Conservative Insurgency: The Struggle to Take America Back 2009 - 2041

by Kurt Schlichter

  We needed a farm team. We needed future leaders. And those jobs were the farm team. That’s where the next generation of conservative leaders, the ones coming up who just got elected with President-Elect Patel, started learning the craft of politics. That’s where they got training, built networks, made contacts and, critically, make mistakes. In 2012, we lost two Senate seats because the geniuses running screwed up. They were right on the issues, and much better than their opponents, but they were stupid and they made mistakes.

  If you are going to disqualify yourself from future office because you are too damn stupid not to refuse to offer your moronic opinions about rape, I think it’s safe to say we’d all have preferred that you did it a campaign for a place on the 23rd Iowa Sewer and Utilities District than when running for the seat that determined who controls the Senate.

  And let’s not forget the Republican Party offices, the chairmen and committeemen and others who actually had a lot to do both locally and at the state level. I remember one of them telling me how he was outnumbered 85% Democrat to 15% Republican in his district and next telling me how he had been the party chair in that district for the last 15 years. It was time for some new blood. We were the transfusion.

  Very few people thought about these intra-party jobs, which made them vulnerable. They were just kind of handed to the same people over and over because they kept showing up over and over at the selection meetings. And the sleepy timeservers who usually held them were often squishes who wanted people like us to shut-up, fall in line, volunteer and write checks, no questions asked. No one really ever challenged them, so they just continued on down the same path of mediocrity and failure, more concerned with retaining their titles and perks than kicking liberal ass.

  In case you misunderstood my point so far, I’m here to kick liberal ass.

  Their complacency made them vulnerable to focused, dedicated challengers who could assemble a voting bloc of constitutional conservatives that would sweep the sparsely-attended elections for these posts. Look at the Ron Paul folks back in the first decade of the century—every election they organized and then came in and pick off a few unsuspecting local GOP structures. And those folks had it even harder than us—I mean, have you ever tried to organize libertarians?

  Whether your turf was your own social circle or whether you aimed for political office or public activism, if you wanted to take this country back from the collectivists who wanted to turn it into a warmer Sweden, then you needed to act. In the end, it all came down to you as an individual. Otherwise, forget it—there was no one else, no outside cavalry squadron that was riding in to save the day. It was all on us as individuals. All of it.

  Each of us had to figure out what we could do, and then go do it.

  * * *

  Sister Margaret Feeney (Nun/Religious Rights Activist)

  I meet the feisty Catholic sister at St. Bart’s Hall, the food kitchen for the down and out that she has run in Seattle for decades. She pitches in with dishes after the lunch meal, joining the recipients who “pay” for their food by helping to clean up afterward. She is a tiny woman, much smaller than she seemed on television twenty years ago when she was one of the most public faces of the struggle against the religious bigotry of the left, but she still seems young even though she is in her seventies.

  It was the Obama and Hillary Clinton administrations’ vicious regulatory assaults on religious freedom that turned her from a quiet monastic into a media-savvy rebel. Putting away her cleaning rag and grabbing herself and her guest cups of hot coffee, she sits at one of the long benches in the hall and begins.

  I was not interested in politics. All I wanted to do was express God’s love through helping people. I feel that’s why I was called to the Church and to the sisterhood in the first place. As things got worse in the country, I tried to escape it by diving deeper into the work, but I realized that there was no way to escape. It was escape-proof by design.

  The progressive goal was to eliminate any spaces that they did not control or dominate. It was not enough that the Church tried to stay out of active politics—and it did try, hoping it would be left alone. But it could never be left alone. The progressives could not allow any alternative power centers to exist. As meek and humble as we tried to be, they could never tolerate us. They had to destroy us, and when I saw that I realized that being meek and humble was not going to do the job.

  They had to break us, to make us betray our own faith by accepting their secular premises. We had to be humiliated and forced to act contrary to our values. That was why forcing us to contribute to abortion funding was so important to them. By making us collaborate, they would break us.

  It was part and parcel of what they did throughout society. They would use discrimination laws to persecute businesses whose owners had a moral objection to gay marriage and didn’t want to participate by baking cakes or taking photos. There were plenty of bakers and photographers out there who would, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to make people bow down before them.

  They used insurance to persecute us. They wanted us to pay for abortion practices, including the so-called “morning after” pills. Well, that was absolutely against our deepest values. This made it even more important to the liberals to bend us to their will. They said we were denying women health care. Of course, if you couldn’t afford to buy your own birth control, perhaps you ought not to have been having sex.

  They went out of their way to rub our nose in the changes they were forcing on us. It was so ugly, so hateful and vindictive. They could have easily found ways to protect our consciences, but that would have been contrary to their real agenda. They wanted us on our knees before their false god: government. Well, this lady kneels to no one but the Lord!

