Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government's Stranglehold on America (40 page)

CULTURE CLASH

H
ISTORICALLY, THERE IS A BOOM AND BUST IN POLITICS.
T
HE
D
EMOCRATS
who held control of the House of Representative uninterrupted for forty years were thrown out by Republicans in 1994, who were, in turn, turned out in 2006. Political fortunes rise and fall. The media seems to expect this to happen to the Tea Party as well. And it may. But the problem with this narrative is that it has failed as a predictive model for explaining the future behavior of the Tea Party, which hasn’t ebbed with the natural flow of the political cycle.

The Tea Party was supposed to disappear after the 800-plus Tax Day rallies on April 15, 2009. It was supposed to dissipate after the passage of Obamacare in 2010. “The air is out of the tea party balloon,” said one DNC operative on March 16, 2010. “Today’s dismal showing on Capitol Hill coupled with the turnout we’re seeing at health reform rallies across the country where supporters are outnumbering opponents by three to one and four to one clearly demonstrates that the momentum is squarely on the side of those who support reform.”
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Grassroots opposition to legislation could not translate into an effective GOTV machine, everyone predicted.

But, like a community trying to solve a problem, the Tea Party continued to evolve, reflecting changing circumstances, different challenges, and the inevitable momentum of an organic movement that is not directed by any single mind.

We no longer have to gather in D.C. en masse to get the establishment’s attention. We did that in 2009, with more than a million activists choosing to squeeze their family budget and put aside, for a few days, the obligations of everyday life. But remember Saul Alinsky’s seventh “rule for radicals”: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” It wouldn’t make sense to gather en masse in D.C. anymore. We’re beyond that.

Protesters protest because they have no better avenue to vent their dissatisfaction with the status quo.

“Tea Party activists who were protesting outside their Statehouses two years ago have now grown more sophisticated,” writes Matt Bai. “They’re quietly organizing through social media, running local candidates and pressuring lawmakers in private meetings.” Bai is a
New York Times Magazine
political reporter, and author of
The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.
The Democrats went through their own hostile takeover bid leading up to the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries. More recently, he wonders: “Does anybody have a grip on the G.O.P.?”
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Bai sees some significant analogies between what happened to the Democratic Party then and the Republican Party today. There is a culture clash going on, at this moment, between the entrenched management of the Republican establishment and grassroots insurgents—both inside the legislative bodies of the House and Senate, and back home, across America.

The question is, who will co-opt whom? Many on the elite management team hope, like former Senate majority leader Trent Lott, that the new Tea Party class and the grassroots that elected them will be absorbed into the system with as few ruffled feathers as possible. “But there is another interpretation,” argues Bai. Maybe “the movement is actually starting to alter the makeup of the party from the bottom up, and it only appears to be losing intensity because its leaders are no longer interested in shouting into bullhorns. If that’s true, and if more Tea Party members start streaming into Washington in the years head, then the next chapter of Republican politics in Washington could look less like ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ and more like ‘Attack of the Clones.’”

One thing is certain: things will never go back to the way they were before. The system has been democratized in ways that Thomas Jefferson could only dream of in 1776. “There are practical explanations for why both party establishments have undergone some version of this same devolution,” writes Bai. “The most important, and most obvious, is the proliferation of broadband Internet and the way it has redefined, within the space of just a few years, the very concept of a political movement.” The hurly-burly of millions of people seeking information, connecting with one another, organizing groups of never-met-before cyber-brothers and cyber-sisters who share facts and correct the record, countless times daily.

This beautiful chaos is an emergent order that creates “a right to knowledge.” But “knowledge” is a negative right, like “the pursuit of happiness.” You are free to seek information, to hold elected officials to account, to fact-check, and to know new things unencumbered by some top-down government bureaucracy that would block your pursuit. But no one is going to do it for you. No one is going to deliver to your door, as an entitlement, a positive right, the knowledge you need to participate in this new democratized, disintermediated world of politics.

That’s up to you. Government will go to those who bother to show up.

You are in charge. For the first time in recent memory, the American people are poised to enact change from the ground up, in response to their own feelings and desires, not those that have been crafted and force-fed by political parties. The political status quo has enjoyed incredible stability. Past political movements like the Reagan Revolution relied on the system itself to enact change, and in the years since, many of Reagan’s accomplishments have been slowly rolled back.

As for Alexander the Great, the empire could not survive the death of its creator; the generals, freed from the hypnotic power of their leader, ran amok. The same is true of the Republican Revolution in 1994—another example of reform from within the system, managed by the system, and ultimately controlled (and lost) by the system. A good effort that was ultimately doomed to fail. In 2006 and 2008, the Left tried to send “agents of change” to Washington, but ended up getting more of the same.

But real change isn’t really about political power anyway. Political power corrupts and unchecked political power disappoints absolutely. It’s about the paradigm shift, from the top-down to the bottom-up. Real impact, if and when it manifests itself, will be from sustainable, ever-present pressure from the bottom up, to do things differently in Washington, D.C. Different than they’ve been done in the past.

The power of our community, what sets us apart, is back home: neighbor to neighbor, street by street, town by town, district by district. Think nationally, act locally.

The genie is out of the bottle. The toothpaste won’t go back in the tube. As much as incumbent CEOs might try, there is no returning to the old politics of closed systems. The hostility and disdain with which the establishment attacks is just a reflex, like the headless chicken that keeps running. They think things can go back to the way they were before. But they won’t. Just ask former president-for-life Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia. Or ask former House Budget Committee chairman John Spratt of South Carolina. A hostile takeover, by the people, replaced both through the power of information and decentralized social media, and through a willingness of the human spirit to say, “Enough!”

