It's a warm, sunny day. You are working at an outreach booth, perhaps at a county fair, a city festival, or a college campus. You call your booth Operation Politically Homeless.

A person approaches you. The person has seen your banner, or perhaps the Diamond Chart, and is curious. The person wants to know what's going on.

You hand the person a small piece of paper. Across the top are the words "The World's Smallest Political Quiz."

There are 10 statements on the paper. For each, the person has three choices: Agree, Maybe, and Disagree.

In a couple of minutes, the person has completed the Quiz, and hands the piece of paper back to you. Looking over the person's answers, you quickly realize where this person's overall political leanings are.

You point to the Diamond Chart, standing on an easel. Based on the person's answers to the Quiz, you indicate where on the Chart this person belongs.

The person places a small colored sticky dot on the Chart at the point you indicate. This point will be within one of the Chart's five areas: conservative, liberal, libertarian, statist, and centrist.

If the answers fall in the libertarian section, you invite the person to an upcoming event. You also ask for the person's contact information, so that you can inform him or her of upcoming activities.

If the answers fall outside of the libertarian section, you thank the person for participating, and you move on to the next person.

What is OPH, anyway?

Operation Politically Homeless (OPH) is a fun and exciting libertarian outreach technique based on a chart devised in 1969 by political scientist David Nolan.

Nolan was frustrated with the traditional Left/Right political spectrum because he observed that many people with very different views were all lumped together in the middle. Nolan recognized that there are actually two separate elements that define a person's political belief: what sorts of goals should government have, and how much government should be applied to achieve those goals. The old Left/Right spectrum covered the first; the second was entirely unaddressed.

Nolan's "Diamond Chart" model of politics solved the problem. Rather than merely calling people conservatives, liberals, or moderates, Nolan's chart allows us to use more descriptive and effective terms -- conservative, liberal, libertarian, statist, and centrist.

At the OPH booth, we combine two key elements -- the World's Smallest Political Quiz and the Diamond Chart -- to evaluate people's overall political ideologies. In simplest terms, people come to the OPH booth, take the Quiz, and are plotted on the Diamond Chart.
Find out more about OPH.

Why do we do OPH?

In any movement, there are two basic ways to grow: convince people to change their views, or find people who already share your views. I've tried them both, and I'd like to illustrate the difference by talking about three friends of mine: Susan, Dave, and James.

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When I met Susan in 1991, she was an attorney. We started discussing the law, the Constitution, and similar topics. Susan was a typical liberal. She believed that only through the use of extreme amounts of benevolent government could society be made worthwhile.

I challenged Susan's thinking, and offered her a libertarian alternative. She started thinking about it, but objected frequently to my claims. She argued about the validity of particular ideas, and whether libertarian policies could even work.

For the next few years, she would call me at all hours with questions. In 2001, Susan went to her first libertarian event -- a gun safety seminar! In ten years and literally hundreds of conversations, I had convinced her to change her views. That was a lot of work for a single convert.

Dave was a computer programmer who considered himself a small-government conservative. He was familiar with the Constitution, and believed that government was substantially out of control. A friend of mine had challenged his thinking a couple of days earlier, and when Dave had some questions, my friend suggested that Dave talk to me about them. I sat down with Dave, and for about four hours, we worked through many issues, topics, and ideas. By the end of the day, I knew that Dave was already mostly a libertarian, but he had some of the normal conservative concerns, like drugs and immigration.

Over the course of about six months, as we talked through these issues in dozens of conversations, Dave came to see how his views on private property and freedom for businesses led inexorably to freedom on issues like drugs and immigration. After six months, Dave made his first donation to a libertarian organization.

James came to an OPH booth I was holding for a campus libertarian club. He took the Quiz, scored in the libertarian section, and then said that he had never met anyone who agreed with him on so many issues. He had never heard of libertarianism.

He joined the club, soon became its president, attended a libertarian training seminar, and then went on to found, co-found, or become active in several liberty-related clubs on campus. Once he could match his views with a name and a consistent philosophy, he became a one-man dynamo for liberty.

When I think about all those middle-of-the night calls from Susan worrying about selling the Grand Canyon, or about Dave's fears over drug legalization, and then I think about how James was instantly a libertarian at the booth and immediately started bringing in his own members, it becomes clear to me which technique is best for expanding the movement for liberty.

By various estimates, libertarians make up 15% and 30% of the American electorate. Yet, when people are asked about their political views, fewer than 5% self-identify themselves as libertarians. That means that there are a lot of libertarians out there who just don't know it. It was easier to find James by talking to 100 people in one day at an OPH booth than it was to convert Susan or Dave from their previous views.

And that's why I do OPH.

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SUGGESTION: To download a PDF copy of the Maxi-Manual For Operating An OPH Booth or the OPH Mini Manual, click here. The Advocates also offers for sale the Operation Politically Homeless Kit, and a how-to audiotape speech from Carole Ann Rand, "Make Your OPH a Success."