by Dick Armey
The warnings came in waves. First there was the unexpected collapse of the initial TARP vote on the floor of the House of Representatives. And then came an explosion of opposition to the Democrats’ $786 billion “stimulus” bill that no one had bothered to read before it was rammed through Congress. Then August saw the visceral opposition to a hasty attempt by President Obama to have government takeover of our health care. There was the special election in New York District 23, where a no-name citizen came within an inch of defeating the handpicked professionals of both political parties. Then Scott Brown’s election sent tremors across the country.
The very foundations of a deeply entrenched establishment were starting to shake, but Republicans and Democrats alike chose to ignore what was happening. The telltale signs were there all along, but for some it was easier to pretend everything was going to be just fine.
So when this political earthquake finally hit Florida, Governor Charlie Crist had no idea it was coming. Crist was lauded by many in the GOP establishment as a new breed of Republican, a fiscal “moderate” they embraced as the answer to the drubbing of the 2008 election. For fiscal conservatives, he was an awful choice to send to the U.S. Senate. He seemed like the ultimate opportunist, easily morphing into the champion of the latest political fad.
As governor, he embraced “cap and trade” restrictions on energy use that put Floridians at an economic disadvantage without any tangible benefit to environmental quality. He had also essentially taken over the market for property and casualty insurance in the state, setting up a taxpayer-funded system that was a fiscal time bomb, not unlike Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, set to go off with the next serious hurricane. And he had been dead wrong to embrace President Obama’s waste-filled stimulus plan, the very one that had drawn the ire of Mary Rakovich and her small band of protesters back in February 2009.
In spite of all this bad economic judgment, when Crist announced his bid for the U.S. Senate, the Republican Party broke with the tradition of staying out of primary races and immediately endorsed Charlie Crist as the favored candidate.
Their thinking was superficial at best. Crist was popular. He had a massive political war chest of almost $10 million. And he was, they claimed, the future of the Republican Party: more moderate, more like the Democrats who had just swept the 2008 elections. Liberal columnist E. J. Dionne summed up the Republicans calculations best, writing two days after the announcement that “Florida will be one of the clearest tests3 of whether rank-and-file Republican voters are more interested in doctrinal purity, or in winning—even if it means nominating an Obama hugger.” (Crist famously had been photographed hugging President Obama onstage; the image soon became a ubiquitous reminder of his support for the president’s stimulus plan.)
Marco Rubio had a different perspective; he thought that a Republican should stand for limited government.
We first noticed Rubio through the eyes of FreedomWorks activists on the ground in the state of Florida. They saw the young Cuban American as a rare combination of principles and political talent, someone who was taking the ideas of liberty and driving the legislative agenda in the state capital in Tallahassee.
In 2008 FreedomWorks asked activists from across the country to nominate a “Legislative Entrepreneur of the Year” for leadership at the state level. Our man in Florida Tom Gaitens quickly nominated Marco for his progrowth, proconsumer votes and strong support for lower taxes and more freedom.
During his time as speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Rubio supported the efforts to protect citizens against the repercussions of the Supreme Court’s wrongheaded Kelo decision on eminent domain. Our team in Florida helped to champion the effort to protect the property rights of the residents of Rivera Beach and ultimately support provisions that would benefit all Floridians. Speaker Rubio was strong in these efforts and built a good working relationship with the boots-on-the-ground activists. These activists would rally in Tallahassee each session calling for lower taxes, less government, and more freedom. Each time, the speaker would greet them warmly with an open door.
THE RIGHT STUFF
MARCO WAS ALREADY RUNNING for the U.S. Senate before Crist announced on May 12, 2009. He had no money and virtually no name recognition. Outside of his home turf in the Miami area and to a dedicated core of FreedomWorks activists, few really knew about him. It looked like an impossible uphill climb for the young challenger. How could you beat the sitting governor with huge name-recognition numbers, a pile of money in the bank, and the support of the entire political establishment from Tallahassee to Washington?
What he did have was a fidelity to good ideas, an ability to get things done, and a record worth supporting. This was exactly the kind of candidate newly minted citizen activists like Mary Rakovich was looking for. From day one, the early Tea Party movement started to spread the word on the ground, evangelizing about this fresh face who offered something different, something worth fighting for. They also had not forgotten how Crist embraced the president’s stimulus and knew what that meant for his record on spending if he was elected to the Senate.
The activists attended local Republican meetings to recruit new support. Our folks on the ground were certain that Rubio would be competitive if he could get the attention of the voters. Rubio became a welcome guest at Tea Party events across the state, speaking at an April 2009 event in south Florida organized by Tom Gaitens and again in Orlando in July.
At their urging, Dick Armey endorsed Rubio early in the primary on July 14, 2009, in the hopes of shedding more light on his record that stood so tall against the political opportunism of the sitting governor. In a press release, Dick described Rubio as “an inspiring leader for the next generation4 of the conservative movement. His track record and conservative convictions are a breath of fresh air in a party looking for new leaders to advance the principles of limited government, lower taxes and economic liberty.”
