That Time Al Franken Kept Telling Me Jokes About Mullets

There was music in the cafés at night, and talk of liberal-libertarian cooperation was in the air.

Some vault somewhere might contain a recording of the time I went on Al Franken's radio show, but I haven't been able to find the episode anywhere on the internet. It aired in 2005, before the former Saturday Night Live writer and future Minnesota senator had ever made a bid for office. I'm guessing that once he decided to run, one of his handlers realized it wouldn't be helpful to have a few years of radio comedy just sitting there for the oppo researchers to dig through. Or maybe the archive just dried up and disappeared, the way old files on the World Wide Web tend to do.

That show has been on my mind, though, because I just published an article looking back at the ways the political spectrum has been turned inside-out over the last two decades, and one of the topics I covered was that sudden burst of discussion, in 2005–06, of what might happen if the liberals and the libertarians could set aside their differences and get together for a while. Like virtually everyone else in the liberty movement, I wrote a couple of blog posts laying out my thoughts on that idea, but it wasn't one of those that caught the eye of a libertarian-friendly producer on Franken's staff. He got in touch because I had written a piece called "The Hippie and the Redneck Can Be Friends." And while that particular article was about drive-in movies and country music, not partisan politics, it was close enough for radio work—Al Franken wanted to know how Democrats could appeal to freedom-loving redneck voters, and that story's title apparently qualified me for the job.

How did the show go? I'm not sure: Like I said, I can't find a recording, so I have to rely here on some fragmentary 19-year-old memories. I know that Franken kept making jokes about mullets. I know that I made what may have been an ill-advised allusion to my host's bit role in Trading Places. And at some point in there, I made the point that if his party wanted libertarians to take it more seriously, it should give more than lip service to the civil liberties where Democrats were supposed to be good. It was nice, I said, to see some bloggers and radio hosts highlighting those issues, but it would be nicer if the party leadership would too.

Well, that was life in the Bush years: In 2005, the liberaltarian dream was widespread enough that someone could spot it even in an article on a completely different subject. In the 2020s, by contrast, it is possible to read something that was explicitly about liberal-libertarian cooperation and completely miss the context that birthed it.

In one of those posts on this topic that I wrote in '06, you see, I included this comment:

I really don't see much hope at all for turning the Democrats in a libertarian direction (though I'll cheer on anyone who's willing to try), but I know plenty of people who reflexively vote Democratic (when they vote at all) but are easily 80% libertarian in their own attitudes. Call them Whole Earth Catalog libertarians, Santa Fe Institute libertarians, bOING bOING libertarians. They appreciate spontaneous order, entrepreneurship (many of them are entrepreneurs themselves), decentralization, free expression, and peace. The hard-core do-it-yourselfers among them (and the veterans of the New Left) also appreciate the widespread private ownership of guns. They might not agree with everything in [a New Republic article called "Liberaltarians"], but hey, neither do I. That's fine. It's a big tent.

In 2021, a Harvard historian named Erik Baker quoted that post in the opening to an acclaimed paper ("The ultimate think tank: The rise of the Santa Fe Institute libertarian"):

In 2006, Jesse Walker, an editor at the libertarian web magazine Reason, identified a new political identity forming in his social milieu. 'Call them', he wrote, 'Santa Fe Institute libertarians'. These were people, in Walker's view, 'who reflexively vote Democratic (when they vote at all) but are easily 80% libertarian in their own attitudes'. Despite their loose cultural affinity with Democratic Party liberalism, the fundamental values of the Santa Fe Institute libertarians were the same as those of Walker and his Reason colleagues: 'spontaneous order, entrepreneurship (many of them are entrepreneurs themselves), decentralization, free expression, and peace'. Walker hoped that the Santa Fe Institute libertarians, with their liberal do-gooder energy, could help the libertarian movement make inroads into a mainstream audience that saw libertarianism as the sole province of Scrooge-like billionaires. 'It's a big tent', he insisted (Walker, 2006).

Every now and then, I remember Baker's paper and wonder how exactly someone could think my ruminations on crunchy nonvoters and gun-toting ex–New Leftists had been about "inroads into a mainstream audience," let alone "liberal do-gooder energy" or "Scrooge-like billionaires." Remember: This was 2005–06. One reason this discussion had been happening in the first place was because some Netroots liberals thought that calling themselves "libertarian Democrats" would make them sound more populist. If I had written a story called "The Hippie and Ebenezer Scrooge Can Be Friends," Al Franken's people probably wouldn't have extended an invite. (Nor was I describing a "new political identity." Baker evidently missed the reference to the Whole Earth Catalog, a publication founded in 1968.)

But I don't want to waste time complaining that someone missed a document's historical context, even if reading things historically is something you might expect a historian to do. I'm just fascinated by just how quickly a historical context can wash away in the first place. It would be fun to go back to 2005 or '06 and talk with some of the Democrats who wanted to work with libertarians to defeat folks like Vice President Dick Cheney; I could tell them that in 2024 a Democratic presidential ticket would working with Cheney to defeat the star of The Apprentice. I doubt that story would get me on Al Franken's show, but maybe I could earn a slot on Art Bell.