  * * *

  Colonel Jeremy Denton, US Army (Ret.) (Insurgency Expert)

  The colonel looks more like a senior professor, albeit a very fit one. He’s very patient with me, a civilian, as he explains to me—slowly—how insurgency differs from what we generally think of as warfare. It is not a battle of similar forces, like two armies with tanks and artillery clashing on a battlefield, but rather of two very different forces both in form and goal.

  An insurgency is about people. It is focused on the people. You need the people to buy in, and because insurgency is decentralized, they have to act independently. But no group of people is homogenous—you have tribes or clans or other groups, many of whom hate each other, but to beat the establishment they have to come together somehow. So, you need the people—regular people—involved, and you need them to work with others they might not normally associate with.

  This is a key point about insurgency—unlike traditional warfare, it doesn’t focus on enemy forces or on terrain. It focuses on the populace. Insurgency theory is a very detailed subject, but simply understand that to the insurgent, the hearts and minds of the population is not the only part of the battlespace, but it’s the most important part.

  This is key. The conservative insurgency sought to win not just terrain—think of that in terms of institutions and social spaces like academia, the media, and political offices—or to defeat enemy forces like specific politicians and leftist activists. It sought to win over the people to constitutional conservatism.

  Our end state was not just a government run by constitutional conservatives, nor even a media, entertainment industry, and academia where conservatives could compete, but an American citizenry that once again wholeheartedly embraced constitutional conservatism. That generally meant reestablishing the cultural norm of personal responsibility as opposed to entitlement, and reinforcing the understanding that individual autonomy takes precedence over government power.

  If we didn’t win over the people to those concepts, then our victories would just be transitory. The next election could see our progress wiped out. Instead of having the Thirty-Second Amendment, we’d still be fighting about government handouts. But because we won the people over, because we changed minds about
not just what government should do but what people were expected to do to support themselves, the argument about personal responsibility is over.

  In the end, the conservative insurgency was about truly fundamental change—or, perhaps more accurately, fundamental change back.

  Without that change, sometimes we could have a solid conservative president, sometimes not. That’s not good enough. We always want a constitutional conservative president, so we wanted the mainstream political spectrum to stop on the left end well before we got to liberalism, much less socialism.

  That was the real goal of our movement, even if no one put it into those words at the beginning. But that’s no surprise that we didn’t articulate out goals precisely. Most insurgencies don’t start off with a well-thought-out plan. Most start out like ours—a bunch of people angry at the status quo who start acting independently.

  The conservative insurgency centered on a few key principles.

  First was decentralization. We weren’t one single, big organization or even a cohesive movement. That was a lucky break. It would have given the other side a target. Look at what happened to the Tea Party, a model of effective decentralization initially. The Tea Party was subjected to the full force of progressive hate, from the media, academia, Hollywood, and politicians. The Obama and Clinton administrations even used the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Election Commission, and other government agencies to attack it. Remember how they persecuted any organization with “Tea Party” in the name? And soon there was no more Tea Party, yet there were still millions of us who were part of the movement it represented and were still active even if fewer people wore the label.

  Our opponents were fighting a phantom—there was no there there, which is why all their hate and anger and effort came to nothing. There was no “Tea Party” to crush. We didn’t give them anything to destroy, so they couldn’t destroy it.

  Next was the principle of individual effort. A decentralized organization means there is no one telling individuals where to go and what to do. In the Army, the bureaucracy decides your military occupational specialty and off you go. The needs of the whole organization matter, not your desires or talents. If the Army needs you in the infantry, you go in the infantry even if you always dreamed of being in military intelligence.

  But in the conservative movement, you could do what you wanted, contributing in your own way, supporting conservatism as you followed your own desires. Artists made art. Writers wrote. Businesspeople did business. But they all did it with an eye toward expanding constitutional conservatism.

  Let’s take one industry as an example, the movie industry. By the 2010s, liberals went into the movie industry to meet girls or guys and make money, and if they could promote liberalism too, that was fine. Liberal ideology was no longer a motivating force. It was burned out, more of a default setting than anything else.

  But conservatives started going into the movie industry to meet girls or guys and make money, but also to consciously promote conservatism. And the same with reporters and professors and government officials and so on. We were a force of individual insurgents, all operating at our maximum effectiveness, independently, whose collective efforts led to victory over time.

  We needed a political consciousness. Insurgents must have an ideology or they are useless. They just won’t undergo the hardships they need to over the extended time periods they must endure them if they aren’t committed to something more than just their petty personal interests. Ten men who believe in something are the match of a hundred who are just drawing a paycheck. We believed, but the failure of Obama and later Hillary meant that the liberals no longer did. It was all a lie to them; liberals repeated the words but they didn’t believe them. They just wanted to maintain their power and position. This was a huge advantage to us.

