They no longer bought their own nonsense—they just mouthed the words. And we had all heard the words and phrases so often, they lost any meaning even to the suckers who believed them before they became clichés.
“War on Women.” “Racism.” “Fair share.” It was all crap. It was all a scam.
Liberalism’s corruption was so complete they didn’t even try to hide it anymore. Crusader for the little guy Al Gore made a fortune off the global warming swindle—it’s still getting colder 30 years on!—and then he doubled it selling his Current TV network to the oil sheiks of the Middle East for a stack of petrodollars. He didn’t even bother to explain it. And no one on the left bothered to comment. Why? Because everyone who had bothered to pay attention—the politicians, the pundits, the media mavens, the cocktail party intelligentsia—all knew that liberalism was just a crock of bullshit.
The Obama campaign won reelection in 2012 based not on “Hope and Change” but on slander and lies. Hillary Clinton didn’t even pretend. She was right out front—it was about greed. Vote for her and she would steal from her opponents and give you a cut via entitlements.
But Americans aren’t a cynical people. I talk to them and with them every day. They are actually very idealistic, and the Constitution embodies that idealism. They started to see the truth, that liberalism was nothing more than a racket designed to spread the spoils in the form of money and power among a small group of elitists on the coasts, in the faculty lounges, and in DC. The poor, well, they got a few scraps—not enough to live like free men and women, but enough to buy their votes in exchange for their dignity.
The liberals knew it. We conservatives certainly knew it. Our challenge was getting the rest of America to know it. We wanted all Americans to internalize this truth the way that popular culture had led them to internalize the bizarre lie that conservatives are repressed sexaphobes who obeyed that Pat Robertson guy and wanted to ban fun in all its forms. That sure as hell wasn’t me, and it sure wasn’t the constitutional conservatives I knew.
Brad Fields (Insurance Salesman)
Fields is a self-described “regular guy,” having never previously held office or been involved in politics, but having been drawn into the insurgency during the Obama administration as things began to fall apart. You get the impression that he considers politics a bother, that he would prefer doing just about anything else. In fact, he only becomes truly excited discussing Clemson football—his office is decked with team memorabilia. As for his role in the insurgency, he talks about it as if having to get involved was an inconvenience. You get the distinct impression he did so only reluctantly, and only because he saw he had no other choice.
Do you think I dreamed of selling insurance as a kid growing up? Could anything be sadder? I wanted to be a lawyer, but when I finished college I was already in $50,000 of debt, and there was no way I was going to spend three years and $250,000 to be an unemployed shyster. But grad school seemed my only option. There were no jobs—none—for people like me. I poured coffee at a Starbucks in the 2010s, fetching lattes for liberal snobs. Of course, I was liberal too then, I guess. I didn’t really care about politics. I just wanted to do my thing, watch the game on the weekend, and drink some beers.
See this scar? It used to be a tattoo of the Chinese character for luck, or so I was told. I thought it was so cool. I was too stupid to see that I was wrong for a long time. I was also too stupid to see that I was wrong about liberalism until I realized that it was being built on my back and I wasn’t getting squat—except for being called a racist or a sexist or whatever during our company diversity seminars. So I was almost happy to get a gig selling health insurance, a perfect fit for a guy with a bachelor’s degree in communications, whatever that was. I’m still not sure what I got out of college except an exhausted liver.
Anyway, my job was to try to explain Obamacare to these small business owners and individuals. It was a nightmare. It was a total train wreck, and I remember wondering why the Democrats resisted any effort to fix even the stupidest provisions. Initially I blamed the Republicans because, well, everything was always the Republicans’ fault, right? But after a while, I started to figure out the truth—and seeing my lazy classmates who weren’t working living off government money about as well as I was living off of money I earned and then paid out in taxes certainly helped.
Obamacare started falling apart right from the beginning. I was cancelling long-time customers and all I could offer were these new policies for more money with higher deductibles. People would ask me why this was happening, and one day I just lost it and said, “It’s the damn liberals. They never should have screwed with it.” That’s when I realized I was a constitutional conservative.
Ashley Hampton (Reluctant Conservative Activist)
A Portland antique compact disc store owner (“You’re going to hate me for being a Portland cliché, but I really do prefer CD sound quality and texture to newer music delivery media”) and self-described ex-liberal, Hampton found herself under enormous peer pressure when she began asking uncomfortable questions about progressive premises.
How liberal was I? Oh gosh, totally. If there was a liberal cliché, I was it. I was against racism, sexism, homophobia, lookism, fatism—everything—and, of course, I saw them everywhere. The Republicans, especially the Tea Party people, now they were just awful. I hated them. They were the worst human beings on earth. Worse than Nazis, who at that time I still thought were right-wingers.
Of course, I had never actually met any Tea Partiers—or Tea Baggers, as we liked to call them—but I was liberal and I didn’t need to actually know someone to know that I was better and more moral than him.
I was really into feminism. I saw patriarchy everywhere. I initially responded to the liberal outreach to women like me—they seemed to be telling me that as a young, single woman, liberalism was going to take care of me. There was this cartoon character, Julia, that the liberals used in the Obama campaign. This Julia, at every juncture of her life, was getting something from the government. Cradle to grave, the government was taking care of her.
But after a while this had started to bother me at some level, because it seemed that as a feminist I shouldn’t be relying on others. To me, feminism was, and is, about finding the power within myself to think and do for myself. I didn’t need a man to support me, but then the liberals were telling me that I needed them. My friends didn’t seem bothered by it, and I kind of put it aside, but it seemed weird to me.
I thought liberalism was about freedom. Really, I did. I just hadn’t thought about it critically yet. But then even more of these things started coming out that kind of puzzled me. There was the NSA surveillance thing—the government was listening in to telephone calls and tracking people’s Internet use. That really bothered me, and I remember getting grief because I blamed Obama. I mean, he was the president when they were doing this, so who was I supposed to blame? Well, evidently Bush, because some of it started under him. But I couldn’t understand why my liberal friends were letting Obama off the hook for not stopping it. It seemed really clear to me.
I started getting uncomfortable thoughts about the hypocrisy I was seeing on my own side. Liberals lied to us about health care, but that was okay because health care was really important. Since when was lying okay? Then you’d have liberal politicians being harassers and abusers, but we were supposed to blame the women because the men were too important to the liberal cause to hold accountable. What?