That made us more agile than the centrally planned left. Decentralization meant that you had to figure out what you could do best to contribute. Only you knew your strengths and weaknesses, your situation, your preferences, your resources, and your opportunities. Only you knew how you could best be a part of our cause.
Decentralization leveraged each individual’s ability to act in the most effective way to achieve the maximum results for his efforts. See, when running a community organizing effort like the left did, you didn’t have to be so targeted. You had a ton of resources, and the sheer bulk of the organization would allow you to overcome the inevitable skills/talents mismatches over the long haul. With the constitutional conservatives, we needed to fit the round peg in the round hole—we couldn’t just pound any peg through any hole because our figurative hammer was so damn small. Instead of some organization organizing the pegs to the holes, we self-organized as individuals.
In other words, we weren’t so big or overwhelming as a movement that we could afford to forgo the benefits of precisely matching individuals to our needs. So the way that conservatives did that matching is the same way the free market does it—decentralized self-selection. People picked jobs because they felt they would fit the need. So, not only did we maximize our talent pool but we reaffirmed our core principles.
People who knew how to write drifted toward writing. Web people drifted to web tasks. There were a lot of people who were really good at speaking, and they drifted toward radio. Guys would just start shows on the web and then—voila! They would land terrestrial radio shows!
This wasn’t really surprising. Even if we could have organized ourselves some other way, we largely came out of the small business, entrepreneurial world. Many of us owned our own small businesses. We applied those same skills to the cultural/political fight.
All this is a really long way of explaining why I needed to figure out on my own how I could best contribute to the movement. But the key was that we needed people to contribute somehow—time, money, effort, whatever—if we were going to beat the liberal establishment. We needed real people. We couldn’t hope to convert the populace without the help of people within the populace.
I found I was a good organizer. I had run a small crafts store for a while but closed it up when the kids came along. Yet even with the kids, I was a den mother and soccer coach and generally, well, a general! I knew how to get stuff done—I was always the one the PTA called to set up dances and such—so I used that skill to organize for the Tea Party in Indianapolis.
But I wasn’t a fighter, at least not yet. And this was a fight.
The first step was to gird your loins for battle—this game was not for the weak or the faint of heart, and our progressive opponents got meaner and more obnoxious and even worse the closer we got to the moment they realized their crappy little ideology was heading out back to the Dumpster.
No one was asking us to stand up to a volley of British musket fire like the Minutemen Founders, but we soon saw that we were going to be smeared, lied about, mischaracterized, intimidated, and threatened. I got audited for the first time the year I became chairwoman of my local Tea Party group. But if you couldn’t take that hit, then we might as well have packed that whole freedom thing up, drunk the Kool-Aid, and started singing that “Mmmm, Mmmm, Barack Obama” song.
You remember that song? Schoolteachers, unionized of course, would make the kids sing it like in some third world dictatorship. It was a terrible time—it was like liberals were trying to create a cult of personality. That’s the thing about liberals—they reject God, but it leaves an empty space they need to fill and they try to fill it with liberal icons. I personally think that liberalism is a symptom of emotional emptiness—it’s like an ideology based on weird daddy issues.
Anyway, we realized that we were effective and that we mattered, especially after we kicked their tails in the 2010 midterms. But in 2012, we realized that we were it. There was no one else. The establishment Republicans certainly weren’t going to fight this fight. It was just us.
If we didn’t win, we were going to lose our country forever.
Remember my friend—really, he was thousands of peoples’ friend—Andrew Breitbart? He saw it. He got it. Andrew’s most important lesson to us may well have been that a decade before he died, he was just some regular guy, a normal American citizen who had had enough.
Just like me. Just like millions of us.
The issue was not whether you could be part of the fight. You could. The question was what could you do?
Most started at the individual level. You had to start somewhere, and many—even most—people are not really comfortable in the limelight. But you didn’t have to be debating some androgynous lefty pundit from DC on MSNBC to be in the fight. Regular folks had a vital—I’d even say decisive—role to play.
As an individual, at the personal level, you could engage in three main ways—by contributing, modeling, and interaction. Of course, no one used those labels at first—we just sort of naturally understood the basic concept. But when millions of us started to engage in these three ways, the results were earthshaking.
Contributing was just that: contributing your money and time to the cause. We had a lot of organizations that did a lot of great work. For example, FreedomWorks organized and trained activists, while the Pacific Legal Foundation pursued a “lawfare” strategy. The NRA defended our Second Amendment. They all needed dough. It was easy to write them a check!
Conservative candidates needed money, and they also needed volunteers. There was where we shined. We got in there and volunteered for the guys running against those hard left congressmen, or the soft right ones who would come home and tell us they had our collective back, then return to Washington and stick a knife in it.
How else could people contribute? Well, people talked a lot about moving into the media and entertainment spheres. If there was an outspoken conservative star—it was so rare back then that it’s hard to believe today—we would go out of our way to see his movie or watch his show. If there was a film that seemed even remotely conservative, we would give it the benefit of the doubt and go see it.
Geez, I saw some terrible movies for the cause. But our viewership watered the seeds of conservative entertainment until it could take root in popular culture and get past liberal prejudices and gain an audience.
Support for conservative writers also created an audience that the mainstream publishing community could not afford to ignore. We knew that you couldn’t fight in the battle of ideas if you don’t even get to the battlefield.
Modeling was huge—huge. I don’t mean modeling in the sense of attractive women marching about in lingerie, although conservative men were very open to this—there was a whole meme about how conservative women were more attractive than liberal women. I mean modeling in terms of living your life in a conservative manner as a model for others to emulate. The media could and did disrespect conservatives all it wanted, but actually living a conservative life, displaying solid values and demonstrating how they lead to success and happiness, was a powerful rebuke to the tacky chaos liberals excused in the personal lives of their constituents. When you modeled what happens when you live conservative values, people had to take notice.
Sure, much of the establishment hated us for it—but they really hated themselves. We got used to that kind of projection. Many of them lived in chaos and despised us for demonstrating that life didn’t have to be an endless series of government handouts, broken families, and failure.
Modeling worked both ways—liberals who modeled bad behavior (especially Hollywood stars and rappers) caused enormous social damage. But when a liberal inadvertently modeled conservative behavior, it was useful. As much as Barack Obama’s policies were awful, his model of an evidently happy marriage with two beautiful children probably did more good for our country than anything else he’d done, including giving the SEALs the reluctant thumbs-up to pop Bin Laden.