I tried and tried to get a job in my field, marketing, and no one was hiring. I remember talking to one employer and kind of demanding to know why he wouldn’t give me a job, like he owed me a job. The guy looked at me, shook his head, and asked why he should hire anyone now when he couldn’t be sure the government wouldn’t put some new regulation or tax on him next year. He told me he didn’t know how much I was going to cost from month to month because of all the things the government was doing “help” me, and that’s why I wasn’t getting a job. It really opened my eyes, or rather, started to.
When I finally got a job with an energy company out in Montana, my eyes were opened even wider. I was working very hard but my taxes were increasing, while more and more of my peers were sitting around doing nothing (often by choice) and getting paid for it!
Then the final straw came when the Obama administration’s EPA essentially banned fracking and I got laid off. I figured out that the only people liberals cared about were their fellow elitist progressives in Manhattan, Hollywood, Chicago, and DC. People like me were collateral damage, acceptable losses, for making their dreams come true.
I registered as a Republican while working at a McDonald’s.
Colonel Jeremy Denton, US Army (Ret.) (Insurgency Expert)
This gruff former Army War College instructor and Iraq/Afghanistan veteran lives outside of Atlanta, north of his old haunts at Fort Benning. He wears a .45 on his hip, largely as a political statement. His specialty on active duty was counterinsurgency warfare, but his passion was conservative politics. It was only after leaving active service that he got personally involved, but that did not keep him from turning his professional eye toward what was happening from the outside. As we talk, he seems to shift personas—from Army officer to college professor to barstool smart-ass and back again.
As we enjoy a cold Dos Equis on his porch, the colonel observes, “Now, insurgency is not a perfect metaphor for what happened. There was no real fighting, though I think there could have been if things happened differently. I don’t even want to think about that. But I see so many parallels to an insurgency that I think using it as the paradigm is the best way to understand what happened since 2009.”
The best reason for embarking on a conservative insurgency was the fact that we did not have a whole lot of other strategic options. We didn’t have a strong, organized majority that could try to push through what we wanted politically, and we had no real infrastructure to do it in the social and cultural spheres. With the eight-inch artillery that was the liberal mainstream media out there ready to call a fire mission in on any concentration of conservative power, there was no other viable strategic option. It wasn’t a conscious decision, of course—it just happened organically. We never really had a plan except to resist. That’s pretty much the best way for an insurgency to happen.
Look back at where we were at our low point in early 2013. Even if the political correlation of forces was different—say, if Romney had won in 2012 and perhaps the GOP had retaken the Senate—we still would probably have had to choose insurgency. Romney’s primary asset was that he wasn’t a liberal—well, at least that he wasn’t a liberal anymore—but he was certainly no constitutional conservative. He wasn’t a bad guy. He just wasn’t committed to the cause. He got a lot of support from the kind of milquetoast Republican who would bloviate about “working together” and “compromising” and “doing the job the American people sent us here to do” as a prelude to sticking real conservatives in the back. We would have had that fight with them if he had won; turns out, we had to have it anyway before we could really take on the liberals.
So even if we had Obama out of the White House, we would not have had a true constitutional conservative in it. And just because we might have had a Republican president would have done nothing for what was arguably the bigger problem conservatives faced, the liberal culture.
Say we had Romney and a GOP House and a GOP Senate and even a stronger GOP-inclined Supreme Court… so? At the end of the day, that would have been just a temporary correlation of forces. Parties change quickly, but culture… the culture changes slowly, and its impact dwarfs the transitory changes in Washington.
We conservatives had very little hold on the culture, and little combat power to retake it. Even with the political reins of power in our hands, the culture would remain progressive, incubating the virus of collectivist thought like monkeys in the jungle provide a reservoir for the Ebola virus. I like that—liberalism as a political Ebola virus!
Anyway, liberalism would just sit there, in the bastions of cultural progressivism—academia, the arts, the media, entertainment, and some sectors of the nonprofit and religious communities—waiting for a chance to spread once again.
No, even if we were stronger, our strategic choice would have to have been an insurgency. We couldn’t hit the strongholds of cultural progressivism head-on, not without causing massive resistance and a cultural fight we’d have had little or no chance of winning. Remember, they wanted to be victims, to be rebels—we’d be throwing them in the locally sourced, organic briar patch.
No, we needed to infiltrate them, quietly, stealthily, even as we cut off their subsidy money and negated their influence from the outside. We needed to go slowly, embarking upon the same kind of long-term campaign that led that crop of aging hippies and Viet Cong–hugging creeps to positions of authority and influence.
We had to destroy them from the inside by turning the culture conservative over time. We had to be stealthy and take advantage of our relatively few tactical advantages. And the only way to do that was through an insurgency.
Now, the strength of any insurgency is that it is decentralized. Conversely, the weakness of any insurgency is that it is decentralized. That’s the conundrum of insurgency.
A traditional military unit succeeds because the commander can use his force’s centralized command structure to synchronize efforts and focus combat power at decisive points within the battlespace. “Battlespace” is the replacement term for “battlefield”—there’s a whole wing of the Pentagon devoted to making up new words for perfectly good old words! They made up “battlespace” to recognize not just the three-dimensional nature of physical warfare but the intangible cyber/electronic and social arenas as well.
Anyway, a traditional commander has a centralized command and control system that lets him make everyone do what he wants them to do and go where he wants them to go to hit the other side all at the same time.
But insurgents have trouble doing that. Why? Because they aren’t centralized. Their chain of command is not so rigid—local leaders have significant power and may not answer to one overall commander. Logistically, they have trouble moving across the battlespace. Their problem is one of concentration—it’s hard for an insurgency to concentrate forces at a particular point in time and space in significant numbers.
Concentration allows you to focus combat power at one place for a maximum effect. Let me give you an example. You have 100 guys each with a pistol that has an effective range of, say, 50 meters. Each of them is 50 meters apart. So, the greatest number of your guys who can concentrate fire on one spot is three at a time unless you can move them, right?
But if you can coordinate, say, 20 of those guys to move to within 50 meters of a spot, you can then concentrate 20 guns on that spot. If you really want to kill something, have more guns concentrating fire on it. So, that’s concentration.
Now, if there were no downside to concentration, we would concentrate forces all the time. But concentrating your forces in one place is risky. It gives the other side a target! That’s why insurgents, at least smart ones, don’t concentrate their forces until they absolutely have to, and then only at the last minute. They avoid a force-on-force fight. The traditional military has a huge advantage because it is designed to concentrate overwhelming force quickly and efficiently.