I found that constitutional conservatives were not seeing the world through the same hyperpoliticized lens that the liberals were. They had no political need to overlook the barbarism of Israel’s enemies. They knew an enemy when they saw it, where liberals never could—or rather, because of their ideology, refused to do so.
And constitutional conservatives felt no need to interfere with the lives of the people. For liberals, the personal was the political, and they felt compelled to insert themselves in every aspect of human existence. It was liberal cities and states where you would see petty harassments and insults like attempts to ban circumcision. It would never occur to a constitutional conservative that this was any of his business. In fact, they saw these progressive attempts to interfere with our sacrament as repugnant.
I found many of the American Jews I met politically and culturally confused. The bombing finally drove some out from under the heel of liberalism, but others couldn’t escape. They were too far in. It was too big a part of their identities. Most were secular, like me, and liberalism seemed to fill a void in them that religion would have in another age. Despite everything liberalism did to them, every failure and every betrayal, some simply could not reject it. But enough did that there is no longer a solid Democratic “Jewish vote” in American politics.
Chapter Four: Regular People
The conservative insurgency was not fought by Washington insiders, though some played a part. Even if the people are sometimes led by a cadre, insurgencies are essentially of the people and by the people. These regular people activated and acted without centralized leadership, yet the synergy of their shared focus exponentially increased their power. But it was not only “ordinary” people or clichéd conservatives—liberalism and its appetite for total control of every aspect of life pushed nonconformists who would otherwise be leftists into the insurgency.
Sandy Crawford (Conservative Activist)
Underneath a portrait of a smiling Andrew Breitbart, Sandy Crawford pauses for a moment to take a phone call. It’s one of her grandchildren; she gives him some advice, then ends the call and returns to our talk.
My kids are why I did it, why I got involved. You have to understand. I was frightened for them and for my country. A lot of us were. Everything I had seen my parents work for was falling apart. The country was being changed into something I didn’t recognize, and something that seemed to hate normal people like me. I was just a normal American who was scared to death.
Obama came in promoting this “hope and change” crap. And it was crap—it was simply a power grab for coastal liberal elitists. He was elected right after Wall Street almost collapsed, or at least said it was about to collapse in order to get its bailout. The national debt was staggering. Prices were increasing, and the Democrats targeted us, the regular middle class folks, the only folks who by no stretch of the imagination were responsible for the crises he was claiming to be solving.
We Middle Americans did everything right. We worked hard, played by the rules, as Bill Clinton used to say. But the liberals hated us. You could tell.
The liberals saw us as the enemy. I think it was partly because they were snobs—they hated our traditional values and looked down on us as ignorant and unsophisticated, even though studies showed that we were better educated. I think it was also partly because hating us was useful politically—they could tell the takers who voted Democrat that we were why they were failures. But I also think there was another thing—we didn’t need the liberals.
We could rule ourselves, without them, and they hated us for it. If the whole country were like us, self-sufficient and responsible, there’d be no need for liberals. That scared them, and they were right to be scared. That’s what we changed the culture toward over the last 30 years, toward self-sufficiency and independence, and that’s a big reason the liberals are locked out of power today.
Americans today don’t need them.
Looking back, you can see how we were the perfect demographic for a mass movement like ours. Many of us had built our own careers and businesses, so we had skills. And Obama pushed exactly the wrong button with us, the red button that would activate us. He said the one thing that forced us off the sidelines.
He came in and told us—and I remember this vividly—that we “didn’t build that.” Right there, the liberals attacked the entire foundation of who we were. They were trying to delegitimize anything we said or did. They tried to steal away the moral value of our hard work, you see. Then we would be defenseless and submit. We would need them and their pack of liberal geniuses, just like every other demographic block. There’d be no one left who they didn’t control.
It didn’t work that way.
I was fuming, but I wasn’t sure what to do. I heard about this Tea Party thing from the mainstream liberal media, and I just instinctively knew that if the liberal media hated it, it had to be good. I got involved. I had no political experience, but I went and saw Andrew Breitbart speak at a rally during a snowstorm in Indiana. He was a visionary. He understood our potential. He treated us like we had power, like we had a right to express our views and defend what we had built, and he urged us to exercise it.
I started listening to conservative talk radio. Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Hugh Hewitt, and others—I was in Indy and listened to Greg Garrison a lot. That was crucial—it helped coordinate us and build morale. You could turn the radio on and you could hear people putting into words what we all were thinking. The Tea Party rallies did the same thing—I never thought so many other folks felt like I did. The media sure wasn’t going to tell me.
I devoured conservative books. The Internet was crucial too. Facebook, Twitter, conservative websites—we just went around the media gatekeepers and built networks of contacts. You learned you weren’t alone.
So I found myself in the movement. It wasn’t like you signed up. It wasn’t “community organized” by some cadre of George Soros–funded leftists—if you showed up and did stuff, you were in the movement. There was no barrier to becoming active. You just did stuff and you were part of it. We never really talked a lot about the goals or even about the ways that we conservatives, as a movement, could wage a peaceful insurgency. See, you aren’t a movement—you were an individual and an American citizen doing what you felt you wanted to do to advance what you believed.
So, I asked myself, what do I do? How should I be a part of this fight?
Well, at first, I had no clue.
It didn’t take me long to come up with some ideas, but the point was that neither me nor anyone else needed to get some kind of order from on high and then to go salute and carry out the mission. The great strength of our movement was that it was individual action—“decentralized” is how some people describe it. The fact that there was no rigid hierarchy or structure trying to manipulate all the levers of the movement was an advantage. It allowed for experimentation, and the most effective ideas rose to the top.