The liberalization of political markets through easy-to-access information and social media—and the narrowing of the gap between concentrated benefits and dispersed costs via the Internet—has fundamentally changed politics forever. If you believe in freedom and government accountability, then this is a fundamentally good thing for the human condition and poses a fundamental threat to tyrannical government. Information
is
power. Social media like Facebook and Twitter have had this effect because these networking tools eliminate the middleman—in most cases, the government bureaucrat—and we should jealously guard political conversations that are intermediary-free.

FREEDOM IS OUR STRATEGY

F
OR ALL THE HYPE ABOUT THE
O
BAMA MACHINE AND THE TAKEOVER
of the Democratic establishment, I don’t think that the contemporary Left has a real grasp of the implications of political disintermediation. The problem for them is that you can’t ever really control, from the top down, spontaneously organizing social movements. You can’t outadjust markets; you can’t outprice the price system. You can never know as much as can be known through the process of discovery and adjustment to change that produces “a greater social intelligence.” And you can’t outorganize, from the top down, what people might do of their own free will, toward a set of goals based on a set of values determined by them, not you, the government official.

Left free, people can accomplish great things, working together on a voluntary, value-for-value basis. Not free, they will seek, like water finding its own level, any opportunity to break their bonds.

This is the dilemma confronted by the coalition that elected Obama in 2008. This is why Van Jones, former Obama green jobs czar, is spending so much time studying what Tea Partiers did to outorganize the community organizers in the 2010 elections. The assumption of Plouffe and others involved in Organizing for Obama was that you needed a leader, someone at the top of a hierarchy. Progressives, it seems, pine for leaders. According to Jones:

So we had Obama the meta-brand, and then we all affiliated to it. And that’s why 2008 felt so great. You know why? Because you didn’t have to quit your labor union to be a part of this meta-brand. You didn’t have to leave your lesbian rights group to be a part. You got to keep everything you ever had, you got to keep your identity, everything you were passionate about. You could still put on that baseball cap and be a part of something bigger: That’s a meta-brand. And we thought “Well, you could only do that if you got a presidential candidate.”
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But the Tea Party emerged as a leaderless movement, and changed everything. Tea Party 2.0, the spontaneous evolution of the movement into a Get Out the Vote machine, was unexpected by just about everyone, simply because such a thing had never happened before. It was a fundamentally bigger step toward the disintermediation of politics than anything the Obama machine had built in 2008.

“We can no longer rely on a single charismatic individual,” says Van Jones, referring to their now tarnished political messiah of hope and change. Why? Because “people let you down.”

But principles are enduring. And values are enduring. And it’s time for us not to just have a charismatic leader, but a charismatic network. That’s the genius of the Tea Party. They have charismatic leaders . . . of a certain kind. But if Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck and Dick Armey had a press conference tomorrow and said, “The Tea Party is over,” it wouldn’t be over. Because the values and the network wouldn’t let it. They built a starfish and not a spider, and that is the next challenge for our movement.
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Ultimately, Van Jones won’t get it right, because he doesn’t comprehend how freedom works. He was a czar, after all, hardwired to assume that someone else—namely himself—is better suited to make decisions than free people choosing for themselves. He doesn’t understand how millions of people located in disparate places—each individual with unique knowledge of their community and circumstances—can voluntarily cooperate and coordinate plans to create something far greater and more valued than any individual could have done alone.

This is the miracle of the market, what Hayek called the spontaneous order. The basis of Hayek’s critique of central government planning and Keynesian attempts to “stimulate” the economy through new spending is this understanding of the market process of discovery. Even the most benevolent czar or the smartest bureaucrat rationing health care on the Independent Payment Advisory Board in the bowels of the Department of Health and Human Services could not possibly know better than free people acting to better themselves and their communities.

“Spontaneous order” equally describes the emergence and power of the citizen protest against big government that we now commonly refer to as the Tea Party. Tea Party values are based on a fundamental belief in freedom, and so is our strategy. There is no leader; no one is in charge. Our movement is fueled by the decentralization of information on the Internet and the ease of connecting with like-minded citizens through social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter, and FreedomConnector. We have evolved, spontaneously, from a protest movement to a GOTV machine. No one knows exactly what is next, but there can be little doubt that the Tea Party is now one of the most important nonviolent social movements in American history.

The future now depends on a continued commitment to the ethos of decentralization, the idea that even in politics, the customer is always right. Intermediaries, be they politicians or organizations like FreedomWorks, exist only as servants to this cause. Do what you say you will do. Add value. Don’t take credit for work that someone else performs. Don’t hurt other people and don’t take their stuff. These are values that defined America’s founding. They can define our future, too.

Too many worry about the limits of decentralization—that eventually the whole leaderless bubble will pop—and the elite will reassert their centralized control. But the best way to beat the entrenched looters and moochers, the powerful public employees unions and the billionaire progressive elites clamoring to spend your paycheck on their grand designs, is by fully embracing the beautiful chaos of this citizen revolt against big government. That’s how we have accomplished so much in such a short period of time, and it is the only practical way that we will ever beat the well-financed special interests that comprise the big government coalition.

If we try to match them toe to toe, dollar for dollar; if we fight them on their field, with their referees and their rules; if we concede the eventuality of our own grassroots demise and look for someone else’s “support” and “know-how,” we will lose. But, as we have seen again and again, the Left intrinsically believes in order from the top down. They believe someone needs to be in charge: a czar, a better benevolent bureaucrat who knows better than you do, a messiah who will heal the planet with a global plan. They can’t help but build hierarchical structures, because that’s what they believe in. This is our strategic window. Embrace the beautiful chaos of citizen action and, by our own movement’s success, prove that freedom works.