Yet despite the obvious advantages these fiscal conservatives found in Rubio, Crist enjoyed an enormous lead in the first Quinnipiac Polls. In late July, rumors were swirling in the Florida press of Rubio dropping out of the senate race and running for attorney general.
But the Tea Party had a champion and got to work. Grassroots leaders from around the state began inviting Rubio to speak at rallies, bolstering his grassroots exposure. In September, Dick attended a Rubio fund-raiser in Dallas and learned that the young lawmaker was not just a champion for Florida, but for small-government conservatives across the nation.
A few weeks later, Dick came to South Florida and held a rally in Coral Gables. Slowly, the Tea Party movement’s support helped bring Rubio to the public eye. As the Tea Party continued to organize and grow, so did Rubio’s popularity. By October the hard work had begun to pay off and Rubio was even in the polls. By December, he was in the lead.
On February 10, 2010, FreedomWorks PAC hosted a reunion of sorts. To mark the anniversary of the Crist–Obama hug, Mary Rakovich was joined in Fort Myers by 1,500 activists from across Florida on the same day and at the same location of Mary’s first protest. The keynote speaker that evening: Marco Rubio. Activists raised more than $750,000 for Rubio’s campaign, proving that grass roots can equal the establishment’s fund-raising efforts.
Rubio’s surge in popularity via the Tea Party movement led to a decision by Governor Crist to drop out of the GOP and run as an independent. The insider-anointed winner was so far behind he didn’t want to risk a crushing primary defeat.
HERE TO STAY
IN MASSACHUSETTS, ACTIVISTS WORKED overtime to win at the finish line. In Florida, they pounced sooner and altered the primary process. A similar story played out in Utah, where Senator Robert Bennett, a three-term Republican mainstay, was ousted at the state Republican convention by Tea Party activists. When the dust settled, a whopping 2,200 of the 3,600 delegates had been personally contacted by FreedomWorks staffers and local volunteers. The pro-freedom contingent even set up a booth on the convention floor, debatin
g the opposition in person and winning votes up to the last moment.
Bennett was widely considered to be a “good guy” who was mostly reliable on Republican issues. But he was unreliable when it came to fiscal conservatism. Bennett was an ardent defender of appropriators’ earmarking habits, and had sponsored legislation proposing an individual mandate for health insurance that became the basis of Obamacare. Most notably for the delegates from Utah, he had voted for the Wall Street bailout. As Bennett spoke to the gathering, the chant of “TARP, TARP, TARP” echoed across Convention Hall. Bennett was ultimately replaced by Tea Party underdog candidate Mike Lee, a staunch supporter of limited government and the very first signer of the Contract from America.
On Meet the Press, New York Times columnist David Brooks fumed, “It is a damn outrage5.” E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post wailed, “It’s almost a nonviolent coup.” Get used to it, guys.
Nothing about elected office should be comfortable. No one should be reelected for hazy memories of partial support and tangential involvement on important issues. With his defeat, Bennett signaled the expanding power of a movement that no longer bites its fingernails hoping for a miracle on Election Day. And as citizens and patriots, we should all be proud of that.
Chapter 9
We are A Movement of Ideas, Not Leaders
THE TEA PARTY’S CALL to arms that first began with Mary Rakovich in Fort Myers has evolved into one of the most potent political forces in American history. This citizen movement is so effective because it has been in large part self-organizing. The many branches of the Tea Party movement have created a virtual marketplace for new ideas, effective innovations, and cutting-edge tactics. We agree on the first principles of individual freedom, free markets, and constitutionally constrained government, but when it comes to how to best advocate these ideas, best practices come from the ground up, around kitchen tables, from Facebook friends, at Tuesday book clubs, or on Twitter feeds.
That’s why the Tea Party ethos gives the political establishment—Left and Right—such uncontrollable fits. They don’t know what to make of it. They don’t know what to call it. They want to talk to the man in charge.
If they knew who was in charge, they could attack him or her. They could crush the inconvenient dissent of the Tea Party. Remember “the thirteenth rule” of Chicago street politics according to Saul Alinsky: “Pick the target, freeze it1, personalize it, and polarize it.” This works when your target is a hapless CEO about to be turned on the class warfare spit. It’s proving much harder to demonize millions of patriotic citizens, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, grandparents fearful that their great-grandchildren will never live the American dream.
The Tea Party is the product of a perfect storm of (1) broken Republican commitments, (2) the aggressive left-wing agenda of a Democratic regime motivated by redistributionist values that are antithetical to the values of most Americans, and (3) technological innovations that allow people to find one another, organize, and get essential information in real time from competitive sources.
We call this complex and diverse movement “beautiful chaos.” Or better yet, to borrow Nobel Prize–winning economist F. A. Hayek’s weighty notion2: “spontaneous order.” By this we reference what is now the dominant understanding in organizational management theory: decentralization of personal knowledge is the best way to maximize the contributions of people, their talents, and the total productivity of any enterprise, no matter how big. Let the “leaders” be the regional activists who have the best knowledge of the local personalities and issues. In the real world, this is common sense. In Washington, D.C., this is known as radical. Even dangerous.
