by Matt Kibbe
OK. Thanks, Larry. I think we got the point. You should get help. Soon.
Senator John McCain came off only slightly more balanced than the MSNBC host, taking to the Senate floor the next morning to school the young Senator from Kentucky on the how-tos of millennial outreach: “If Mr. Paul wants to be taken seriously,” the seventy-seven-year-old senator said, “he needs to do more than pull political stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids in their college dorms.”26 Senator McCain’s most reliable sidekick, Lindsey Graham, sided squarely with Barack Obama and his stonewalling attorney general. “I do not believe that question deserves an answer,” Graham said. According to a Washington Times report:
Mr. Graham said he defends Mr. Paul’s right to ask questions and seek answers, but said the filibuster has actually pushed him to now support Mr. Brennan. Mr. Graham said he had been inclined to oppose the nomination because he’d found Brennan to be qualified for the job but also “arrogant, kind of a bit shifty.” He said he wasn’t going to filibuster him but would have voted against him on final passage, but now he’ll vote for him. “I am going to vote for Brennan now because it’s become a referendum on the drone program,” he said.27
But while the filibuster was actually going down, most ignored it. It was just a stunt, another archaic parliamentary procedure that no one really pays any attention to. Early on during Paul’s almost thirteen-hour talkathon, the story was not a story at all, but a source of ridicule among Beltway cognoscenti. So few rational people outside the Capitol Bubble pay any attention to what happens on the floor of the U.S. Senate on any given day, you could almost forgive the denizens of conventional wisdom for missing the point. Why would an outsider like Rand Paul, who won his Senate seat in Kentucky in 2010 by beating Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s handpicked candidate in the Republican primary, use such an insider tactic?
DEFENDING THE STATUS QUO
The filibuster, a last-ditch attempt by a single member of the Senate to stall consideration of legislation, has a storied history in legislative warfare. Typically, this roadblock has been used to defend the status quo inside the cloistered walls of the most closed, insulated institution in America—the U.S. Senate. They don’t call it a club for nothing: It’s a privileged cadre unaccustomed to the bright light of public attention. And that’s the way they like it.
The most infamous use of the filibuster, of course, was by Democratic senator Strom Thurmond, then a segregationist who famously fought against the efforts of Martin Luther King. In 1948, Thurmond had actually left the Democratic Party to run for president as a Dixiecrat. Thurmond would later argue that “King demeans his race and retards the advancement of his people.”28
In 1954, the landmark Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education had ended “separate but equal” and started the process of integrating schools all over the country. A year after that, Rosa Parks famously refused to sit in the “blacks only” section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her bravery helped force racist government policies into the public psyche.
On August 28, 1957, at 8:54 P.M., Thurmond took the Senate floor in opposition to major provisions of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. He would not stop until more than twenty-four hours later. He denied that any blacks were being denied a right to vote and argued that every state already had sufficient voter rights protections in their existing laws. “I think it is indicative that Negroes are voting in large numbers. Of course, they are not so well qualified to vote as are the white people.”29
To this day, Thurmond’s remains the longest verbal filibuster in U.S. history. Ultimately, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 passed the Senate and was signed into law, but not before Thurmond and his Democratic colleagues had stripped the legislation of key provisions.30
Segregationists like Thurmond had thoroughly corrupted the notion of “states’ rights” and the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution—a vital and legitimate check on federal abuses of power—to obfuscate their real agenda. Thurmond and many others used the excuse of federalism to justify the oppression of individuals—unequal treatment under law—but that was never the intention of the federalist system. Yes, the states must not submit to federal tyranny, but that does not give them license to be tyrannical themselves. It was all about the rights of the individual.
Free people should judge others based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. If you believe in liberty and the dignity of the individual, you inherently believe in treating everyone equally under the laws of the land. This is a first principle. It’s nonnegotiable. Defending the rights of the individual, including equal treatment under the law, is a fundamental responsibility of a constitutionally limited government, as James Madison had so eloquently argued in Federalist 51.
