by Dick Armey
THE ROAD AHEAD
THE EARLY, TARGETED EFFORTS of concerned citizens like Mary Rakovich have now taken root, grown, and blossomed into a social phenomenon that is so powerful because it is not directed by any one mind, political party, or parochial agenda. The criteria for membership in the Tea Party is straightforward: stay true to principle even when it proves inconvenient. Be assertive but respectful. Add value and don’t take credit for other people’s work. Our community is built on the Trader Principle: we associate by mutual consent, to further our mutually shared goals of restoring fiscal responsibility and constitutionally limited government.
These were the principles that enabled the September 12 Taxpayer March on Washington to become one of the largest political protests in the history of our nation’s capital. How do you get a million people to travel to Washington, D.C., from the four corners of the country, on their own dime, to join in a common purpose? In a word: freedom. It was a glorious day. It was fun. It was irreverent. The 9/12 Taxpayer March on Washington was created by a beautiful mob of peaceful citizens engaged in patriotic dissent. No one asked permission, and no one considered the possibility that it was not their born right to peaceably assemble. Is that what the political establishment hates so much about our community?
It is time to take America back. We need to reclaim America from the advocates of big government in both political parties, from the rent-seeking corporations eager to use the power of government to enrich themselves at the expense of consumers and taxpayers, and from the web of left-wing special interests who feed at the public trough and consider it their right to do so.
The political potential of the broad grassroots movement against big government that we are witnessing today should not be underestimated. There is a small-“l” libertarian, commonsense fiscal conservatism out there that transcends partisan definitions. These are independent voters who are united around the idea that government is spending too much money it does not have, and that government is getting involved in things, like controlling health care and running car companies, that it cannot do effectively, and should not try to do at all.
These highly motivated concerns about fiscal issues now represent the very center of electoral opinion among Republicans, most independents, and a growing number of Democrats who have developed buyer’s remorse. Today the liberals who control Congress make even Bill Clinton look conservative by comparison and they are scaring Americans with their fiscal lasciviousness. This overreach is the stage upon which to build a revolt. We can take America back from moneyed special interests, leftist advocacy groups, and arrogant politicians. We can stop the monumental legislative threats to our economic liberties. Most important, perhaps, we can do these things by building a national community of activists—organized on the ground and connected online—that will be able to hold the next generation of political leaders, whether they are Democrats or Republicans, accountable for their actions.
The Tea Party is different. Consider the comparable events that led to the political backlash in 1994. That was a voter uprising that too quickly waned when the imminent threat of one-party rule under the Democratic establishment seemed contained. The new activists who had risen up to throw the bums out of power eventually left the playing field again, leaving our political system in the hands of politicians. Left unattended, these politicians, as they all eventually will, returned to tending to their own self-indulgent needs. At best, they became inconvenience-minimizers, eager to compromise for the lesser of two evils. At worst, they grew their own power at the expense of the American people and the fiscal health of our economy. All of the corruptions that followed—the ballooning federal debt, the frenzied spending, the political favors, the bailouts, and the government takeovers—now confront our economy, our futures, and the American way of life built upon freedom, opportunity, and prosperity.
This political boom-and-bust cycle, not unlike the government-generated business cycle that caused the housing bubble and the massive mistakes that went with it, generates periods of accountability followed by years of neglect and an inevitable slip back to business as usual. The problem with this cycle, beyond the policy damage done, is the difficulty in reversing the trend toward more government spending and more government control over our lives. With each new government program, the baseline of total spending is raised, phony budget estimates become very real red ink, and the federal take grows as a percentage of the total private economy. When a constitutional barrier is breached, as happened with the extraordinary ceding of power to an unelected secretary of the treasury under TARP, there is permanent damage done to that constitutional wall that stands between free citizens and a tyrannical government. When informal constraints against hasty legislative actions are torn, as happened with the Democrats’ decision to create a massive new health care entitlement through parliamentary chicanery, there is no going back to the way it was before. A future Congress will certainly try to use its new power to enact sweeping legislation with similar tactics, permanently end-running the “cooling off” function the authors of the Constitution envisioned in their design of a deliberative Congress.
The Tea Party movement is rising up because we know we cannot leave public policy to the politicians, or to the “experts,” or to someone else with a parochial agenda, a concentrated benefit that comes first, before the public good, and at your expense. The broad community of patriotic citizens that have stood up to take their country back from an unholy alliance of government power and privileged interests are making a difference in ways that defy easy comparisons to the boom and bust of other recent shifts in the political winds. The Tea Party has evolved from political revolt to social movement. We the people are that force more powerful, a force that can save our great nation for future generations.
The establishment doesn’t like it one bit. They will kick and scream and throw every possible roadblock in our path.
