Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government's Stranglehold on America

by Matt Kibbe

  Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

  These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty.8

  Barlow’s declaration became a manifesto of sorts for cyberlibertarians who believed that the spontaneous spread of information could create, in Barlow’s words, “a right to know.” The liberating forces of knowing, at diminishing marginal cost to the end user, had implications for individual freedom, politics, and the functioning of democracy. Beyond even Barlow’s futuristic optimism, the free flow of information online was breaking down barriers and leveling the playing field between mere citizens and the insiders who had always exploited special access to information to fix the game, concentrate benefits for a select few, and disperse costs outside the walls of the establishment.

  In a 2008 speech before the Icelandic Digital Freedom Society’s conference in Reykjavik, Barlow anticipated the coming clash between bottom-up freedom and top-down control in the name of intellectual property.9 He quotes Jefferson, the radical democrat, from an 1813 letter to Isaac McPherson:

  If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.10

  Only too much meddling and rearranging by government could imperil the potential of the Internet to liberate information and knowledge and the decentralized spirit of the American idea.

  Barlow’s cyberspace declaration of ’96 also portended—sixteen years after it was posted—an important tipping of the insiders’ apple cart and a disruption in the collusive and symbiotic relationship between big government and big business. An attempt to give the federal government sweeping discretionary control over content on the Internet through the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA)managed to bring grassroots forces from across the political spectrum together against this Washington power grab.11 Adding to the drama, the legislative bum’s rush on Internet freedom had been orchestrated by a trifecta of powerful Washington insiders: Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy (PIPA), Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Lamar Smith (SOPA), and disgraced senator-turned-über-lobbyist Chris Dodd, now head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). That’s right, that Senator Dodd, who once received a sweetheart mortgage deal from Countrywide Financial and who, once outed, ignominiously retired in 2010 rather than face voters looking to hold him accountable for the Dodd/Countrywide/housing bubble nexus.

  Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute argues that these proposed bills would have put government bureaucrats into a new and dominant position to control online speech, not just blocking legitimate free speech and undermining the inherent openness of the Internet. “The practical effect of SOPA,” Sanchez says, “will be to create an architecture for censorship—both legal and technological—that will radically alter the costs [to government] of engaging in future censorship unrelated to piracy or counterfeiting.”12

  Micah Sifry with Personal Democracy Media argues that the opposition coalition of interests and activists that coalesced is something new, representing a shift from traditional defense of parochial interest politics to something broader and bigger. “[T]he bills have backfired on Hollywood, fostering the emergence of a significant new force: a civic-business alliance to defend the freedom of online speech and sharing and to protect the basic values and structure of the open Internet . . . This is the first time,” he says, “we’ve seen a wave of nonprofit and for-profit sites that exist primarily to serve their users openly choose to use their platforms to interrupt their users—without asking for permission—and implore them to take a stand.”13

  According to Talking Points Memo, every bit as left-leaning and progressive as Sifry and PDM, “The clearest turning point was surely ‘Blackout Day,’ Wednesday, January 18, [2012] which saw coordinated online protests by upwards of an estimated 115,000 websites, coupled with physical protests by hundreds on the ground in five cities. Throughout the day, 19 senators and numerous other representatives—many of them Republicans—came out in opposition to SOPA and PIPA or renounced their former support for the bills.”14

  In case anyone was missing the point—the potential for this government power grab to create the essential architecture to censor political speech—Senator Mike Lee tweeted the following on January 18: “Here are my thoughts on #SOPA #PIPA: Xl xxxxx xx xxxxxx xxxxxxxxx ://ow.ly/8ynx4 Please RT to fxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx Internet.”15

  What’s interesting about this is the strange bedfellows who united against the establishment’s coalition of insiders. Against SOPA and PIPA was everyone from presidential candidate Ron Paul (and eventually, all Republican candidates for president in a January 2012 South Carolina debate hosted by CNN), Senator Rand Paul, RedState, and FreedomWorks to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Talking Points Memo, Personal Democracy Media, Google, and Wikipedia, to name just a few. Even the diametrically opposed groups MoveOn.org (for the Left) and the National Taxpayers Union (for the Right) were against it. Without hyperbole, it was the greatest display of nonpartisanship in Washington since September 11, 2001.

  Dodd, who was not “lobbying,” because he is still legally prohibited from doing so, proffered something far more blatant than the mutually beneficial payoffs between Big Labor and the health care czars of the Obama administration.

  “Candidly, those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake,” Dodd pronounced on Fox News. “Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake. . . . I would caution people don’t make the assumption that because the quote ‘Hollywood community’ has been historically supportive of Democrats, which they have, don’t make the false assumptions this year that because we did it in years past, we will do it this year.”16

  We sent our “quid,” Dodd was saying. Lots and lots of quid, in fact. Where’s my “quo”?

