It was especially frustrating for conservative politicians trying make clear to their own rank and file that avoiding disadvantageous engagements was a strategic choice, not a lack of will to win. Just saying it wasn’t enough—the conservatives needed wins to keep from being demoralized. The insurgents needed to look for situations where they were likely to win—even little victories helped keep morale up when there were setbacks, like the election and reelection of Hillary Clinton.
The Obamacare rollout debacle was a fortuitous one—it came right on the heels of most of the Washington, DC, punditocracy pronouncing the Tea Party dead. One note on the term “Tea Party”—that label was Alinskyed by the left and by the establishment of both parties into an all-purpose enemy upon which they could focus their efforts. It was an attempt to manufacture a single, identifiable, and tangible opponent to destroy.
But there was no Tea Party. It was a chimera. Certainly, a few organizations used the name, but there was no single entity that could be destroyed. The establishment turned its full power against this so-called “Tea Party” and poisoned it with normal Americans—but there was nothing there. The conservative insurgency was not bound to the fate of the “Tea Party.” The establishment ended up defeating only a label while its actual opponent was growing stronger.
It became clear to the insurgents that they had to force the GOP to act during Obama’s remaining time in office to defeat his plans, mostly pushed through via executive orders and by gimmicks like ending the filibuster, while setting the stage to enact its own goals. They wisely gave up on trying to govern.
They hated it when establishment GOP politicians went on Sunday morning television shows—Sunday morning was when they ran all the boring political programs at the time—and started babbling about “governing.” They realized that the Republicans needed to forget about “governing” and try to stay alive as a party. They wanted to let Obama “govern,” if he could, which meant let him pay the consequences for his policies. The Obamacare rollout fiasco was a great example—and the conservatives had to work hard to prevent establishment Republicans from bailing Obama out from the consequences of his actions in the name of “good governance.”
Every time the GOP tried to reform something or improve something, they either got skewered by the media or helped Obama avoid the fallout of his own actions. The conservatives preferred to focus on the only goal that mattered: destroying the progressive movement. That meant letting Obama and Clinton fail.
* * *
Sandy Crawford (Conservative Activist)
The Breitbart Institute has a bar with 23 beers on tap. This is just one of the ways in which it attempts to honor its namesake, whose love of the occasional quaff was almost as great as his love of battling the liberal establishment. Sandy and I sit at a table in the corner watching the young staffers gather to blow off steam after another week of hard work fighting for control of the culture.
I was not born into the movement. I came into it because, well, I was a thinking human being and I hated the conformity and lying I saw the liberals around me get wrapped up in. I started out generally liberal, so I kind of knew how they thought—or didn’t, as the case may be. But I got the appeal of liberalism, which some of my fellow cons never did. I understood why someone might choose to be liberal. I didn’t agree with the rationale, but I got the thought process. There was a security in giving up your autonomy in return for vague assurances that you would be taken care of. Many of us in the constitutional conservative movement understood, because many of us were ex-liberals. I think it gave us an advantage in appealing to regular Americans.
I got active in the movement after college and bounced around various organizations and institutions doing conservative activist work. In college, I started out an English major, which meant I was set to be a lawyer or a barista. I ended up with a degree in poli sci and marketing. Both were useful down the road.
I understood the cultural challenge, but I wanted to work on the political side. Pretty quickly I saw that to win—and we did not win much at first—we needed to fight on our terms, where we could do the most damage to not just Democrats but liberals in general.
Now, most professional politicians are terrible politicians. I don’t know how they get elected. So many of them are lawyers, but they can barely make an argument. They’re awful advocates and they have no sense of strategy. We tried to advise them on how to do it better, so that the constitutional conservative message would get out and so they wouldn’t step on their stuff talking about insane things, like their personal rape theories. Geez, I still don’t know what possessed some of those guys, but some lib reporter would ask them about rape and they would go on a two-minute monologue that made them look like idiots from the Dark Ages. It seemed like it was irresistible to them—no matter how many times you’d tell them, “If someone asks about rape, tell him you’re against it,” they would just keep talking. It still baffles me.
So, we saw ourselves as a resource helping constitutional conservatives at every level with articulating their views and organizing for success. I worked for candidates from senators down to, literally, a dogcatcher. Really, a dogcatcher. I’m not even sure which organization it was—I think it was before I moved to FreedomWorks—that sent me to help this conservative candidate for director of animal control for some county in Colorado. These pushy liberal vegan activists were trying to take over the job, which is an important job in a semirural area. I mean, it was important enough that it was an elected office there. Anyway, this guy was a manager at a grocery store and a Tea Party activist who had started off working to recall some gun-banning state senators. Well, he saw this going on, and he liked animals, so he ran, but he didn’t know anything. I got sent out to help him, and he ended up winning.