#STANDWITHRAND
So the filibuster seemed like a strange tactic for a feisty young “tea party” senator to employ against presidential tyranny, and in support of the fundamental right of individual American citizens to due process under our constitution. He was flipping old traditions upside down, using an old tactic to disrupt the status quo, using the same tool that Strom Thurmond had used, but this time to defend our individual civil liberties from a government that had overstepped its constitutional limits.
The Internet had changed everything. As Rand Paul spoke, social media, especially Twitter, exploded almost instantaneously as people tuned into C-SPAN based on a tweet or a Facebook post from a friend. Check this out: This senator is speaking truth to power. At their peak, creative Twitter hashtags like #StandWithRand, #filiblizzard, and the more prosaic #RandPaul were seeing two thousand mentions a minute.31 A report put together by the media analysis firm, TrendPo, shows that, by the filibuster’s end, #StandWithRand had become the number-one trending topic on Twitter with more than 1.1 million associated tweets. During the following twenty-four hours, Rand Paul gained an astonishing 44,700 new followers.32
When Rand Paul finally yielded the floor, hoarse and exhausted, it was past midnight on March 7. He had been speaking for a total of twelve hours and fifty-two minutes.33 Mocked and ignored just a few hours earlier, Paul had succeeded in changing the conversation globally, transforming the political landscape by endrunning the Beltway information monopolists.
That day, a Washington Post headline pronounced: “An Old Tactic Packs New Power in Digital Age.” Polling of possible 2016 Republican presidential contenders showed Paul jumping the queue “into Tier 1 status, leapfrogging Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Mike Huckabee to place a very respectable 2nd in a 9 person field.”34 On March 8, one CNN commentator said that, “[a]t least for the time being, Tea Party darling Sen. Rand Paul is the effective leader of the Republican Party. And that’s a pretty big deal.”35
Was #StandWithRand a publicity stunt, a waste of time? I don’t think so. Public opinion polls conducted in the days and weeks following the filibuster showed a marked decline in approval for the Obama administration’s drone policies. Whereas a clear majority of Americans favored drone strikes prior to Paul’s raising of the issue, afterward approval for such policies plummeted to just 41 percent.36 On March 7, Attorney General Eric Holder sent another letter. “Dear Senator Paul,” it read. “It has come to my attention that you now have asked an additional question. ‘Does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on U.S. soil?’ The answer to that is no.”37 This, of course, was the question all along. Opinions will come and go, and polls will rise and fall, but ultimately, Senator Paul’s efforts produced real policy change, a reining in of executive power, and a legal opinion from the top law enforcement officer of the land, previously not offered, that will have legal standing in future debates over our civil liberties and the limits on executive power.
A RIGHT TO KNOW
Nearly 215 million people use Twitter on a regular basis, sending half a billion tweets a day. Facebook has more than a billion active users worldwide.38 Twitter is scooping old media on news st
ories approximately 20 percent of the time.39 More than 50 percent of people say they have learned about breaking news from social media rather than from a traditional news source; 27.8 percent of people get their news from social media in general. Social media was responsible for breaking major news stories such as the Egyptian uprising, the Hudson River plane crash, and Osama bin Laden’s death.40 Information and knowledge itself have been democratized, no longer filtered by three television networks offering a monolithic product controlled by self-anointed experts.
The full implications of tremendously responsive and ever-mutating social networks are only beginning to be understood, but their decentralizing power is undeniable. Freedom is trending, I believe, because of the “long tail” of the Internet. Imagine a world where ideas are easy to find, and learning is available to anyone who’s willing to work for it.
