by Matt Kibbe
One thing is certain: things will never go back to the way they were before. The system has been democratized in ways that Thomas Jefferson could only dream of in 1776. “There are practical explanations for why both party establishments have undergone some version of this same devolution,” writes Bai. “The most important, and most obvious, is the proliferation of broadband Internet and the way it has redefined, within the space of just a few years, the very concept of a political movement.” The hurly-burly of millions of people seeking information, connecting with one another, organizing groups of never-met-before cyber-brothers and cyber-sisters who share facts and correct the record, countless times daily.
This beautiful chaos is an emergent order that creates “a right to knowledge.” But “knowledge” is a negative right, like “the pursuit of happiness.” You are free to seek information, to hold elected officials to account, to fact-check, and to know new things unencumbered by some top-down government bureaucracy that would block your pursuit. But no one is going to do it for you. No one is going to deliver to your door, as an entitlement, a positive right, the knowledge you need to participate in this new democratized, disintermediated world of politics.
That’s up to you. Government will go to those who bother to show up.
You are in charge. For the first time in recent memory, the American people are poised to enact change from the ground up, in response to their own feelings and desires, not those that have been crafted and force-fed by political parties. The political status quo has enjoyed incredible stability. Past political movements like the Reagan Revolution relied on the system itself to enact change, and in the years since, many of Reagan’s accomplishments have been slowly rolled back.
As for Alexander the Great, the empire could not survive the death of its creator; the generals, freed from the hypnotic power of their leader, ran amok. The same is true of the Republican Revolution in 1994—another example of reform from within the system, managed by the system, and ultimately controlled (and lost) by the system. A good effort that was ultimately doomed to fail. In 2006 and 2008, the Left tried to send “agents of change” to Washington, but ended up getting more of the same.
But real change isn’t really about political power anyway. Political power corrupts and unchecked political power disappoints absolutely. It’s about the paradigm shift, from the top-down to the bottom-up. Real impact, if and when it manifests itself, will be from sustainable, ever-present pressure from the bottom up, to do things differently in Washington, D.C. Different than they’ve been done in the past.
The power of our community, what sets us apart, is back home: neighbor to neighbor, street by street, town by town, district by district. Think nationally, act locally.
The genie is out of the bottle. The toothpaste won’t go back in the tube. As much as incumbent CEOs might try, there is no returning to the old politics of closed systems. The hostility and disdain with which the establishment attacks is just a reflex, like the headless chicken that keeps running. They think things can go back to the way they were before. But they won’t. Just ask former president-for-life Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia. Or ask former House Budget Committee chairman John Spratt of South Carolina. A hostile takeover, by the people, replaced both through the power of information and decentralized social media, and through a willingness of the human spirit to say, “Enough!”
The liberalization of political markets through easy-to-access information and social media—and the narrowing of the gap between concentrated benefits and dispersed costs via the Internet—has fundamentally changed politics forever. If you believe in freedom and government accountability, then this is a fundamentally good thing for the human condition and poses a fundamental threat to tyrannical government. Information is power. Social media like Facebook and Twitter have had this effect because these networking tools eliminate the middleman—in most cases, the government bureaucrat—and we should jealously guard political conversations that are intermediary-free.
FREEDOM IS OUR STRATEGY
FOR ALL THE HYPE ABOUT THE OBAMA MACHINE AND THE TAKEOVER of the Democratic establishment, I don’t think that the contemporary Left has a real grasp of the implications of political disintermediation. The problem for them is that you can’t ever really control, from the top down, spontaneously organizing social movements. You can’t outadjust markets; you can’t outprice the price system. You can never know as much as can be known through the process of discovery and adjustment to change that produces “a greater social intelligence.” And you can’t outorganize, from the top down, what people might do of their own free will, toward a set of goals based on a set of values determined by them, not you, the government official.
Left free, people can accomplish great things, working together on a voluntary, value-for-value basis. Not free, they will seek, like water finding its own level, any opportunity to break their bonds.
This is the dilemma confronted by the coalition that elected Obama in 2008. This is why Van Jones, former Obama green jobs czar, is spending so much time studying what Tea Partiers did to outorganize the community organizers in the 2010 elections. The assumption of Plouffe and others involved in Organizing for Obama was that you needed a leader, someone at the top of a hierarchy. Progressives, it seems, pine for leaders. According to Jones:
So we had Obama the meta-brand, and then we all affiliated to it. And that’s why 2008 felt so great. You know why? Because you didn’t have to quit your labor union to be a part of this meta-brand. You didn’t have to leave your lesbian rights group to be a part. You got to keep everything you ever had, you got to keep your identity, everything you were passionate about. You could still put on that baseball cap and be a part of something bigger: That’s a meta-brand. And we thought “Well, you could only do that if you got a presidential candidate.”23
But the Tea Party emerged as a leaderless movement, and changed everything. Tea Party 2.0, the spontaneous evolution of the movement into a Get Out the Vote machine, was unexpected by just about everyone, simply because such a thing had never happened before. It was a fundamentally bigger step toward the disintermediation of politics than anything the Obama machine had built in 2008.