  Usually, such threats are delivered with a modicum of subtlety and panache. You just don’t discuss political bribery in public like that; it’s really not polite. Save it for the back rooms. But Hollywood insiders were caught flat-footed, flummoxed because their major investment in politics was not paying the proper financial returns. And Dodd—the epitome of Washington insiderdom if there ever was one—couldn’t contain his frustration. At least he was honest.

  HOPE AND CHANGE

  OF COURSE, THIS WAS NOT THE FIRST TIME THAT THE INTERNET HAD disintermediated legislative horse-trading and disrupted
the comfortable relationship between committee chairmen and rent-seekers out to protect or grow their share at someone else’s expense. It happened when grassroots America defeated Nancy Pelosi’s first TARP bill, in 2008. It was happening with more and more frequency throughout the Obama administration, forcing a monumental clash between the regular pathways of legislative fixes crafted behind closed doors and the new transparency and “the right to know” inherent in the decentralized nature of the Internet.

  In reality, it was as much about the rushed, secretive, and cobbled-together nature of the Obama stimulus boondoggle, which generated such a visceral grassroots response among fledgling Tea Partiers. The same was true with Obamacare, a massive undertaking that sought to redesign one-sixth of the American economy, all before the August recess. It seemed like they were jamming it through—hiding something—because they were in fact jamming it through in order to hide something from the public.

  The onslaught of grassroots activist opposition to these big-government power grabs in early 2009 caught Team Obama totally by surprise, just as flat-footed as Big Hollywood’s Chris Dodd. People caught off guard often say dumb things, because they never plan to be asked questions like the one asked by disillusioned Obamanista Lydia DePillis by the New Republic on October 29, 2009: “What happened to Obama’s massive network of grassroots activists?”17

  “It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” wrote DePillis. “The reason was Organizing for America [OFA]. Last year, after winning the presidency, Obama decided to keep intact the backbone of his stunningly efficient, innovative campaign. . . . OFA was supposed to be a new kind of permanent campaign: a grassroots network wielding some 13 million e-mail addresses to mobilize former volunteers on behalf of the administration’s agenda (and keep them engaged for 2012).”

  Frustrated and panicked, the response of partisans in and around the Obama administration was to attack the motives of the Tea Party. They were racist! They were angry! They were domestic terrorists! The name-calling was a Saul Alinsky–inspired diversionary tactic, but it only thinly veiled an internal debate among the newly triumphant axis of the mainstream media, the progressive movement, and the Democratic political establishment. Obama had toppled the Democrats’ establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton, by rewriting the rules of politics, replacing top-down money bundlers and paid media consultants with a whole new, bottom-up grassroots political machine. Right?

  The reality of Organizing for Obama (OFO) was a mixed bag, part bottom-up and part top-down. Clearly it was more decentralized than the McCain campaign, which was seemingly indistinguishable from Bob Dole’s failed 1996 effort. It is true that the Obama campaign took a fundamentally different strategic tack by fighting in more states, not just the big prizes like California. The slow accumulation of delegates in caucus states, favorable territory for the motivated grassroots troops of OFO, proved to be an essential tactic for the Obama campaign, allowing the candidate to eke out victory before the Democratic National Convention. OFO’s formidable e-mail database allowed the campaign, to a certain extent, to end-run the Democratic establishment’s bundlers, who were by and large standing with Hillary and Bill Clinton. But, as it turns out, the decentralized nature of the Obama campaign was much more about optics and message.

  Was the actual campaign structure bottom-up? The campaign was still about a single charismatic leader, and the grassroots activists were still tightly controlled from Obama headquarters. “The truth is that Obama was never nearly as free of dependence on big money donors as the reporting suggested, nor was his movement as bottom-up or people-centric as his marketing implied,” argues Micah Sifry in a must-read post on TechPresident. “And this is the big story of 2009, if you ask me, the meta-story of what did, and didn’t happen, in the first year of Obama’s administration.”18

  Why didn’t the grassroots machinery of the Obama campaign sustain itself after President Obama was sworn into office? “The answer, ultimately,” says Sifry, “is that [Obama campaign manager David] Plouffe and the rest of Obama’s leadership team, wasn’t really interested in grassroots empowerment. Instead, they think they’ve invented a 21st century version of list-building, and to some degree they’re right.” To prove his point, Sifry quotes directly from Plouffe’s book The Audacity to Win:

  Our e-mail list had reached 13 million people. We had essentially created our own television network, only better, because we communicated with no filter to what would amount to about 20 percent of the total number of votes we would need to win. . . . And those supporters would share our positive message or response to an attack, whether through orchestrated campaign activity like door-knocking or phone calling or just in conversations they had each day with friends, family, and colleagues.19

