In case you misunderstood my point so far, I’m here to kick liberal ass.
Their complacency made them vulnerable to focused, dedicated challengers who could assemble a voting bloc of constitutional conservatives that would sweep the sparsely-attended elections for these posts. Look at the Ron Paul folks back in the first decade of the century—every election they organized and then came in and pick off a few unsuspecting local GOP structures. And those folks had it even harder than us—I mean, have you ever tried to organize libertarians?
Whether your turf was your own social circle or whether you aimed for political office or public activism, if you wanted to take this country back from the collectivists who wanted to turn it into a warmer Sweden, then you needed to act. In the end, it all came down to you as an individual. Otherwise, forget it—there was no one else, no outside cavalry squadron that was riding in to save the day. It was all on us as individuals. All of it.
Each of us had to figure out what we could do, and then go do it.
Sister Margaret Feeney (Nun/Religious Rights Activist)
I meet the feisty Catholic sister at St. Bart’s Hall, the food kitchen for the down and out that she has run in Seattle for decades. She pitches in with dishes after the lunch meal, joining the recipients who “pay” for their food by helping to clean up afterward. She is a tiny woman, much smaller than she seemed on television twenty years ago when she was one of the most public faces of the struggle against the religious bigotry of the left, but she still seems young even though she is in her seventies.
It was the Obama and Hillary Clinton administrations’ vicious regulatory assaults on religious freedom that turned her from a quiet monastic into a media-savvy rebel. Putting away her cleaning rag and grabbing herself and her guest cups of hot coffee, she sits at one of the long benches in the hall and begins.
I was not interested in politics. All I wanted to do was express God’s love through helping people. I feel that’s why I was called to the Church and to the sisterhood in the first place. As things got worse in the country, I tried to escape it by diving deeper into the work, but I realized that there was no way to escape. It was escape-proof by design.
The progressive goal was to eliminate any spaces that they did not control or dominate. It was not enough that the Church tried to stay out of active politics—and it did try, hoping it would be left alone. But it could never be left alone. The progressives could not allow any alternative power centers to exist. As meek and humble as we tried to be, they could never tolerate us. They had to destroy us, and when I saw that I realized that being meek and humble was not going to do the job.
They had to break us, to make us betray our own faith by accepting their secular premises. We had to be humiliated and forced to act contrary to our values. That was why forcing us to contribute to abortion funding was so important to them. By making us collaborate, they would break us.
It was part and parcel of what they did throughout society. They would use discrimination laws to persecute businesses whose owners had a moral objection to gay marriage and didn’t want to participate by baking cakes or taking photos. There were plenty of bakers and photographers out there who would, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to make people bow down before them.
They used insurance to persecute us. They wanted us to pay for abortion practices, including the so-called “morning after” pills. Well, that was absolutely against our deepest values. This made it even more important to the liberals to bend us to their will. They said we were denying women health care. Of course, if you couldn’t afford to buy your own birth control, perhaps you ought not to have been having sex.
They went out of their way to rub our nose in the changes they were forcing on us. It was so ugly, so hateful and vindictive. They could have easily found ways to protect our consciences, but that would have been contrary to their real agenda. They wanted us on our knees before their false god: government. Well, this lady kneels to no one but the Lord!
Colonel Jeremy Denton, US Army (Ret.) (Insurgency Expert)
The colonel looks more like a senior professor, albeit a very fit one. He’s very patient with me, a civilian, as he explains to me—slowly—how insurgency differs from what we generally think of as warfare. It is not a battle of similar forces, like two armies with tanks and artillery clashing on a battlefield, but rather of two very different forces both in form and goal.
An insurgency is about people. It is focused on the people. You need the people to buy in, and because insurgency is decentralized, they have to act independently. But no group of people is homogenous—you have tribes or clans or other groups, many of whom hate each other, but to beat the establishment they have to come together somehow. So, you need the people—regular people—involved, and you need them to work with others they might not normally associate with.
This is a key point about insurgency—unlike traditional warfare, it doesn’t focus on enemy forces or on terrain. It focuses on the populace. Insurgency theory is a very detailed subject, but simply understand that to the insurgent, the hearts and minds of the population is not the only part of the battlespace, but it’s the most important part.
This is key. The conservative insurgency sought to win not just terrain—think of that in terms of institutions and social spaces like academia, the media, and political offices—or to defeat enemy forces like specific politicians and leftist activists. It sought to win over the people to constitutional conservatism.
Our end state was not just a government run by constitutional conservatives, nor even a media, entertainment industry, and academia where conservatives could compete, but an American citizenry that once again wholeheartedly embraced constitutional conservatism. That generally meant reestablishing the cultural norm of personal responsibility as opposed to entitlement, and reinforcing the understanding that individual autonomy takes precedence over government power.
If we didn’t win over the people to those concepts, then our victories would just be transitory. The next election could see our progress wiped out. Instead of having the Thirty-Second Amendment, we’d still be fighting about government handouts. But because we won the people over, because we changed minds about not just what government should do but what people were expected to do to support themselves, the argument about personal responsibility is over.
In the end, the conservative insurgency was about truly fundamental change—or, perhaps more accurately, fundamental change back.
Without that change, sometimes we could have a solid conservative president, sometimes not. That’s not good enough. We always want a constitutional conservative president, so we wanted the mainstream political spectrum to stop on the left end well before we got to liberalism, much less socialism.
That was the real goal of our movement, even if no one put it into those words at the beginning. But that’s no surprise that we didn’t articulate out goals precisely. Most insurgencies don’t start off with a well-thought-out plan. Most start out like ours—a bunch of people angry at the status quo who start acting independently.