“We can no longer rely on a single charismatic individual,” says Van Jones, referring to their now tarnished political messiah of hope and change. Why? Because “people let you down.”
But principles are enduring. And values are enduring. And it’s time for us not to just have a charismatic leader, but a charismatic network. That’s the genius of the Tea Party. They have charismatic leaders . . . of a certain kind. But if Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck and Dick Armey had a press conference tomorrow and said, “The Tea Party is over,” it wouldn’t be over. Because the values and the network wouldn’t let it. They built a starfish and not a spider, and that is the next challenge for our movement.24
Ultimately, Van Jones won’t get it right, because he doesn’t comprehend how freedom works. He was a czar, after all, hardwired to assume that someone else—namely himself—is better suited to make decisions than free people choosing for themselves. He doesn’t understand how millions of people located in disparate places—each individual with unique knowledge of their community and circumstances—can voluntarily cooperate and coordinate plans to create something far greater and more valued than any individual could have done alone.
This is the miracle of the market, what Hayek called the spontaneous order. The basis of Hayek’s critique of central government planning and Keynesian attempts to “stimulate” the economy through new spending is this understanding of the market process of discovery. Even the most benevolent czar or the smartest bureaucrat rationing health care on the Independent Payment Advisory Board in the bowels of the Department of Health and Human Services could not possibly know better than free people acting to better themselves and their communities.
“Spontaneous order” equally describes the emergence and power of the citizen protest ag
ainst big government that we now commonly refer to as the Tea Party. Tea Party values are based on a fundamental belief in freedom, and so is our strategy. There is no leader; no one is in charge. Our movement is fueled by the decentralization of information on the Internet and the ease of connecting with like-minded citizens through social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter, and FreedomConnector. We have evolved, spontaneously, from a protest movement to a GOTV machine. No one knows exactly what is next, but there can be little doubt that the Tea Party is now one of the most important nonviolent social movements in American history.
The future now depends on a continued commitment to the ethos of decentralization, the idea that even in politics, the customer is always right. Intermediaries, be they politicians or organizations like FreedomWorks, exist only as servants to this cause. Do what you say you will do. Add value. Don’t take credit for work that someone else performs. Don’t hurt other people and don’t take their stuff. These are values that defined America’s founding. They can define our future, too.
Too many worry about the limits of decentralization—that eventually the whole leaderless bubble will pop—and the elite will reassert their centralized control. But the best way to beat the entrenched looters and moochers, the powerful public employees unions and the billionaire progressive elites clamoring to spend your paycheck on their grand designs, is by fully embracing the beautiful chaos of this citizen revolt against big government. That’s how we have accomplished so much in such a short period of time, and it is the only practical way that we will ever beat the well-financed special interests that comprise the big government coalition.
If we try to match them toe to toe, dollar for dollar; if we fight them on their field, with their referees and their rules; if we concede the eventuality of our own grassroots demise and look for someone else’s “support” and “know-how,” we will lose. But, as we have seen again and again, the Left intrinsically believes in order from the top down. They believe someone needs to be in charge: a czar, a better benevolent bureaucrat who knows better than you do, a messiah who will heal the planet with a global plan. They can’t help but build hierarchical structures, because that’s what they believe in. This is our strategic window. Embrace the beautiful chaos of citizen action and, by our own movement’s success, prove that freedom works.
CHAPTER 14
THE REVOLUTION WILL BE CHOSEN
Don’t follow leaders. Watch the parking meters.
—Bob Dylan
“WHERE IS THE NEXT RONALD REAGAN?” IT SEEMS THAT A DAY CANNOT pass without someone, deeply concerned for the future of our country, asking me the question. The Next Ronald Reagan serves as a conceptual proxy for a jumble of aspirations, but when someone poses the question, they are likely on a personal quest to find a better president than the one we have now—someone principled, who can take charge and fix things in Washington, D.C.
