The conservative insurgency centered on a few key principles.
First was decentralization. We weren’t one single, big organization or even a cohesive movement. That was a lucky break. It would have given the other side a target. Look at what happened to the Tea Party, a model of effective decentralization initially. The Tea Party was subjected to the full force of progressive hate, from the media, academia, Hollywood, and politicians. The Obama and Clinton administrations even used the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Election Commission, and other government agencies to attack it. Remember how they persecuted any organization with “Tea Party” in the name? And soon there was no more Tea Party, yet there were still millions of us who were part of the movement it represented and were still active even if fewer people wore the label.
Our opponents were fighting a phantom—there was no there there, which is why all their hate and anger and effort came to nothing. There was no “Tea Party” to crush. We didn’t give them anything to destroy, so they couldn’t destroy it.
Next was the principle of individual effort. A decentralized organization means there is no one telling individuals where to go and what to do. In the Army, the bureaucracy decides your military occupational specialty and off you go. The needs of the whole organization matter, not your desires or talents. If the Army needs you in the infantry, you go in the infantry even if you always dreamed of being in military intelligence.
But in the conservative movement, you could do what you wanted, contributing in your own way, supporting conservatism as you followed your own desires. Artists made art. Writers wrote. Businesspeople did business. But they all did it with an eye toward expanding constitutional conservatism.
Let’s take one industry as an example, the movie industry. By the 2010s, liberals went into the movie industry to meet girls or guys and make money, and if they could promote liberalism too, that was fine. Liberal ideology was no longer a motivating force. It was burned out, more of a default setting than anything else.
But conservatives started going into the movie industry to meet girls or guys and make money, but also to consciously promote conservatism. And the same with reporters and professors and government officials and so on. We were a force of individual insurgents, all operating at our maximum effectiveness, independently, whose collective efforts led to victory over time.
We needed a political consciousness. Insurgents must have an ideology or they are useless. They just won’t undergo the hardships they need to over the extended time periods they must endure them if they aren’t committed to something more than just their petty personal interests. Ten men who believe in something are the match of a hundred who are just drawing a paycheck. We believed, but the failure of Obama and later Hillary meant that the liberals no longer did. It was all a lie to them; liberals repeated the words but they didn’t believe them. They just wanted to maintain their power and position. This was a huge advantage to us.
We promoted and reinforced our constitutional conservative beliefs and values, and they kept us going all the way to victory. Remember, we always had to keep in mind that thanks to the progressive threat, everything we did—from having a family to working a job to simply living conservative values—had become a political act.
No, we didn’t ask for the personal to become political, but it did and it still is. Maybe now that we have banished the pathology of progressivism from our body politic we can go back to normal someday. I hope so.
We had to learn to attack where the progressives were most vulnerable. An insurgent does not waste his efforts putting his strength against the counterinsurgent’s strength. He finds the enemy’s weakness and masses his power against that weakness so to maximize the effect.
Think about a guerrilla band in the jungle, perhaps of company size, about 100 troops. Do they attack a company of the counterinsurgents? No, they hit a platoon of say 20 troops, making sure that in that one small fight the correlation of forces favors them.
And they don’t just hit enemy forces. They swoop in and mix with the people when the counterinsurgents are gone. They find the unguarded bridge the counterinsurgents need and blow it up. They use whatever they have to make it difficult for the counterinsurgent. We needed to hit progressives where they were weak. And, as we found, they were weak all over. That’s what happens to a force that realizes that its ideology is based on lies.
We needed to fight everywhere and in every way. This was not just a political fight. We couldn’t win without winning elections, but we couldn’t win by only winning elections. We needed to take the fight to every one of progressivism’s redoubts and sanctuaries, the places where they thought they were safe and had let their guard down.
Academia, the media, the entertainment industry—the liberals thought that they owned them all. But technology was on the way that made their grip on the legacy means of distribution that used to mean power (the campuses, the newspapers, the movie studios, the networks) less and less relevant. We had a golden opportunity to move into their sanctuaries and clear them out, and we took it.
While it didn’t seem like it at the time, as Obama and Hillary were tearing apart the country, in reality, time was on our side: the insurgency was not going to be over quickly. The progressives really started moving in the 1960s (or even before) and only then, a half-century later, were they truly on the cusp of realizing their nightmarish vision. They underwent a long march through our institutions and reached the summits, but there’s one thing they didn’t count on. All that marching left them exhausted, spiritually and ideologically.
If they ever believed that their scheme was about anything more than raw power, that illusion has long since been discarded. Liberalism was a spent force as a political philosophy. The only reason it could still fight us was that it had sheer weight on us. It was ripe for defeat, and it didn’t take us half a century to make our own march back through the institutions.
After all, they had to impose a twisted, alien ideology upon a free people. We were selling freedom to a people born hungry for it. And they could try to hide and excuse the manifest failures of their ideology for a while, but not forever—the truth was all around us, like “Going Out of Business” signs and health insurance cancellation notices. The truth was going to win out—we learned, though, that it would take some time, that we were in it for the long haul. But every day, we got stronger, and every day, they got weaker.
As with any insurgency, we insurgents advanced in phases. David Galula’s famous book Counterinsurgency Warfare discusses the classic communist insurgency model. Phase one is to create a party; that is, an ideological infrastructure. Phase two is to form a united front, which means enlisting allies. Phase three is guerrilla warfare, actual combat, but not as equals with the counterinsurgent force. Phase four is movement warfare, fighting the counterinsurgents as equals. Phase five is the annihilation campaign, where the insurgent is now stronger and destroys the counterinsurgent in detail.
This is not a perfect fit for how we did it in our conservative insurgency, but it’s pretty close. Through the Tea Party’s embrace of the Constitution and the existing conservative intellectual structure of institutions and publications, we completed phase one and created our ideological infrastructure. We didn’t have a Communist Party promoting rigid orthodoxy, but constitutional conservatism did have a coherent set of values and principles and institutions to discuss, explain, and promote.
To the extent the Republican Party tried to fit the bill, we had to take it over first. There was a lot of heartburn about that, but revolutions are always full of infighting between factions with marginal differences. Think of the GOP establishment as the Mensheviks, except wimpier and whinier and even less competent. But it was a structure, and taking it over was smarter than trying to build a third party from scratch like some people advocated.