Fighting for people doesn’t mean a massive catalog of new government programs. It does not mean occupying a park and railing against the “1 percent.” It means thinking carefully about who is in need and how their need can best be met. In some cases, such as caring for the truly poor, the right solution may well involve the government. In others—such as needy children caught in ineffective schools and entrepreneurs struggling to start businesses—the proper conservative answer is for the government to stop creating harm and get out of the way. In both cases, conservatives can and should be bold warriors for vulnerable people.
Prosperity can grow and more people can have it. We can bring more people out of deprivation, and we have a moral obligation to do it. For too long, we have ceded the notion of compassion and fairness to progressives. But now, we see more and more authentically conservative leaders like Congressman Paul Ryan, Senators Marco Rubio and Mike Lee, former governor Jeb Bush, and many others stepping forward to lead the fight for conservative social justice. They understand that if conservatives become champions of the vulnerable, the spark we set off will relight the fires of hope in a weary country.
In ethical, emotional, and electoral terms, no opportunity could be more promising than this chance to advocate for those who need our help.
Chapter 6
FROM PROTEST MOVEMENT TO SOCIAL MOVEMENT:
A Road Map for the New Right
It was the spark that set off a political insurrection.
On February 19, 2009, a CNBC commentator named Rick Santelli delivered the “rant heard ’round the world” on national television. The country was increasingly on edge as the ravages of the recession were deepening. Banks were going bust. Home values were tanking. Millions of Americans who had taken on mortgages they could not afford were choosing to simply walk away and make their upside-down mortgage someone else’s bad investment. And the Obama administration was contemplating ways to provide government-subsidized mortgage relief to everyone.
Reporting live from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Santelli turned to the traders behind him and yelled, “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors’ mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hand! President Obama, are you listening?” He then declared, off the cuff, “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing.”1
With those words, the modern Tea Party was born.
This is how rebellions often get started. Popular frustration builds and builds until someone says or does something that taps into that frustration, setting off a spark that ignites the dry chaff and creates a conflagration. In words commonly attributed to Samuel Adams, the original Tea Party organizer, “It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.” Scholars dispute whether Adams actually said this, but it certainly captures the spirit of the Tea Parties of both 1773 and 2009.
There was certainly a lot of dry chaff lying around in 2009. Only 20 percent of Americans were satisfied with the way things were going.2 We had an administration, a government, a ruling elite in Washington that many Americans believed was content with decline. And some activists believed they knew exactly what was causing decline: Politicians of both parties were growing the government grotesquely, spending money we didn’t have, bailing out irresponsible bankers and citizens, and unilaterally imposing ruinous taxes and job-killing regulations.
The Tea Party jolted conservative politics. Riding a grassroots wave, Republicans—dominated by Tea Party candidates—took back the House of Representatives in 2010.3 But the Tea Party had its biggest impact in the states, where conservatives won a higher percentage of seats in state legislatures than at any time in almost a century.
The Tea Party not only took on President Obama and the Democrats; it took on the Republican establishment. Conservative insurgents challenged sitting GOP senators and ran in open primaries against the establishment’s handpicked candidates. Some Tea Party candidates ultimately lost general elections that many thought were the GOP’s for the taking. But the Tea Party revolt succeeded in electing a host of new conservative reformers—such as Senators Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, and Pat Toomey, among others—who are still making a lasting mark on Washington.
As the Tea Party revolt moved voters at the polls, it also moved ordinary people’s minds. According to Gallup, the number of Americans who agreed with the Tea Party that “big government” is the greatest threat to the country rose from 55 percent when President Obama took office to 64 percent in 2011 and reached a record high of 72 by 2013.4 This was driven mostly by Republicans (92 percent of whom said big government was the nation’s greatest threat), but even a majority of Democrats—56 percent—agreed. Never had big government been so discredited in the minds of so many Americans. It looked like a movement that could not be stopped.
But then, in the 2012 election, came a lightning bolt: Barack Obama decisively won reelection over Mitt Romney.
Many conservatives saw this as an unthinkable turn of events just a year before, and pundits debated whether it constituted a repudiation of the Tea Party wave. Indeed, after reaching a high of 32 percent support in November 2010, support for the Tea Party dropped to just 19 percent by November 2014.5 Was that the beginning of the Tea Party’s end? Is the rebellion fated to limp on for a while until it peters out?
It depends. The Tea Party phenomenon is a case study for the conservative movement. As I will show in this chapter, the movement’s future relevance depends on whether it can shift from being a protest movement to becoming a social movement.6 And this holds lessons for the future of conservatism much more broadly.
