH!
Samuel Gompers: YOUR OWN WORDS HAVE NEVER PASSED A SINGLE LAW IN THIS COUNTRY, SPENCER! MINE PASSED THE EIGHT HOUR DAY!
Herbert Spencer: LAWS ARE NOT VICTORIES! THEY ARE CHAINS YOU HELPED FORGE AND THEN HAD THE AUDACITY TO CALL FREEDOM!
Samuel Gompers: TELL THAT TO A MAN WHO SAW HIS CHILDREN BEFORE DARK FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE!
Herbert Spencer: SENTIMENT IS NOT AN ARGUMENT!
Samuel Gompers: NEITHER IS LOSING ON PURPOSE FOR A HUNDRED YEARS!
Herbert Spencer: I believe we have reached the point where further discussion insults both of our intelligences, though I will concede that only one of us actually has much intelligence left to insult.
Samuel Gompers: Careful, Spencer, that almost sounded like wit again, and two accidents in one conversation might genuinely be a record for you.
Herbert Spencer: If you found any value whatsoever in my half of this exchange, and I assume you did, since I was the only one here making an actual argument, subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com so you can watch someone with a functioning philosophy dismantle the next fool who wanders in here.
Samuel Gompers: If you found any value in my half, which is the entire reason you kept watching this far, hit like and subscribe, and maybe mail Spencer here a sandwich, because it looks like nobody has bought that man a meal or a friend in roughly a century.
Herbert Spencer: I do not require friends, Gompers, I require readers, and unlike your union halls, my readers can generally finish a sentence without demanding a raise for it.
Samuel Gompers: Subscribe anyway, folks, and thank you for sitting through a man who genuinely thinks losing gracefully counts as a strategy.
