This baffled and frightened the establishment of both parties. This is why the insurgents were painted as crazy, or “whacko birds” in the immortal characterization of Senator John McCain.
Until the conservative movement built up enough raw political power, its members needed to avoid decisive fights on the establishment’s terms. They didn’t always do that. In the fall of 2013, the insurgents led by Senator Ted Cruz forced a government shutdown. The establishment Republicans hated it and joined in with the liberal establishment to beat them down. The establishment still had overwhelming power (including the liberal media) that it could use to crush the insurgents when they picked a fight.
Barack Obama, of course, loved it. He sought out crises—he loved them. He thought he would win when he pushed things to the brink, and too often he did. But just weeks later the disaster of Obamacare became all too undeniable, first with the website failing and then with the realization that the liberals had outright lied about what the law would do to regular people’s medical insurance policies. That was a key event, and the insurgents were there pointing out the disaster that liberalism had wrought.
Many establishment Republicans saw this in the context of short-term advantage, and it was a short-term advantage. It was enough to hold the House in 2014 despite the amnesty debacle, but Hillary Clinton would still win the 2016 election. The insurgents saw it as something more, the end of the beginning of the fall of liberalism rather than the beginning of the end of liberalism. Obamacare would fuel their critique of the establishment’s Beltway-based thinking as part of a long-term project to remake American culture.
The insurgents learned not to fight just to fight, but to fight to win. Because they lacked raw political power, they learned to be careful about where they let themselves be engaged. Some felt that they were insufficiently aggressive, and mistakenly lumped them in with the establishment GOP mandarins who were reticent because, below the surface, they did not support the change the insurgents sought. Their statist ox was being gored too.
The insurgents learned to make absolutely sure that the situation and correlation of forces favored them greatly before consenting to engage in battle. Simply put, they picked their fights after the 2013 government shutdown. They understood that they had no solid allies—the establishment GOP, given the choice between conservative change that would disrupt their power and position, would support the status quo when push came to shove.
And it was quite frustrating, not only to the establishment that—try as it might—just could not stamp out these stubborn insurgents because the insurgents would not let them leverage the establishment’s full weight against them, but to the insurgents themselves. The conservatives wanted to fight—they were hungry for the chance to take their progressive opponents down a peg or twenty. But the goal wasn’t merely to fight. Fighting was a tactic, not a goal. The goal was to win in the long run by winning over the culture. So they had to walk away from most fights, and that was very frustrating for a furious grassroots base.
It was especially frustrating for conservative politicians trying make clear to their own rank and file that avoiding disadvantageous engagements was a strategic choice, not a lack of will to win. Just saying it wasn’t enough—the conservatives needed wins to keep from being demoralized. The insurgents needed to look for situations where they were likely to win—even little victories helped keep morale up when there were setbacks, like the election and reelection of Hillary Clinton.
The Obamacare rollout debacle was a fortuitous one—it came right on the heels of most of the Washington, DC, punditocracy pronouncing the Tea Party dead. One note on the term “Tea Party”—that label was Alinskyed by the left and by the establishment of both parties into an all-purpose enemy upon which they could focus their efforts. It was an attempt to manufacture a single, identifiable, and tangible opponent to destroy.
But there was no Tea Party. It was a chimera. Certainly, a few organizations used the name, but there was no single entity that could be destroyed. The establishment turned its full power against this so-called “Tea Party” and poisoned it with normal Americans—but there was nothing there. The conservative insurgency was not bound to the fate of the “Tea Party.” The establishment ended up defeating only a label while its actual opponent was growing stronger.
It became clear to the insurgents that they had to force the GOP to act during Obama’s remaining time in office to defeat his plans, mostly pushed through via executive orders and by gimmicks like ending the filibuster, while setting the stage to enact its own goals. They wisely gave up on trying to govern.
They hated it when establishment GOP politicians went on Sunday morning television shows—Sunday morning was when they ran all the boring political programs at the time—and started babbling about “governing.” They realized that the Republicans needed to forget about “governing” and try to stay alive as a party. They wanted to let Obama “govern,” if he could, which meant let him pay the consequences for his policies. The Obamacare rollout fiasco was a great example—and the conservatives had to work hard to prevent establishment Republicans from bailing Obama out from the consequences of his actions in the name of “good governance.”
Every time the GOP tried to reform something or improve something, they either got skewered by the media or helped Obama avoid the fallout of his own actions. The conservatives preferred to focus on the only goal that mattered: destroying the progressive movement. That meant letting Obama and Clinton fail.
Sandy Crawford (Conservative Activist)
The Breitbart Institute has a bar with 23 beers on tap. This is just one of the ways in which it attempts to honor its namesake, whose love of the occasional quaff was almost as great as his love of battling the liberal establishment. Sandy and I sit at a table in the corner watching the young staffers gather to blow off steam after another week of hard work fighting for control of the culture.
I was not born into the movement. I came into it because, well, I was a thinking human being and I hated the conformity and lying I saw the liberals around me get wrapped up in. I started out generally liberal, so I kind of knew how they thought—or didn’t, as the case may be. But I got the appeal of liberalism, which some of my fellow cons never did. I understood why someone might choose to be liberal. I didn’t agree with the rationale, but I got the thought process. There was a security in giving up your autonomy in return for vague assurances that you would be taken care of. Many of us in the constitutional conservative movement understood, because many of us were ex-liberals. I think it gave us an advantage in appealing to regular Americans.
I got active in the movement after college and bounced around various organizations and institutions doing conservative activist work. In college, I started out an English major, which meant I was set to be a lawyer or a barista. I ended up with a degree in poli sci and marketing. Both were useful down the road.
I understood the cultural challenge, but I wanted to work on the political side. Pretty quickly I saw that to win—and we did not win much at first—we needed to fight on our terms, where we could do the most damage to not just Democrats but liberals in general.
Now, most professional politicians are terrible politicians. I don’t know how they get elected. So many of them are lawyers, but they can barely make an argument. They’re awful advocates and they have no sense of strategy. We tried to advise them on how to do it better, so that the constitutional conservative message would get out and so they wouldn’t step on their stuff talking about insane things, like their personal rape theories. Geez, I still don’t know what possessed some of those guys, but some lib reporter would ask them about rape and they would go on a two-minute monologue that made them look like idiots from the Dark Ages. It seemed like it was irresistible to them—no matter how many times you’d tell them, “If someone asks about rape, tell him you’re against it,” they would just keep talking. It still baffles me.