They lie to our faces and tell us we’re stupid for having believed them. They convert the word “period” from meaning “no exceptions” into an all-purpose asterisk that converts whatever they say into whatever they happen to need it to mean at any given moment.
We need to be tough enough to accept all this, to face the challenge as it is and not as we wish it to be. If we are, we will grow strong enough to prevail in this struggle.
Today, we constitutional conservatives are the minority faction of a minority party—many of our opponents are those supposedly on our side, who call themselves “conservatives” back home at election time, then come to Washington and gleefully vote to sustain and expand the hideous, soul-killing welfare state and its attendant pathologies.
These pseudocons—call them “moderates,” “squishes,” “RINOs,” or “Lindseys”—hate us even more than they hate the liberals. We seek their removal; the liberals are content to let them enjoy a few perks as the loyal opposition, so long as they manifest that loyalty by not actually opposing anything. So we, not the real enemy, are their target.
Our opponents, therefore, have us surrounded. This is good. It means we can attack in any direction.
So, how does one fight outnumbered and outgunned? How can anyone in our position ever hope to win? I bet General George Washington wondered that as his forces lost battle after battle against the most powerful military in the world right up until the time the British cried “uncle” and the rebels won it all.
You win because you believe in your cause. We fight for principles. We believe in America and the promise of freedom and liberty embodied in the Constitution. Our main opponents—the welfare state liberals and the submissive Tories of the Republican establishment—believe only in retaining the perks and privileges of power.
They don’t stand a chance.
Our strategy—the blend of the means (resources) at our disposal with the available ways (the possible courses of action we can undertake) to reach the end we seek (a Constitution-based, free nation where individuals govern their own lives while also taking responsibility for them)—presents us only one real option. We must undertake a multifront, long-term political, social, and cultural insurgency designed to seize society’s high ground in order to restore the Founders’ vision. It’s not a struggle of violence but one of persuasion and action. Our weapons are not arms but arguments.
How does a force that is always “losing” end up winning? That’s the key question.
We need to fight smarter. We need to maximize our many strengths—and we have incredible strengths, starting with our message—while minimizing our weaknesses. We need to learn to hit our opponents not where they are strong, but where they are weak. We need to be agile, and to avoid allowing them to put their full strength against us.
We will pick at them until, exhausted and defeated, they collapse as we flow in to fill the vacuum. The looming final failure of Obamacare is only the beginning.
We need to prioritize our efforts, as any good insurgency does. And we need to accept that we don’t get a vote on reality. We need to approach reality in a way that supports our constitutional conservative objectives. We won’t achieve every policy objective—after all, we do not seek to be dictators. We must not become fixed on single issues while pursuing a wider vision. The alternative may be to lose the entire war instead of just a skirmish.
Remember that picking a hill to die on results in you dying. We’re not interested in our cause dying on principle. Conservatism is too important to let that happen. Let progressivism do the dying.
This is not about losing gloriously but about winning gloriously.
The current cliché is that the Tea Party is dead. Nonsense. We’re still here. We’re still ready to fight. And we’re going to fight.
We’re going to do so each in our own way, whether by infiltrating liberal institutions or using social media to participate in campaigns or simply modeling the benefits of a conservative lifestyle to regular Americans who have been brainwashed into thinking that government-subsidized degeneracy is their only option.
Remember that we are fighting a bloated, slow opponent. It hits hard only because it is so massive, wielding government force and media power, but it has to find you and hold you still to hit you. We have to be gone when they land a blow. We need to select our targets carefully, put our own power against their vulnerabilities, and leave the other side damaged, disorganized, and demoralized.
We need to drive our enemies to fits trying to find us, forcing them to play Conservative Whac-a-Mole as they get more and more exhausted trying to club us.
And we need allies. Libertarians first of all—we agree on much more than we disagree on, though our disagreements are real. But how about some people who think they are “liberal” but aren’t? These are people who value family, country, and hard work but for whatever reason—including the fog of propaganda disgorged by our opponents—they think we are the enemy.
And what about young people? We offer the opportunity to be more than a nation of hapless, eternally adolescent Julias . We also offer the chance to rebel against the stifling nannyism that has tormented young people from the day they set foot in the unionized conformity factories known as “public schools” to the petty fascist tyranny of the leftist-controlled universities. We need to seize the mantle of the rebel, the nonconformist, the individual.
We are cool, not these tatted-up, goateed conformists who share every stupid idea, notion, and prejudice with the rest of their boring, pseudointellectual clique. Wanna fight the power? Welcome to our struggle.
If this book did its job, it will leave you with both hope and inspiration. No insurgency can succeed if its participants do not believe that it will eventually prevail. That’s why the mainstream media is so intent on telling you how America has embraced liberalism and that you are alone, a freak, and a rejected relic of America’s wicked racist, sexist, imperialist, and homophobic past.
It’s all a lie—just look at how desperate they are to convince you.
The liberals protest too much. They know the enforced mediocrity, conformity, and squalor of their twisted ideology is poison to real Americans. They know that what we sell sells itself to those with self-respect and pride. This is why they are so busy undercutting those qualities with their government handouts.
We cannot lose—you should not merely have hope but the serene assurance that it is only a matter of time before America is once again that shining city on the hill and no longer a squalid slum in the swamp.
And, hopefully, you will be inspired to join the fight. How will you contribute? I don’t know. You know your capabilities, your resources, and your priorities better than anyone. You decide how you can best contribute.
You don’t need me to tell you what to do. You’re an American. You’re an adult. Think about how best you can help, and you’ll know what to do.
Then go do it.
And someday—yes, years from now—we will look around us at a restored America, and feel the pride of knowing that when our country’s most sacred values and principles were under merciless attack, we fought to take America back.
About the Author
Kurt Schlichter is a weekly columnist for Townhall.com. His freelance work has been published in the New York Post, the Washington Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Times, Army Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and elsewhere.