But we suspect George Washington would love it. He, after all, demanded as much of us. “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of government are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”
Or, as we like to say, freedom works.
Epilogue: Changing the Culture in Tacoma, Washington
I don’t expect politicians to solve anybody’s problems1. . . . We’ve got to take the world by the horns and solve our own problems. The world owes us nothing, each and every one of us, the world owes us not one single thing. Politicians or whoever.
—BOB DYLAN
EVERY TWO YEARS, LIKE clockwork, a fresh crop of candidates from both political parties promise the voters that they will come to the nation’s capital and act differently. They say they will spend taxpayer dollars more prudently; they will drain the swamp along the Potomac of the undue influence of well-heeled special interests; they will bring with them a new era of nonpartisanship, or civility, or transparency, or whatever their pollster says “moves the dial.” On cue, each and every one of them promises to change the culture in Washington, D.C.
George W. Bush promised to do it. Nancy Pelosi promised to do it. Barack Obama promised to do it. “Changing the culture in Washington” is the bottled snake oil of electoral politics. It is the Hope and Change greasing the skids that lead us straight back to an ironclad political equilibrium that takes our freedoms and our dollars for the servicing of their needs.
And many of us fall for it. Conservatives and Libertarians want to believe it. Independents, Republicans, and Democrats fall for it, too. Working people who don’t give a damn about politics and simply want to be left to live their lives hoping that the government will do those few things it should and otherwise stay out of their lives fall for it.
It’s the cynical politics of the same: same promises, same outcomes. Challengers running against seated senators do it. Even incumbents do it, by rote, fully expecting to close another sale of this magical politica
l elixir to returning customers: “I promise not to do what I did; to not use the appropriations process as my personal reelection fund; to not kowtow to the advantaged rent-seekers who use their access to game the market to their advantage; to not feed taxpayer-financed special interests at the public trough.”
But they do. They always go back to doing what they did before.
And we leave them alone to do it again. We go back to what we were doing before the last time things in Washington got so bad that it drew us out of our homes to the voting booth to push back against a political process noticeably out of control. Inevitably, the political class is again left to its natural tendencies, to hand out the concentrated benefits that will buy their next election and distribute the dispersed costs unnoticed by the voting public.
We are all like Charlie Brown, standing poised to take one more run at Lucy’s perfectly placed football. We hope and we believe even though we know we should not and then we find ourselves flat on our backs looking up from the ground, cursing the politicians.
By not showing up, by not pushing back, we allow even the best public servants to be manipulated by the privileged interests inevitably drawn to plunder the riches of big government. They too will fail and fall without our support and encouragement.
Somewhere along the way, we abandoned George Hewes and the other citizen patriots who took to the streets in defense of liberty in 1773. We abandoned the traditions of citizen activism that made the American experiment a reality. We left the streets to be controlled by advocates of bigger government.
We accepted the naive notion that public officials left their self-interests at the door the moment they took the oath of office. We took solace in the belief that our ideas were so superior, so inevitable, that all we had to do was clearly explain our policy wisdom to government officials and they would eventually come around to the right way of thinking. They would do the right thing if someone just explained how to do it.
We now know the world just doesn’t work this way.
And then we fell into what I call the “Benevolent Despot” trap. If we just elected the right people to public office, they would do the right thing regardless of the political consequences. We have all slipped into this way of thinking, waiting for the perfect leader to take charge and drive the right reforms of big government from the top down.
These, by the way, are the same assumptions that socialists and progressives and other advocates of big, benevolent government employ to solve social problems. Angry about the unholy collusion between banking committee chairmen and big banks? Give Congress even more power. Frustrated with the bureaucracy and seemingly arbitrary power of big insurance? Put a benevolent government in charge of a more rational rationing of your health care.
When Jann Wenner, the hopelessly liberal founder of Rolling Stone magazine, was interviewing Bob Dylan in 2006, he was told that politicians cannot be counted on to solve problems. To him, the statement seemed absurd.
“Who is going to solve them?” Wenner asked, incredulous.
Dylan replied, “Our own selves2.”
He’s exactly right. If we want things to change, we need to look to our own selves to get the changing done. The culture in Washington won’t change. The politicians who promise to change the culture in Washington won’t change. When you think about it, that has never been the answer. George Hewes and Mary Rakovich knew it was not the answer.
We need to change the culture in the other Washington—the real Washington—in Tacoma, in Seattle and Yakima and Everett and Olympia. We need to change the culture in Jacksonville, and in Philadelphia and Evansville, Little Rock and Houston. We need to change the culture outside the D.C. Beltway, in America. We need to change things, starting in your hometown.
That’s why the Tea Party movement is so different. Unlike past political uprisings against a political establishment run amok, this is a revolt from the bottom up. It is built on a coherent, unifying set of values, American values that go back to the revolutionary traditions of our founding as a nation. It is connected via the social networks of the Internet. It is built around traditions of respect and humility and hard work.