Hayek argues that it is impossible to replace the decentralized wisdom of freely acting individuals with a top-down government-imposed hierarchy without destroying the knowledge needed to rationally allocate resources in society:
Which of these systems3 is likely to be more efficient depends mainly on the question under which of them we can expect that fuller use will be made of the existing knowledge. This, in turn, depends on whether we are more likely to succeed in putting at the disposal of a single central authority all the knowledge which ought to be used but which is initially dispersed among many different individuals, or in conveying to the individuals such additional knowledge as they need in order to enable them to dovetail their plans with those of others.
Hayek, along with his mentor, Ludwig von Mises, used this essential point to explain why markets work and why socialism fails. Discounted by their peers in academia at the time, their predictions came, quite tragically, to pass. Much later, Hayek would brand the arrogance of big-government planners a “fatal conceit.”
When you think about it, a decentralized model for social change is most consistent with the values of independence, self-reliance, and personal liberty that embody America. Those activists who gathered at Boston’s Old South Meeting House in 1773 knew it. Thomas Jefferson understood this when he wrote, “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences4 attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”
SUPER-SIZED
THE BIG-GOVERNMENT CROWD, ON the other hand, is naturally drawn to the compulsion demanded by a centralized authority. They can’t imagine an undirected social order. Someone needs to be in charge. “We can’t give people a choice5 or they might take it,” said Senator Ted Kennedy during a closed-door House–Senate conference committee dealing with health savings accounts.
Big government is audacious. It is conceited. It knows better. Government is, by definition, the means by which you are compelled by force to do that which you would not do voluntarily. Like pay high taxes. Or “purchase,” by federal mandate, a government-defined health insurance plan that you cannot afford, do not need, or simply do not want. For the left, and for today’s monolithically liberal Democratic Party, every solution to every perceived problem involves more government: top-down dictates from new laws enforced by new bureaucrats who are presumed to care more and, most important, know better what you need. “I’m from the government, and I’m going to help you whether you want it or not.”
Would anyone voluntarily bail out strangers living thousands of miles away who lied on their applications to buy a home? Of course not! It’s a stupid idea that rewards bad behavior. YOU CAN’T FIX STUPID, BUT YOU CAN VOTE IT OUT OF OFFICE, reads a popular Tea Party protest sign. Consumers in free markets uncorrupted by regulatory favoritism vote untold millions of times a day, punishing irrational behavior, bad actors, and liar loans with equal and swift justice. Government, on the other hand, socializes bad behavior, taking from the responsible and giving to the irresponsible.
That’s not how tea partiers roll.
And that’s not how most Americans roll, either. Matt Kibbe got a lot of heat from liberals for telling the New York Times that “Americans are just genetically opposed to socialism.” But it seems like an obvious statement of fact. America is different. We are special because our founding was conceived in liberty. It was in the genes of the Sons of Liberty who risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor for an idea. That genetic code makes our family, our community, and our country unique from all the rest of the world. Dick remembers a conversation with a friend who had emigrated from Ethiopia and was so proud that he had just completed his naturalization requirements for U.S. citizenship. He couldn’t stop talking about it. He spoke about the U.S. Constitution, about the founders, and about freedom. As proud as he was of his heritage, he was a different man: he was an American.
Those liberals now in control of our government seem bent on apologizing for the United States, striving to, in the words of Barack Obama, “remake America.” They want to remake us to look more like European social democracies. Liberals don’t talk about democratic socialism anymore; they prattle on about “social justice.” They misuse the phrase. Justice means treating every individual with respect and decency and exactly the same as anyone else is treated under the laws of t
he land. As best we can tell, “social justice” translates to really wise elected officials (you know, smarter than you) redistributing your hard-earned income to their favored social agendas, all dutifully administered by a well-intentioned bureaucrat. In Europe, this translates into bloated social welfare programs that punish work; massive tax burdens, particularly on the working class through hidden value-added taxes that crush economic expansion; and structural barriers to opportunity for younger generations of have-nots trying to enter the workforce.
The politics of greed is always wrapped in the language of love. When you hear someone go on about social justice, read between the lines. More government control of health care is not really about improving access to health care; it’s about controlling your health care.
If you want to comprehend the energy and passion behind the citizen activists who are fighting this corrosive ideology of redistribution, understand this: we believe that America’s founders got it right and that Europe got it wrong. America is different because we are all about the individual over the collective. No one says it better than Howard Roark in his speech to the jury in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead:
Our country, the noblest country in the history of men, was based on the principle of individualism, the principle of man’s “inalienable rights.” It was a country where a man was free to seek his own happiness, to gain and produce; not to give up and renounce; to prosper, not to starve; to achieve, not to plunder; to hold as his highest possession a sense of his personal value, and as his highest virtue his self-respect.
Individualism is the unity of purpose that binds the Tea Party movement into a cohesive community. And left-wingers, bless their hearts, will never get it. What looks like chaos to its detractors is the essential order to the Tea Party. Freedom unleashed is a potent force for social change.