Sure, dogcatcher is a pretty minor office, but here’s the thing. It was a stepping-stone. We were building a constitutional conservative farm team. He got elected dogcatcher in 2018. He’s a conservative congressman now.
We tried to get our candidates to think strategically. The challenge was that the Tea Party brought in a lot of amateurs, people with no political experience. But that was also a good thing because we could start fresh with them and not have to waste time breaking bad habits. This was definitely not true about the pros, or alleged pros. They thought they knew everything, which was true—if you were talking about getting your butt kicked by liberals. They were experts at that.
We tried to get them to avoid issues that required compromise, which they resisted. They would talk about this nebulous need to “solve problems,” not realizing that you weren’t going to solve any problems while liberals were in control. You were only going to put off the final collapse of liberalism. Our job during the Obama and Clinton years was not “good government.” It was destroying the liberal cancer plaguing our government at every level.
We pushed them to choose smaller issues that we could win, that would embarrass the opposition or at least jam a wedge between their key constituencies. The best issues led to concrete wins for us.
For example, we tried to get them to make sure that any kind of “gun violence” proposal included amendments that required liberals to go on record supporting or opposing the individual right to keep and bear arms. If we won, we strengthened the right to keep and bear arms. If we lost, we at least outed the liberals who liked to pretend to be protecting gun rights for the benefit of the voters back home in red states. We looked for these win-wins.
There were a lot of old white guys who were the face of conservatism. Now, I like old white guys. My dad was an old white guy. But there was a lot more to the constitutional conservative movement than old white guys. Hell, the original Tea Party—okay, not the original original Tea Party—was led primarily by women. There was nothing wrong with who they were. It just presented a distorted view of who we were as a movement.
So, we pushed local groups and candidates to put females out there to talk about how women benefited by conservative po
licies. For example, guns were supposed to crush us with women. The GOP experts said it was a toxic issue—women hated guns. The liberals certainly thought women hated guns and were afraid of guns and would vote like zombies for anyone saying he hated guns. We must not have known the same women.
When we talked guns to women, we emphasized that they needed the right to have weapons to protect themselves from rape and to protect their kids from whatever hideous fate the thugs liberals won’t lock up would inflict. When liberals started babbling that guns are more dangerous to their owners—which is nonsense, but facts never stopped them—then we would demand that Democrats stop telling women what women need. We invented a catchphrase, “We can choose for ourselves!” and it just infuriated the liberals.
We pushed them to start passing laws and statutes that made the liberals squirm. We did that at every level, from city council to Senate.
The possibilities were endless. We were the ones who started pushing for laws that set the expectation that able-bodied Americans will support themselves. The American people loved it—at least the majority that worked to support itself—and it infuriated the liberals who had to block them and explain their votes later. This idea actually sowed the seeds for the Thirty-Second Amendment.
We pushed for restrictions on lobbying designed to keep politicians and their staffers from cashing in. That was really popular with voters, but the liberals hated it—it was a threat to their power base. Sure, some GOP hacks got squishy about it, but we pointed out that no liberal president like Obama or Hillary would ever sign these bills even if the Democrats let them pass Congress. The liberals became the ones stopping commonsense reforms, not us!
Oh, and we used the phrase “common sense” all the time. Liberals hated having to take positions against “common sense.” Wherever we had control—county boards of supervisors, state assemblies, the House of Representatives—we would advise our people to pass bill after bill that embraced good, old-fashioned common sense—in the most covertly partisan manner possible.
We weren’t bipartisan. We were about destroying our opponents, flat out. After all, our opponents were looking to destroy us. They even tried to outlaw us with the “campaign reform” laws under Hillary Clinton. It was sickening that you could actually be put in jail for advocating your views, but that was liberalism.
This was a fight to the death, and it was important that our people understand that and not pine for some bogus bipartisan fantasy world of the past. We needed to install the killer instinct into some of these people. The people who came in as candidates inspired by the Tea Party were okay. They wanted to draw political blood, and they understood that it was a death match with liberalism. The moderates, the squishes —well, they did not understand that the liberals would take their goo-goo, cloying nonsense about “good government” and turn it into liberalism.
We needed to teach them to say “No” to all manner of liberal nonsense. There could be no compromise with progressivism, just “No.” I got furious at one whiny congressman who was babbling to me about compromising on something and I shouted, “Getting half a shit sandwich still means you’re getting a shit sandwich!” It scared him into voting the right way. That and the fact that I told him I was going to go find a primary opponent for him if he didn’t.
It was hard to get some of them to reject the shit sandwich. A lot of them were perfectly happy holding office in a permanent minority. When you expect to lose all the time, it’s a lot lower stress than when you expect to have to fight for your principles every day.