  We promoted and reinforced our constitutional conservative beliefs and values, and they kept us going all the way to victory. Remember, we always had to keep in mind that thanks to the progressive threat, everything we did—from having a family to working a job to simply living conservative values—had become a political act.

  No, we didn’t ask for the personal to become political, but it did and it still is. Maybe now that we have banished the pathology of progressivism from our body politic we can go back to normal someday. I hope so.

  We had to learn to attack where the progressives were most vulnerable. An insurgent does not waste his efforts putting his strength against the counterinsurgent’s strength. He finds the enemy’s weakness and masses his power against that weakness so to maximize the effect.

  Think about a guerrilla band in the jungle, perhaps of company size, about 100 troops. Do they attack a company of the counterinsurgents? No, they hit a platoon of say 20 troops, making sure that in that one small fight the correlation of forces favors them.

  And they don’t just hit enemy forces. They swoop in and mix with the people when the counterinsurgents are gone. They find the unguarded bridge the counterinsurgents need and blow it up. They use whatever they have to make it difficult for the counterinsurgent. We needed to hit progressives where they were weak. And, as we found, they were weak all over. That’s what happens to a force that realizes that its ideology is based on lies.

  We needed to fight everywhere and in every way. This was not just a political fight. We couldn’t win without winning elections, but we couldn’t win by only winning elections. We needed to take the fight to every one of progressivism’s redoubts and sanctuaries, the places where they thought they were safe and had let their guard down.

  Academia, the media, the entertainment industry—the liberals thought that they owned them all. But technology was on the way that made their grip on the legacy means of distribution that used to mean power (the campuses, the newspapers, the movie studios, the networks) less and less relevant. We had a golden opportunity to move into their sanctuaries and clear them out, and we took it.

  While it didn’t seem like it at the time, as Obama and Hillary were tearing apart the country, in reality, time was on our side: the insurgency was not going to be over quickly. The progressives really started moving in the 1960s (or even before) and only then, a half-century later, were they truly on the cusp of realizing their nightmarish vision. They underwent a long march through our institutions and reached the summits, but there’s one thing they didn’t count on. All that marching left them exhausted, spiritually and ideologically.

  If they ever believed that their scheme was about anything more than raw power, that illusion has long since been discarded. Liberalism was a spent force as a political philosophy. The only reason it could still fight us was that it had sheer weight on us. It was ripe for defeat, and it didn’t take us half a century to make our own march back through the institutions.

  After all, they had to impose a twisted, alien ideology upon a free people. We were selling freedom to a people born hungry for it. And they could try to hide and excuse the manifest failures of their ideology for a while, but not forever—the truth was all around us, like “Going Out of Business” signs and health insurance cancellation notices. The truth was going to win out—we learned, though, that it would take some time, that we were in it for the long haul. But every day, we got stronger, and every day, they got weaker.

  As with any insurgency, we insurgents advanced in phases. David Galula’s famous book Counterinsurgency Warfare discusses the classic communist insurgency model. Phase one is to create a party; that is, an ideological infrastructure. Phase two is to form a united front, which means enlisting allies. Phase three is guerrilla warfare, actual combat, but not as equals with the counterinsurgent force. Phase four is movement warfare, fighting the counterinsurgents as equals. Phase five is the annihilation campaign, where the insurgent is now stronger and destroys the counterinsurgent in detail.

  This is not a perfect fit for how we did it in our conservative insurgency, but it’s pretty close. Through the Tea Party’s embrace of the Constitution and the existing
conservative intellectual structure of institutions and publications, we completed phase one and created our ideological infrastructure. We didn’t have a Communist Party promoting rigid orthodoxy, but constitutional conservatism did have a coherent set of values and principles and institutions to discuss, explain, and promote.

  To the extent the Republican Party tried to fit the bill, we had to take it over first. There was a lot of heartburn about that, but revolutions are always full of infighting between factions with marginal differences. Think of the GOP establishment as the Mensheviks, except wimpier and whinier and even less competent. But it was a structure, and taking it over was smarter than trying to build a third party from scratch like some people advocated.

  The united front envisioned in phase two was important. We needed allies, even ones who weren’t a hundred percent in line with our views but for whom progressivism was likewise a nightmare. Libertarians were the first to join, but there were other groups that soon did as well, like college students. Many Jewish Americans left the Democratic Party and found their way to us after Tel Aviv.

  The key was to have allies, and sometimes we had to soft-pedal or even modify peripheral policy preferences to enlist others in our cause. If we could destroy progressivism for the price of letting Bob Marley–loving potheads fire up their bongs without getting arrested, we were getting a bargain.

  Phase three was active conflict, where we used every one of our limited assets in the most effective manner possible across the entire spectrum of society to challenge the left. Over time, as we began to prevail and become stronger (and as progressivism became weaker), we could meet them on equal terms. Conservatism, not milquetoast GOP moderation, became the sole opposition.