HOW TO BUILD A SOCIAL MOVEMENT
A protest movement—a rebellion—is conceptually simple. Identify a source of misery and recruit others to join the fight against it. Whether it’s the tyranny of taxation without representation or the effects of an out-of-control government, you identify an enemy and assail it.
Rebellions are inherently oppositional. And oppositions are, by their nature, minorities. With some notable exceptions, such as those where tyrannical racial or religious minorities suppress the population, you don’t “rebel” against a minority, but against an unjust majority. Rebellions boil down to us versus them, where “they” are strong and powerful and “we” are weak but courageous.
The key to moving beyond protest and becoming a full social movement is to stop being the opposition and start being the majority. In effect, it is moving from Sam Adams to his cousin John Adams. Or think of it as moving from Boston to Philadelphia. That requires having an intentional design to becoming the majority.
Believe it or not, not everyone wants to be in the majority. Some people prefer to belong to a “remnant,” a holdout that bravely carries the truth without compromise in the face of overwhelming opposition. Intellectuals in particular love remnant status, which is why you find such weird causes on college campuses. There is something viscerally satisfying about being part of a minority that is small but right, the sole keepers of special true knowledge. But remnants are rarely responsible for wholesale political change. And since the point of the Tea Party rebellion is to stop the decline of our country, becoming a political remnant simply won’t do the trick.
There are four steps to making that transition from minority to majority and turning a protest movement into a broad-based social movement:
1. Launch a rebellion
2. Declare majoritarian values
3. Claim the moral high ground
4. Unite the country behind an agenda
The Tea Party rebellion, and the conservative grassroots it has energized, thus have some choices to make: Does it want to remain at step one, settle for 19 percent support (and falling), and become a permanent political remnant—capable of setting political brushfires, but too weak to bring about real lasting change in our nation? Or d
oes it want to make a run at majority status and build a popular social movement that changes our country forever? Do Tea Party activists want to remain little more than the guardian of fiscally conservative orthodoxy holding the Republican establishment’s feet to the fire? Or can the Tea Party become something bigger—a transformational, majoritarian force in American politics that does not simply rebel against American decline, but reverses it?
The truth is, if we want to reverse American decline, and not just rail against it, then we do in fact need a conservative majority to prevail. That requires that Tea Party patriots start thinking like a majoritarian social movement.
The good news is the Tea Party has already taken the first step. Now it must take the others. To see how it can, let’s look at examples of other rebellions that successfully transitioned into social movements and see what we can learn from their experiences.
I HAVE A DREAM
The defining social movement of the past half century is the civil rights movement.
The civil rights cause started out in the 1950s as a rebellion against racism. America fought a civil war to end slavery in America. But a century later, slavery had been replaced by institutional racism that was deeply ingrained and relatively uncontroversial in most parts of the country, including in the North. Jim Crow laws and segregation made it harder for African Americans to get a job, obtain education, start businesses, build better lives, and participate fully in American society.
The civil rights movement began with a series of brave, rebellious acts. In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus for a white person, setting off the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. In 1960, black students began a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, sparking similar sit-ins throughout the South. In 1961, Freedom Riders began riding interstate buses in mixed racial groups to challenge local laws that enforced segregated seating. They were met and beaten by members of the Ku Klux Klan. These and other acts of rebellion captured the nation’s attention and set the civil rights movement in motion.
If it had stayed in this initial rebellion phase, the civil rights movement might have burned itself out or become a remnant, like the Black Panther Party or the Nation of Islam. Instead, the leaders of the civil rights movement did something very profound. Rather than continue a perpetual rebellion against an unjust majority, they audaciously claimed that they were the ones who possessed majoritarian values.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to the language of our Founding Fathers and challenged Americans by asking why we were not living up to the ideals on which this great nation was founded. Do we not believe that all men are created equal? Don’t we hold these ideals sacred? If we do, then that’s the majority view. So why aren’t we living up to it?
King used his moment in the American spotlight—speaking at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963—not to declare unending war on racism, but rather to speak about American values.7
In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. . . .
Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children. . . . And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
With these words, the civil rights movement went from rebelling against institutions of racism to claiming majority values. Civil rights leaders argued that those institutions undercut a vision of America in which a vast majority of citizens believed. They were no longer simply saying that racism was unfair to black people. They were insisting that racism was inconsistent with majoritarian, American founding values.