We had to turn around a lot of losses. Even after Obama was reelected and started to melt down with Obamacare and the budget and Iran, we found ourselves still having to fight to just keep the House. The bipartisan, good governance idiots shoved through the immigration amnesty bill. We didn’t take the Senate, which was ours for the taking, and nearly lost the House. What were they thinking going against something the conservative base made absolutely clear was a deal breaker? Our people were disgusted—and rightly so—and so they stayed home. They only came back when we primaried the bastards who sold us out in 2016.
We didn’t take any chances with the good, solid conservative politicians in Congress. We buttressed the vulnerable members, which required the grassroots outreach that the overpaid GOP consultants hated but we excelled at. Once we cleared out the squishes, we were then able to go after vulnerable Democrats ruthlessly. The Obamacare fiasco had created a lot of vulnerable Democrats, and it was the gift that kept on giving as new problems arose year after year.
Most Democrats came from districts much more conservative than Washington, DC, is, and that bipolar activity made them vulnerable even before parroting the president’s lies turned them into liars too. We started early, recruited solid candidates—preferably ones that were bright enough not to spout off about rape—and took the fight to the enemy. The 2018 election wins that mirrored 2010 built on years of hard work and started setting the stage for eventual victory.
Chapter Three: Reaching Out
“We Were Selling What Young People Loved and Progressives Hated—Freedom”
There was always a huge tension on the right between two factions. The more cautious, moderate faction became the establishment and, to the constitutional conservatives, it was distinguished by its acceptance of the premises—and the perks—of power. In the eyes of the rebels, the establishment conservatives went on tedious Sunday morning talk shows like Meet the Press, circulated through Georgetown cocktail parties, and plotted with progressives in the guise of “bipartisanship.” In response, the establishment was barely able to hide its contempt for the rebels and failed to see that the “sit down, shut up and vote for whoever we pick for you” attitude was fueling the fire.
The constitutional conservatives were the only place people with any libertarian ideas could go, as the establishment rejected them outright. That led to a critical mass of libertarian impulses among the constitutional conservatives, who rapidly discovered that if they wanted to succeed they needed to avoid picking fights with their new allies over the small issues. Libertarianism presented an ideology that made papering over these very real differences intellectually coherent. It also opened up the ability to attract young, tech-savvy voters alienated by progressivism’s economic failure and tyrannical impulses.
Then there were the immigrants. The immigration issue was enormous in the first two decades of the century, with progressives partnering with establishment conservatives to pass a “reform” that essentially opened the floodgates to low-skill immigrants who were expected to vote reliably Democratic—while nearly destroying the Republican Party. After conservatives took over the reins of power in the mid-2020s, they made what was widely seen as one of their biggest errors, repealing the “pathway to citizenship” that millions were already on. The immigrant issue had always been difficult for conservatives, but while many immigrants viewed the insurgency as a threat to themselves, others embraced it.
And, of course, Hillary Clinton’s abandonment of Israel in its time of need made many formerly liberal Jews reconsider the constitutional conservatives.
The libertarian and minority outreach effort was a success, but the immigration outreach failed. The consequences of each attempt still reverberate today—and will continue to do so in the future.
* * *
Tamara Hayes Smith (Professor/Activist)
One thing the establishment never understood was the libertarian impulse that surged through the constitutional conservative movement. GOP establishment figures were as much a part of the “big government” mindset as their liberal comrades—they could not conceive of any other paradigm. This led them, in many cases, to feel more at home with liberals than with members of their own party. And that mindset also kept away a substantial number of libertarians who were repelled by the GOP’s intermittent embrace of big government solutions. It took years to undo the damage George Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” which was really just a rela
beled progressive republicanism, caused with libertarians.
* * *
Tony “Gator” McCoy (Chief Advisor to President Carrie Marlowe)
Gator is on his fourth beer and it’s not even noon. The sun is up and the Florida humidity is getting to me. I finally accept a Coors and let the campaign legend ramble on.
There was already one big outside group that was largely on our side, or at least gettable. The problem was that with all the conflict over our relatively few areas of disagreement, it was hard to see it. It was the libertarians. These folks not only shared many of our core values but also—if they were actual libertarians, and some weren’t—had huge issues with the soulless slide to fascism with the progressive status quo.
“If” was the operative word because many people who called themselves “libertarian” had the “lib” syllable down really well, but the appropriate suffix was “-eral” rather than “-ertarian.”
If you thought you were a libertarian and you spent all of your time worrying about TV preachers banning masturbation and zero time about free enterprise getting strangled, you were not a libertarian. You were a liberal, and you probably needed to get a girlfriend.
Then there were the crazy libertarians, who looked sane and could hold up a conversation until they slipped in their worries about “chemtrails” and then moved on to telling you that their Ford wouldn’t start and it was probably the fault of the neo-cons.
“Neo-cons” meant “Jews,” and those kinds of libertarians were against them. So my feeling was that they could kiss our collective ass. I wasn’t wasting any time on them.
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