Are you looking for the next Reagan? Finding that guy is the Holy Grail of American politics. In your search, you will quickly discover that virtually every politician fashions himself or herself, at one time or another, as The Guy. A quick Google search reveals that virtually every potential political challenger to the sitting president is, it is hoped, the “Next Ronald Reagan.” In 2008, Fred Thompson was supposed to be The Guy. Mitt Romney may turn out to be in 2012, according to some. Bobby Jindal, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Chris Christie, and Herman Cain have all been, at one time or another, heir apparent to the NRR title.
According to the Huffington Post, the real Next Ronald Reagan isn’t even a Republican; it’s Stephen Colbert. The popular Comedy Central host, argues Jordan Zakarin, clearly has what it takes:
A mildly successful actor who spent years researching and refining his political beliefs, he reached a new level of fame and success after beginning a career of frequent, thinly-veiled activist speeches on the dime of a major corporation. During a time of national upheaval, he decided to take the next step, launching a campaign for office predicated on disciplining young protesters and preserving states’ rights to curtail progressive social progress.
Stripped of specific details, the political beginnings of Ronald Reagan and Stephen Colbert are remarkably interchangeable.1
Even Barack Obama, whose conviction that history holds a special place for his presidency seemingly knows no bounds, sometimes sees himself as the next Reagan. “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” candidate Obama told the Reno Gazette-Journal in early 2008.
He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. They felt like with all the excesses of the 60s and the 70s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think he tapped into what people were already feeling. Which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.2
Admit it. You, or someone in your family, or one of your dearest friends, voted for Barack Obama, wanting to believe the sales pitch. Everybody wanted to believe the unbelievable when the young, good-looking, half-a-term senator from Illinois told us, “I want to make government cool again.”3 No one particularly knew what that even meant, but we didn’t dig too deep beneath the surface to figure it out, because it sounded like a step up from the Bush years. And we were desperate. We hoped against history that Obama meant it when he promised to kink the fire hose of new spending and impose accountability on the insiders in Washington. “The only way you can control [the out-of-control spending],” he said while soliciting your vote, “is if there is some sense of shame and accountability. The more we increase accountability the more we reduce the special interests in Washington.”
He sounded like the next Ronald Reagan, for sure.
WHAT WOULD GEORGE WASHINGTON DO?
WHY DO WE, IN THIS DAY AND AGE, KEEP LOOKING TO A BETTER CHIEF executive officer to solve our problems for us? We keep pursuing the quixotic hunt for a better benevolent dictator, hoping for change that we know can never come from the top down. Who is elected president matters, no question about it, but we will never restore liberty and the proper limits of government in America through a more “enlightened” implementation of the expanded powers, real and contrived, of the executive branch of government.
Isn’t top-down executive power exactly what the Sons of Liberty were fighting against in 1773?
Americans have always jealously guarded against the natural urge of those in power, and those in cahoots with those in power, to seize our liberties. It’s encoded in our moral DNA. “The ideology of the Revolution, derived from many sources, was dominated by a peculiar strand of British political thought,” writes historian Bernard Bailyn in his seminal work, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. “It was a cluster of convictions focused on the effort to free the individual from the tyranny of the state. But the spokesmen of the Revolution—the pamphleteers, essayists, and miscellaneous commentators—were not philosophers and they did not form a detached intelligentsia.”4
In other words, the values and principles of our founding spontaneously came from, and were defended by, the people for the people. From the bottom up.
No one understood this better than our first president, who was a humble embodiment of the uniquely American ethos of bottom-up governance by the people. Time after time, George Washington would resist the temptations of more centralized authority centered in the executive branch of the federal government. He is reported to have turned down requests by members of his own army that he become king of America. Instead, he voluntarily resigned his commission as commander-in-chief. According to historian Paul Johnson, no one was more surprised by Washington’s decision than King George III. When told by American painter Benjamin West that Washington would “return to his farm,” the British emperor was incredulous. “If he does that,” said George, “he will be the great
est man in the world.”5
Washington strongly resisted serving a second term as president of the United States. He finally refused a third term, declining to run for office in an open letter to the American people, what became known as his Farewell Address, first published in the American Daily Advertiser on September 19, 1786. His final missive reflected his belief that the people should be eternally wary of encroachments in the exercise of power by the branches of government:
It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositaries, and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern; some of them in our country and under our own eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them.6
Washington worried about conflict between opposing political parties; what he did not anticipate was their collusion, together, in a bipartisan fashion, to expand the power of government beyond the bounds of the Constitution. But he was particularly aware of the threat that the “spirit of encroachment” and the consolidation of power would lead to “a real despotism.”