The lapdog comics and hosts who stuck by him and sucked up to him, well, they all went away. It wasn’t just that they were liberal. It was because you lose credibility when you try to be a man of the people and you can’t talk about what the people are talking about.
There was some direct action too. Some conservatives began to actively boycott liberal entertainment. Some liberal would say something horrible about conservatives in general, or more often make some disgusting comment about a conservative woman, and Twitter and Facebook and other social media would ignite. The conservatives would simply stop watching. Now, a niche show on one of the old cable networks could survive that, but on the big networks it was a real problem. Liberals would retaliate and urge their folks to tune in to counterbalance it, but it’s a lot easier to organize a view-out than a view-in, if you see what I mean.
So, it started becoming acceptable to joke about liberals, and joking about conservatives got to be kind of tired and hacky. Now, liberals are often the butt of jokes. They usually get portrayed as bitter, out of touch, and borderline delusional. Now, I’d argue that’s all absolutely true. Liberals are all those things and worse. I happen to think liberals are inherently funnier because they’re so obnoxious and their failures are so undeniable.
Are we doing to them what they did to us? I hope so. Look, I don’t buy the idea of equivalency. Liberalism is a failure—we lived through decades of it. It is opposed to freedom—we all saw how the liberals ignored the Constitution to keep power, even if it meant sticking some critics in jail. Liberalism makes people stupid, lazy, and weak. I’m all for it being mocked because it’s terrible.
But we conservatives have to make sure not to allow our new cultural power to turn us reactionary or allow us to fall prey to powerful interests. Power always corrupts, and I expect it will with us in the entertainment world—hell, I expect it will in the entire culture. This next generation is going to find fault with us, and that’s okay. I just hope the people who take us out when we get fat, lazy, and corrupt are more conservative than we are!
Jack Archer (Democratic Strategist)
When the retired Democratic strategist talks about the past, you can read the disappointment on his face. It was clear that at one time he believed in liberalism. It is not so clear that his current support for it is based on anything more than habit.
You need to understand something about Obama. He always—always—succeeded because his opponents screwed up. He waited for it. But the GOP made him be aggressive, and he just wasn’t that good at it. I wish our party today would stop “me tooing” them and start fighting them like they fought us!
But I don’t see that happening for a while. The Obamacare thing was really the first domino. It was so incompetently executed, and the fact was that if the Democrats had been upfront about how it was going to really turn everyone’s healthcare insurance upside down, it never would have passed. And then they just wouldn’t stop digging once they got into the hole. People would be upset and they would essentially tell them that they were too stupid to understand all the liberals were doing for them. Liberals had gotten away with a lot in the past, but you couldn’t deny what people saw with their own eyes.
And then Hillary comes in and tries to salvage all these programs that, while well intentioned, were just falling apart and becoming unsustainable. Not just Obamacare—Medicaid, food stamps, everything. All the while the economy is still tanking for everyone except the politicians’ rich friends on Wall Street. These were Democrats and they were cavorting with rich guys! How the hell was I supposed to spin that!
I was a strategist trying to find a way to win our campaigns. You know how hard it is to sell a product that stinks and that everyone knows stinks? In the 1950s it was the Ford Edsel. In the 1980s, New Coke. In the 2020s, the iPhone 19.
I don’t think the damn conservatives killed liberalism. I think liberals did by not being honest, competent liberals.
Michael Ambarian (Supreme Court Justice)
The justice ponders the activist conservative Supreme Court of today as he orders another pint of Guinness.
Do I have doubts about using the courts to promote a constitutional conservative agenda? Hell no. Not a one. Constitutional conservatism is about conserving the Constitution, not about substituting in the latest leftist legal fad du jour. There’s your difference.
We learned from Justice Roberts that when you play constitutional footsie with progressives, their foot kicks your ass. No, I have zero problem with activism in support of the Constitution. We ought to be more active in support of it.”
Roberta Klein (Conservative Activist/Attorney)
The renowned lawyer sums up the fight that took three decades of her career.
We never gave an inch—we fought attacks on free speech, freedom of the press, free exercise of religion, the right to keep and bear arms, and the right to be free of unreasonable searches. The thing about progressives is that, unlike us, these freedoms were always merely tools to use to batter their opponents. They never really held them as principles and never had a moment’s hesitation in abridging them once they had power.
But for constitutional conservatives, these were bedrock, core beliefs. And the American people saw who fought for them. In the minds of most Americans, constitutional conservatism became the ideology associated with freedom. And when you thought of progressivism, you thought of the smug bureaucrat who denied your request for a doctor’s appointment.
Billy Coleman (Activist)
Billy has shopping to do—at a midsized grocery store whose owner he has known since high school. He picks up his hemp shopping bag and leaves me with a thought.
Might Walmart come back someday? Kind of up to it. If it wants to play by the same rules as everyone else, it’s welcome to try. But the days when a corporation can use the government to crush the little guy and erase the competition, well, those days are over.
I gotta get my shopping done and get back to the farm—my cows won’t milk themselves.
Ted Jindal (Technology Consultant)
The master technologist activates the HP holograph monitor and gestures toward it with evident pride, as well as evident concern.
This is our encrypted database. It has everyone we know or believe is a constitutional conservative, and we interact with them constantly. There’s a phenomenon we call “tech exhaustion” where a person gets tired of constant contact over social media, but we see surprisingly little of it. Most conservatives have learned you have to watch these bastards like hawks, and we do that for them and pass them the info they need to stamp out liberalism wherever is raises its pointy little head. They learned the hard way—if you aren’t engaged, the bad guys still will be.
Brad Fields (Insurance Salesman)
Brad has to take a call from a client, but leaves me with some final thoughts.
I feel like today we have the country that the Founders promised us. Some people are angry because there’s no more free lunch. I say, “Great!” Government is supposed to protect people and allow them to live their lives freely, not to subsidize deadbeats.
You know what I want from the federal government? A military that can kill our enemies, guards on our borders to make sure you can’t come in without an invitation, and not a helluva lot else. If it isn’t in the Constitution, the federal government has no business doing it. Period.