We didn’t take any chances with the good, solid conservative politicians in Congress. We buttressed the vulnerable members, which required the grassroots outreach that the overpaid GOP consultants hated but we excelled at. Once we cleared out the squishes, we were then able to go after vulnerable Democrats ruthlessly. The Obamacare fiasco had created a lot of vulnerable Democrats, and it was the gift that kept on giving as new problems arose year after year.
Most Democrats came from districts much more conservative than Washington, DC, is, and that bipolar activity made them vulnerable even before parroting the president’s lies turned them into liars too. We started early, recruited solid candidates—preferably ones that were bright enough not to spout off about rape—and took the fight to the enemy. The 2018 election wins that mirrored 2010 built on years of hard work and started setting the stage for eventual victory.
Chapter Three: Reaching Out
There was always a huge tension on the right between two factions. The more cautious, moderate faction became the establishment and, to the constitutional conservatives, it was distinguished by its acceptance of the premises—and the perks—of power. In the eyes of the rebels, the establishment conservatives went on tedious Sunday morning talk shows like Meet the Press, circulated through Georgetown cocktail parties, and plotted with progressives in the guise of “bipartisanship.” In response, the establishment was barely able to hide its contempt for the rebels and failed to see that the “sit down, shut up and vote for whoever we pick for you” attitude was fueling the fire.
The constitutional conservatives were the only place people with any libertarian ideas could go, as the establishment rejected them outright. That led to a critical mass of libertarian impulses among the constitutional conservatives, who rapidly discovered that if they wanted to succeed they needed to avoid picking fights with their new allies over the small issues. Libertarianism presented an ideology that made papering over these very real differences intellectually coherent. It also opened up the ability to attract young, tech-savvy voters alienated by progressivism’s economic failure and tyrannical impulses.
Then there were the immigrants. The immigration issue was enormous in the first two decades of the century, with progressives partnering with establishment conservatives to pass a “reform” that essentially opened the floodgates to low-skill immigrants who were expected to vote reliably Democratic—while nearly destroying the Republican Party. After conservatives took over the reins of power in the mid-2020s, they made what was widely seen as one of their biggest errors, repealing the “pathway to citizenship” that millions were already on. The immigrant issue had always been difficult for conservatives, but while many immigrants viewed the insurgency as a threat to themselves, others embraced it.
And, of course, Hillary Clinton’s abandonment of Israel in its time of need made many formerly liberal Jews reconsider the constitutional conservatives.
The libertarian and minority outreach effort was a success, but the immigration outreach failed. The consequences of each attempt still reverberate today—and will continue to do so in the future.
Tamara Hayes Smith (Professor/Activist)
One thing the establishment never understood was the libertarian impulse that surged through the constitutional conservative movement. GOP establishment figures were as much a part of the “big government” mindset as their liberal comrades—they could not conceive of any other paradigm. This led them, in many cases, to feel more at home with liberals than with members of their own party. And that mindset also kept away a substantial number of libertarians who were repelled by the GOP’s intermittent embrace of big government solutions. It took years to undo the damage George Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” which was really just a relabeled progressive republicanism, caused with libertarians.
Tony “Gator” McCoy (Chief Advisor to President Carrie Marlowe)
Gator is on his fourth beer and it’s not even noon. The sun is up and the Florida humidity is getting to me. I finally accept a Coors and let the campaign legend ramble on.
There was already one big outside group that was largely on our side, or at least gettable. The problem was that with all the conflict over our relatively few areas of disagreement, it was hard to see it. It was the libertarians. These folks not only shared many of our core values but also—if they were actual libertarians, and some weren’t—had huge issues with the soulless slide to fascism with the progressive status quo.
“If” was the operative word because many people who called themselves “libertarian” had the “lib” syllable down really well, but the appropriate suffix was “-eral” rather than “-ertarian.”
If you thought you were a libertarian and you spent all of your time worrying about TV preachers banning masturbation and zero time about free enterprise getting strangled, you were not a libertarian. You were a liberal, and you probably needed to get a girlfriend.
Then there were the crazy libertarians, who looked sane and could hold up a conversation until they slipped in their worries about “chemtrails” and then moved on to telling you that their Ford wouldn’t start and it was probably the fault of the neo-cons.
“Neo-cons” meant “Jews,” and those kinds of libertarians were against them. So my feeling was that they could kiss our collective ass. I wasn’t wasting any time on them.
The libertarians we wanted were the ones who pretty much wanted to be left alone, which was admirable. That was most of them. Wanting to be left alone is totally antithetical to everything liberalism is about, so we had that in common. We could build on that foundation.
We couldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that we had everything in common. Libertarians tended to think—and some still think—that the only legitimate defense policy for the United States is locking ourselves inside our local Alamos and waiting. They got all squishy over drone strikes too during the terrorist wars, which I never understood—how can anyone have been against raining fiery death on jihadists? We cons, well, we loved that shit.
Also, they tended to dig pot. Lots of pot. And they liked to talk about hemp for some reason. I don’t know how many times I got buttonholed by some stoner telling me how George Washington raised hemp. Great! Now vote Republican! The best argument against marijuana decriminalization I ever heard was that if it passed, they’d never shut up about their stupid weed.
Some of us had a controversial idea—that we put off our fights with them and focus on beating Hillary and her statist pals. Certainly, there were some libertarians that thought, “Wow, conservatives are generally against abortion—I can’t work with them on anything,” which was as counterproductive as us thinking, “Wow, libertarians are generally against restrictions on abortion—I can’t work with them on anything.” We have had plenty of time to fight with them after we ran those Marxists out of DC in the 2020s. But we agreed on probably 90 percent of things. What did Reagan say about that? That made us 90 percent allies, not 10 percent enemies? He said something like that.
Now, the road to getting support from the libertarian libertarians overlapped with the road to getting the young and hip people in our corner. I knew it could be done. The smarter ones among the young and the hip started to realize pretty quickly that liberalism was a giant scam where they do the working and the sweating for the government hacks and unemployables who made up the Democrat base. Hell, Obamacare was based on the idea of healthy young people being forced to buy too much health insurance for too much money so old people who had already had their chance to make money got theirs cheaper. Obamacare was a huge opening for us. It drove them away from liberalism, but not directly to us. We had to earn their support. And we did. We were selling what young people loved and progressives hated—freedom.