In 2018, the Supreme Court had issued rulings to the effect that the Second Amendment did not mean what it expressly said, but that the Constitution’s silence on the issue of abortion somehow indicated the Founders’ clear intent that the government would pay for them. Moreover, the justices found a provision lurking within the Constitution holding that doctors could be ordered to perform abortions regardless of their religious objections. Such decisions inspired a campaign of civil—and not so civil—disobedience that in turn called down harsher repression from the Clinton regime. It was a classic insurgency phenomenon—a government further undercutting its own legitimacy by overreaction to the insurgents, who then capitalized on the overreaction to amplify the cycle once again.
The surveillance state the Obama administration oversaw drove young people away from the smothering embrace of liberalism, though not immediately into the insurgency. It was only as the insurgency demonstrated that “social issues” were not its focus, contrary to the portrayals of an increasingly hysterical mainstream media, that young people began to consider the “liberty option” that the insurgency offered. The fact that liberal economic policies had led to 45 percent unemployment among debt-ridden recent college graduates in 2019 made the conservative alternative that much more appealing.
The Obama administration had fitfully started reexamining long-term issues like drug and federal criminal law reform, but it had predictably done so not through legislation but with uncoordinated and poorly thought-through executive actions. Hillary Clinton, whose authoritarian instincts at home came to define her presidency as much as her inept foreign policy abroad, quickly undid even these minor changes. With the crime rate growing, she sought to get to the conservative’s right on the issue. The insurgency’s willingness to let her do so, and to consider more humane and wise drug law and sentencing reforms, provided a key opening into the once solid-Democrat minority voting bloc.
Clinton’s contempt for individual rights, and a Supreme Court willing to limit free speech rights where they threatened the establishment’s hold on power, drove even more formerly apolitical Americans into the arms of the conservative insurgency. Many former liberals joined the insurgency too, often contending (not unlike Ronald Reagan did with regard to the Democratic Party) that they had not left liberalism but that liberalism had left them. But it also set up a challenge for the insurgency that it continues to face today—would the nontraditional strategies and tactics it felt compelled to adopt to compete with the liberal establishment make reinstating a traditional America impossible?
America found itself on the brink of the abyss during the second Clinton term. Abroad, the military was a hollow shell and the United States was regularly humiliated by foreign potentates who had nothing but contempt for Clinton’s weakness. A botched invasion of the Iranian coast in response to its terrible nuclear strike on Israel on November 30, 2020, led to years of humiliation over the prisoners of war abandoned after Clinton’s panicked retreat order.
At home, the economy was moribund, with the “new normal” being a lack of upward mobility for the declining cohort of Americans who still sought to work rather than to collect government checks. Worse, as the insurgency grew, the liberal establishment’s desperate grip on power tightened. The administration harassed, abused, and sometimes even arrested its opponents. It clumsily attempted to suppress dissent, whether on the Internet or in the media. And there was violence, as administration-affiliated thugs intimidated designated “enemies” and as states acted to nullify unconstitutional laws. The shootout at an Austin, Texas, airfield between federal marshals trying to enforce Clinton’s federal handgun ban and Texas Rangers determined to stop them left several dead. It could have easily been the first battle in a very different insurgency, one that involved violence instead of peaceful political action.
By the end of the Clinton administration, Americans had a choice. And thanks to the conservative insurgency, there was a viable alternative to both the intellectually and politically exhausted liberalism of Obama and Clinton and to the status quo–embracing moderate Republicanism of the John McCains of the GOP. Conservative think tanks had a ready supply of policy prescriptions for the problems facing the country. The mainstream media, thanks to technological changes that bypassed liberal gatekeeping and to infiltration by committed conservatives, was no longer the pro-establishment monolith of the past. Out in the states, conservatives had taken power and demonstrated that the vision of the insurgents would work in practice.
But, most of all, there was now a generation of insurgents ready to take power—and the last 16 years of defying the liberal establishment’s merciless counterinsurgency had endowed them with a ruthlessness that would ensure they would not hesitate to aggressively impose their conservative vision when given the chance. That ethic remains today within the conservative movement, even as critics now question whether the movement has strayed too far from the norms and values it had sought to revitalize.
But such considerations paled in comparison with the need for expediency in seizing back the apparatus of the federal government. The insurgency’s chance came in 2024, when the governor of Florida was elected president over yet another doctrinaire liberal. President Carrie Marlowe was less significant as an individual than as a representative of the insurgency.
Liberalism’s aging playbook simply did not apply when faced with what she represented. It was hard to decry a “War on Women” when, like perhaps a majority of insurgency activists, Marlowe was a woman. Other conservative women had been targeted in the past, but Marlowe cleverly sidestepped such political land mines as abortion by refusing to take a national position and insisting—in keeping with the firm federalist inclinations of the insurgency—that the issue be remanded to the states. That, in conjunction with a cultural turn against the idea of abortion, brought the Bill Clinton formulation of abortion as “safe, legal, and rare” to fruition. Today, only eight states allow it, and combined with society’s distaste for it, the numbers are a fraction of those in the past. However, the Marlowe compromise did not completely disarm the issue—it still comes up in Republican primaries today, with no sign of it ever being completely resolved on the horizon.
Marlowe also set out to redefine the GOP’s relationship with minorities. Her sentencing reform platform and active outreach to minorities, which she began as Florida’s governor, earned her a hearing with minority voters not offered to other Republicans. While she did not win a majority of minority votes, she won more than the Democrats could afford to lose.
As would be expected from one of the insurgents, she refused to apologize for America—she radiated pride in the nation while promising to reign in the excesses of the oppressive surveillance state. Her steely ultimatum to the Iranians following her inauguration solved the prisoner crisis in hours, echoing Ronald Reagan’s resolution of the hostage crisis 44 years before.
After nearly two decades of ennui, Americans were ready not only to have pride again, but to have a nation worthy of pride again.
Of course, the political result was only one consequence of the conservative insurgency’s cultural campaign. After all, “politics,” as the late Andrew Breitbart famously observed, “is downstream from culture.” The insurgency was never about just winning political offices. Rather, constitutional conservatives winning political offices in large numbers came only after constitutional conservatives began winning the cultural struggle.