  Plouffe ultimately wanted control of every aspect of the campaign, and the need to run things from the top ultimately undermines decentralized networks, whether the spontaneous emergence of knowledge, the dissemination of information online, or local grassroots organization. “We wanted control of our advertising, and most important, we wanted control of our field operation,” says Plouffe of the Obama campaign. “We did not want to outsource these millions of people, and these hundreds of thousands of full-time volunteers to the DNC or any other entity.”20

  In other words, the Obama campaign wanted to control things, from the top down. Progressive politics, like progressive solutions to economic and social problems, is always that way. Political power and the freedom to let things emerge, by choice, just don’t seem to mix. But they also were smart about it. Plouffe and the rest of the Obama brain trust knew what was happening out there. They knew the popularity of social networks. They knew people wanted to believe they were in control. Most of all, they knew that Obama’s appeal as a candidate could not stand on Obama’s accomplishments as a politician. Obama needed something else: And that something else was the appearance that Obama was the candidate of the people.

  It was an illusion.

  This is the cognitive dissonance on the Left that I will simply never grasp. Government power must be checked, strictly limited, as Jefferson and Madison insisted, or it will always end up getting in lines of business you never intended it to get into, like censoring speech on the Internet. Centralized health care and centralized education must always lead to less individual autonomy, less freedom. More government is just about less of everything else. It is not possible for the federal government to take over one-sixth of the economy without the undue influence of interests who have something to gain (and much to lose). The loser will always be the least connected among us, the ones with the least pull, in this particular case the patient most in need of a functioning health care system that treats patients individually, not special interests collectively.

  CULTURE CLASH

  HISTORICALLY, THERE IS A BOOM AND BUST IN POLITICS. THE DEMOCRATS who held control of the House of Representative uninterrupted for forty years were thrown out by Republicans in 1994, who were, in turn, turned out in 2006. Political fortunes rise and fall. The media seems to expect this to happen to the Tea Party as well. And it may. But the problem with this narrative is that it has failed as a predictive model for explaining the future behavior of the Tea Party, which hasn’t ebbed with the natural flow of the political cycle.

  The Tea Party was supposed to disappear after the 800-plus Tax Day rallies on April 15, 2009. It was supposed to dissipate after the passage of Obamacare in 2010. “The air is out of the tea party balloon,” said one DNC operative on March 16, 2010. “Today’s dismal showing on Capitol Hill coupled with the turnout we’re seeing at health reform rallies across the country where supporters are outnumbering opponents by three to one and four to one clearly demonstrates that the momentum is squarely on the side of those who support reform.”21 Grassroots opposition to legislation could not translate into an effective GOTV machine, everyone predicted.

  But, like a community trying to solve a problem, the Tea Party continued to evolve, reflecting changing circumstanc
es, different challenges, and the inevitable momentum of an organic movement that is not directed by any single mind.

  We no longer have to gather in D.C. en masse to get the establishment’s attention. We did that in 2009, with more than a million activists choosing to squeeze their family budget and put aside, for a few days, the obligations of everyday life. But remember Saul Alinsky’s seventh “rule for radicals”: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” It wouldn’t make sense to gather en masse in D.C. anymore. We’re beyond that.

  Protesters protest because they have no better avenue to vent their dissatisfaction with the status quo.

  “Tea Party activists who were protesting outside their Statehouses two years ago have now grown more sophisticated,” writes Matt Bai. “They’re quietly organizing through social media, running local candidates and pressuring lawmakers in private meetings.” Bai is a New York Times Magazine political reporter, and author of The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics. The Democrats went through their own hostile takeover bid leading up to the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries. More recently, he wonders: “Does anybody have a grip on the G.O.P.?”22

  Bai sees some significant analogies between what happened to the Democratic Party then and the Republican Party today. There is a culture clash going on, at this moment, between the entrenched management of the Republican establishment and grassroots insurgents—both inside the legislative bodies of the House and Senate, and back home, across America.

  The question is, who will co-opt whom? Many on the elite management team hope, like former Senate majority leader Trent Lott, that the new Tea Party class and the grassroots that elected them will be absorbed into the system with as few ruffled feathers as possible. “But there is another interpretation,” argues Bai. Maybe “the movement is actually starting to alter the makeup of the party from the bottom up, and it only appears to be losing intensity because its leaders are no longer interested in shouting into bullhorns. If that’s true, and if more Tea Party members start streaming into Washington in the years head, then the next chapter of Republican politics in Washington could look less like ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ and more like ‘Attack of the Clones.’”