We welcome everyone from every walk of life to join our cause. We pick up our trash. We protest peacefully but insistently. This decentralized grassroots revolution has gathered disparate citizens and turned a gathering crowd into a cohesive community.
This is not a political party; it is a social gathering. Any activist will tell you about the essentially fun and celebratory nature of any Tea Party event. It’s like a tailgate party before a football game or the annual family picnic. I am reminded of the sense of community you used to experience in the parking lot before a Grateful Dead concert: peaceful, connected, smiling, gathered in common purpose.
At the 2010 D.C. Tax Day Tea Party, we had some forty thousand people gather on the National Mall right under the Washington Monument. It was a typically joyous gathering despite the name-calling of our critics and in spite of the serious challenge we face as a nation. The press desperately wanted to report otherwise. They wanted to find a problem or a bad actor. So when NBC reporter Kelly O’Donnell questioned a black participant that day she started with a not-so-subtle observation. “There aren’t a lot of African American men at these events,” she said. “Have you ever felt uncomfortable?” He responded, “No, these are my people, Americans3.”
Tea partiers have successfully taken their nascent movement from what I call “political space,” a space regularly populated by a tiny percentage of the American people, to a broad cultural space, where the rest of America lives. This is the difference between a canned stump speech and a Grateful Dead concert. It is a community in the fullest sense of the word.
And that makes it sustainable. It means that we have the opportunity to change the culture in Tacoma, Washington. It means that this community will be there the day after the first Tuesday in November, holding a new crop of elected officials accountable not just for their promises but for their actions.
What an opportunity. Let’s go for it.
MATT KIBBE
Appendix
FREEDOMWORKS GRASSROOTS ACTIVISM TOOLKIT
MANY OF YOU MAY BE new to the political process. You have probably never considered yourself to be a community organizer. But in the last couple of years, thousands of Americans have become true leaders in their communities, organizing protests and town hall meetings, lobbying their state and federal legislators, and leading get-out-the-vote efforts for limited-government candidates in elections.
Scenes from the September 12, 2009, March on Washington. Photos by Michael Beck
No one is born an expert organizer, but we can all learn from one another by sharing best practices and pitfalls to avoid. In the next few pages you will learn the basics necessary to become an effective advocate for limited government. We will describe how to organize a protest, be effective in town hall meetings, interact with the media, utilize online tools, hold events, raise money, recruit members to your group, and other essential information.
Remember that we are following the tradition of the original American community organizers, the Sons of Liberty. These grassroots Americans helped lead a campaign to build public support for the American Revolution, and were the brains behind the original Boston Tea Party in December 1773. As they understood so well, it does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires of freedom in the minds of men.
We hope that you will find this guide useful to you and your local group. There is also an online resource for those who want to learn more at www.freedomworks.org/manual.
1. THE CHAPTER CONCEPT
THE CHAPTER CONCEPT IS designed to achieve the goal and mission of FreedomWorks: lower taxes, less government, and more freedom. Therefore, it is important that you know and use these methods when building your club.
The chapter concept allows activists to function in small groups so they can easily relate to one
another. It promotes a sense of unity and motivates members to take action in the political system. We have state chapters, county chapters, and town chapters all across the country. You can become a part of this network of activists by creating your own chapter and networking with others in your county and state.
ACTIVIST SPOTLIGHT: BEN TESSLER
On April 15, 2009, Washington, D.C., real estate agent Ben Tessler attended his first Tea Party rally. “I was shocked to see nine or ten people I knew,” he recalled. “These are normal people who feel as anxious as I do for the country. All felt helpless and at the same time, all felt a great need to be there at that rally just to be doing something.”
Ben went home feeling revitalized. He forged deeper relationships with his friends he saw at the rally. He also began building a contact list and pushing the limited government and fiscal responsibility message whenever and however he could. Although it seemed like more and more people were picking up on the message, he wasn’t sure exactly how to bring things to the next level.
At a July 4 gathering, Ben met Brendan Steinhauser of FreedomWorks. “Brendan and I exchanged contact information and kept in touch. When I found out about the 9/12 march on Washington, I volunteered to do anything I could to help. I had to be involved and not let someone else fight my battle. There is nothing more important than fighting for family, country, and faith. They are all tied together.”
Fired up for the march, Ben went back to work on his e-mail list. He and his friends began to send out articles and video clips to those on their contact lists. As the messages were forwarded and became viral, Ben’s list continued to grow.
“Our local group positioned itself as a kind of a first responder,” he said. “We put ads in local papers, wrote letters to the editor, and tacked flyers on the community boards at coffee shops and pizza parlors. We put signs on major streets and hung banners on overpasses and busy intersections.”