You know who else is really, really religious? Black women. Did you see a lot of black women voting Republican? You see some doing it now, but it took work, not position papers from DC think tanks. I kept saying, “Clichés aren’t metrics, people!”
Our success came from trying to get people to join us not because of demographic factors but because they shared our constitutional conservative principles. They just didn’t always know it yet. I won campaigns because I showed them!
Jack Archer (Democratic Strategist)
The retired Democratic strategist is still bitter when he recalls how the conservatives, left with nothing but a shaky grip on the House, managed to hold off the efforts of the Democrats and their media allies to crush them by cleverly avoiding traps and keeping focused on their objectives. In contrast to his old foe Gator McCoy, Jack Archer sits alone in a New York City apartment writing up his memoirs in the hope that they might be of use for liberals hoping to take power again someday. “It’s not really an autobiography,” he notes glumly. “It’s more of a postmortem.”
I hated those bastards. The conservatives didn’t even pretend to respect their role or the processes of government. We couldn’t break their hold on the House. Their states had gerrymandered very, very effectively, so it was structurally difficult to do anyway. We tried and tried, but they kept holding on, and that totally screwed our plans. And we were so focused on their rear guard in Washington that we missed them growing out in Middle America. I mean, occasionally we’d watch a governor’s race in Colorado or Missouri for a little while, but then it’d be back to focusing on DC. What a huge mistake—they were growing like a cancer out in the states.
I’ll be honest—we tried to make them into monsters. It worked for a while. Then the damn Republicans suddenly refused to cooperate. They stopped putting the same mush-mouthed, old white guy losers in front of the cameras as the voice of the party. They coordinated their talking points so we couldn’t get any clips of backbenchers going off message. They got a bunch of conservative trial lawyers to come to DC and train their members on how to talk to people like human beings and to advocate effectively instead of make fools of themselves.
In other words, they got smart. Maybe they realized what we were doing. Maybe they figured out we were serious about making them extinct and taking the country left.
Still, after the shutdown thing at the end of 2013, we figured we’d just keep forcing them into confrontations and pummel them with our media. Yeah, it was our media—it knew what we wanted and was happy to help us. We already hung the “Tea Party” label around the conservative senators like Ted Cruz, and the media was helping to make it radioactive.
Of course, the Obamacare fiasco derailed us. I thought we were going to be finished when millions of Americans woke up to find the Democrats lied to them and they were losing their plans and their doctors. But we got another chance. If those GOP idiots hadn’t decided to push through amnesty in 2014, we would have been crushed and never restarted our momentum.
We played on their divisions in the GOP. We identified Republican moderates, and our media friends tried to get them to break ranks. They fell for it every time. There was this governor in New Jersey, Chris Christie, a big guy—he was always good for a slam on his party. Put a mic in front of his face and he’d trash the conservatives all day with a smile. We loved him. He probably could have been president, too, if he hadn’t burned all his bridges helping us. He went to Iowa and got about 4 percent of the vote. Then he did the “sensible moderate spoiler thing” and got Hillary reelected in 2020. He ended up joining the Democrats and just faded away when he stopped being useful.
But this was a serious fight. We were playing for keeps. We had this great idea about how we were just going to tear them up, wedge out the reasonable ones from the hard-core Tea Party types, and totally destroy the opposition. That’s what we were after—I know we denied it, but we wanted to eliminate any opposition. We wanted the Republican Party dead, and there were a lot of Republicans who seemed willing to go along with it. It was the conservatives who wouldn’t give up. They refused to die.
We tried to do what the damn conservatives have actually done to us today. I’m kind of sorry, you know, that we threw all the norms of collegiality and loyalty in opposition out the door, because as soon as the GOP took power it used the same tactics against us. Court packing, executive orders, eliminating the filibuster—we threw out the rules, and then the conservatives came and shoved them up our asses. And now we’re the ones who are almost extinct.
I hated those bastards.
Tamara Hayes Smith (Professor/Activist)
A Yale political science professor, Professor Smith was one of the first of the new wave of conservative academics to grudgingly receive tenure at the Ivy League schools after a combination of public opinion, alumni activism, political pressure regarding federal funding, and structural changes created by new technology forced liberal academia to diversify.
Yale is one of the few colleges to still use the “traditional method,” with resident students undertaking a four-year curriculum with entirely live professors in both lecture and seminar settings. “I am grateful I have the luxury of face-to-face interaction with students,” she says. “Few academics do anymore. They can blame economics, technology, and themselves for that.”
Her students are the cream of the crop, with the school using its endowment to pay the costs of those who can’t afford the $350,000 per year tuition and room and board costs. With the end of government student loan programs and new laws requiring schools to spend a portion of their endowments annually, both Professor Smith’s students and the school are very focused on making the most of what is, today, a rare educational opportunity.
Professor Smith’s office is plastered with campaign signs from the last three decades, a graphic lesson in history for the students who crowd in during her weekly office hours to learn from the foremost academic scholar of the constitutional conservative movement. I catch up with her as she talks to a few of them one winter afternoon.
The conservatives shook up the establishment because they came into the political process totally focused on their core beliefs, not on the perks of power, and they felt little or no allegiance to the “institutions” or their processes. The GOP establishment was slow to realize that these constitutional conservatives were serious about their goals. You can’t buy off committed ideologues. The establishment politicians were used to people playing conservative at home and then coming to DC and being co-opted.
But the conservatives arrived feeling not a part of Washington or sharing its Beltway worldview, and they felt no loyalty to the status quo. The establishment couldn’t control them, so it decided that it had to try to crush them.
We need to understand the establishment perspective and how disruptive this was to the status quo. Understand that political power was not the be-all and end-all of the conservative movement. This was a fight across every part of society, and while political power was necessary, it was not sufficient. Conservatives saw that, and because personal political power was not their goal, the usual carrots and sticks of Washington—the proverbial cocktail party invitations—didn’t influence them.