Brian Shields filed a thoughtful objection to my post on the The Libertarian Mind , which says in part: Your dream of a Libertarian society is just that, a dream. Reality is that if you want Libertarianism to take hold, you have to find a way to work with the other two parties to squeeze your ideas in. As a third party, the most effective way to get what you want is to work as the third leg for government to stabilize on. Republicans go one way, Democrats go the other, Libertarians can bridge the gap, and create true partisanship. Complementing this, here's an excerpt from a long post (worth reading in its entirety) from Third Party Watch : Changing the mindset of an entire country is a bit more of a daunting task than to simply win elections. While the percentages are still being debated by historians, it’s clear that a quite sizable number of Americans opposed the Revolutionary War at a time many consider to be the most libertarian period in American history. For the sake of argu...