A key element of majoritarian status is fighting in broad terms for people instead of fighting narrowly against particular evils. The civil rights movement shifted from fighting against racism to fighting for minorities. It fought for their right to vote. It fought for the right of black kids to attend good schools and get a decent education. And that pro-people focus attracted a host of allies to the front lines. In 1964, during the “Freedom Summer,” white students from the North came to the South to help register African Americans to vote and set up “Freedom Schools.” The schools taught subjects that southern public schools refused to cover, such as black history and constitutional rights.
All this has an immensely important twist. At the time King was proclaiming that the civil rights movement represented the values of a sweeping majority, he did not yet have actual majority support. When the March on Washington was held in August 1963, Gallup found that only 23 percent of Americans favored the march, while 42 percent did not. Even one year after Dr. King delivered his famous speech on the National Mall, just 44 percent of Americans approved of him.8 But King continued to speak for the majority, knowing that over time the majority would come his way. If you wait to begin speaking for the majority until everyone agrees, you might not ever get there.
The leaders of the civil rights movement simultaneously took the next step in building a lasting social movement, which is to grab the moral high ground. The values it claimed were not simply majoritarian; they were transcendentally right. The problem was not just that bigotry is contrary to our founding principles. Bigotry is evil. It is evil now and at all times. This broad moral claim was an appeal to natural law. Civil rights leaders were declaring: Our movement is morally in the right, and those who oppose us are morally in the wrong.
Finally, the civil rights movement began uniting the country behind the new majority. As popular support for the movement steadily grew, Congress passed with overwhelming votes a series of laws—including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (73–27 in the Senate, 289–126 in the House), the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (79–18 in the Senate, 328–74 in the House), and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (71–20 in the Senate, 250–172 in the House)—that ended legal discrimination against African Americans. By passing these laws, America was going to be better off because together as a nation, we were finally going to live up to the principles of our founding and our own Declaration of Independence.
In 1969, fully a quarter of Americans said they would not be willing to vote for an African American president. By 1999 the number had shrunk to four percent.9 And in 2009 the first African American president took the oath of office on the steps of the United States Capitol. Whether you like President Obama or not, we have achieved unity on this question.
Racism has not disappeared, but over time the civil rights movement transformed America. We went from a nation where supporters of civil rights were a minority fighting against powerful institutions to a country where the opponents of civil rights were the minority and the political fringe. Civil rights support today is majoritarian, inevitable, and utterly uncontroversial.
SOBERING UP
The civil rights movement is a profound example of how a rebellion becomes a transformational social movement. But a movement doesn’t have to be as world-historical as this. For example, con
sider Mothers Against Drunk Driving, popularly known by its acronym, MADD.10
When I was a kid in the 1970s, drunk driving was considered to be no big deal. You didn’t want to get caught doing it, but the worst part was crashing your dad’s car or running over your neighbor’s mailbox. Drunk driving didn’t make you a pariah. It was how some people routinely got home from parties.
Then, on May 3, 1980, all that began to change. Candace Lightner’s 13-year-old daughter, Cari, was walking to a church carnival in Fair Oaks, California, when she was killed by a hit-and-run driver.11 When police called Candace to tell her they had the driver in custody, they failed to even mention that he had been drunk behind the wheel. It wasn’t important enough to bring up. Only after Candace drove by the spot where her daughter had been killed and stopped to talk to some officers did she learn the truth. The driver was out on bail from another drunk driving hit-and-run. It was his fifth offense in four years.
Outraged, Candace began researching the issue. She discovered that alcohol was involved in nearly 60 percent of fatal car crashes. Thousands of kids were dying at the hands of drunk drivers. Something had to be done. So together with her friend Sue LeBrun-Green she started Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Cari’s still-decorated bedroom served as the organization’s first office.12
MADD began as a rebellion against the social attitude that condoned a dangerous activity while it was claiming lives. It could have easily ended there. After all, that’s what happened to many other, similar parental rebellions. Do you remember the 1980s movement to curb sexually explicit and violent lyrics in music? Probably not. This movement was spearheaded by Al Gore’s then wife, Tipper Gore. The group she founded, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), got attention for a while. It elicited brief pushback from some players in the music industry. Frank Zappa, my favorite rock star as a kid, testified against music labeling and called it an un-American form of censorship. Numerous artists released songs and albums mocking Gore and her labeling effort. The PMRC rebellion soon fizzled out. It had little lasting impact—as any parent can tell you who still has to quickly change the station while driving with his or her children.
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