John Perry Barlow, the cyberlibertarian and cofounder of EFF, saw the disruptive nature of the Internet before just about anyone else, and imagines a world where every one of us has, at our fingertips, a “right to know”:
For the first time, we have it within range to make it possible for anybody, anywhere to know everything that he is intellectually capable of assimilating about any topic. That is to say, he can know as much, whether he is in the uplands of Mali or midtown Manhattan, about some nuance of molecular biology as is presently known by anybody. Now, I understand that knowledge also has a context, and this is much likelier to be the case if it’s not in the uplands of Mali, since you won’t have so many people to discuss it with. But there is, I think, the possibility that we can convey to future generations the right to know. The right to know, as much as they want to know, and that includes everything that’s presently known and generally applicable by anybody. And it also includes everything that is known, or can be known, about what one’s government is doing.41
Several days after Rand Paul’s game-changing talkathon, I happened to be speaking to the annual gathering of the European Students for Liberty, in Leuven, Belgium. My topic, fortuitously, was all about the liberating nature of social media and the strategic implications for grassroots efforts to restore liberty and the dignity of the individual in an era of encroaching government power. What amazed me most about the gathering was the incredible growth in the number and quality of the students in the group from the previous year’s event. There was now a packed auditorium, more than four hundred freedom-loving students gathered from all over the world. Given the timeliness of the Paul filibuster, I had decided to use it as a real time example of the new political disintermediation. How many people knew of it, I asked. Every one of their hands went up. How many people participated in the Paul filibuster on Twitter? Almost every hand went up.
How quickly things have changed. Imagine this opportunity before us. We have the ability, at least theoretically, to find every single person in the world who believes in individual freedom and who has access to the Internet. We can connect with them, share ideas, books, and strategies. We can gather and coalesce, build a virtual division of labor, and generate a new accountability against the many instances of government overreach and tyranny happening every day, all over the world. Together, acting in voluntary cooperation, we can create a “greater social intelligence” and social awareness unlike anything possible before.
Compare the experience of these students, many of whom had already read the same books I struggled to find when I was their age.
I stumbled upon the ideas of liberty by accident when I bought that Rush album, 2112, the one I didn’t want. I happened upon an old used copy of Anthem at a community garage sale. I accidentally discovered the Austrian economics program available at Grove City College and George Mason University in a late night argument fueled only by the wisdom-enhancing properties of cold beer.
Today, I would just Google it. I would “like” Ludwig von Mises on Facebook. I would watch a 1976 performance of “2112” on YouTube. I would follow Rand Paul, or Ted Cruz, or Justin Amash on Twitter. I would almost instantaneously connect with centuries of intellectual tradition that had allowed subsequent generations to stand on the intellectual shoulders of the best activists, entrepreneurs, thinkers, rabble-rousers, and disrupters.
Imagine a world where Lech Walesa, the heroic grassroots leader of Poland’s Solidarity movement, could have live-streamed his courageous calls for civil disobedience from the shipyards of Gdansk. What if Samuel Adams, America’s first community organizer, could have live-tweeted the Boston Tea Party in real time across the colonies? What if Dr. King could have organized a virtual March on Washington for all of those who could not afford to get to the nation’s capital on August 28, 1963?
The Internet is a force multiplier for free people because we naturally fit with its ethos. Everything is transparent, and there are simple rules. No one gets to tell anyone else what to do. But people are constantly coming together in common purpose, based upon mutually agreed-upon goals, to bigger ends. That is precisely how freedom works.
That’s why freedom is trending online. Freedom is breaking down barriers to knowing. It also seems to be breaking down the old rules of political partisanship. It may no longer be so black and white, Republicans versus Democrats. It may not even be about liberals versus conservatives. What if the new political spectrum has on one side those people who want to be left alone, those who want to be free, those who don’t hurt people or take their stuff, and on the other extreme of this new scale stands anyone who wants to use government power to tell you how to live your life?
Don’t believe me? Consider this story from the Guardian about a grassroots protest in Washington, D.C., organized against the Obama administration’s practice of mass surveillance of its innocent citizens:
Billed by organizers as “the largest rally yet to protest mass surveillance,” Stop Watching Us was sponsored by an unusually broad coalition of left- and right-wing groups, including everything from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Green Party, Color of Change and Daily Kos to the Libertarian Party, FreedomWorks and Young Americans for Liberty.
William Evans, of Richmond, Virginia, may have best embodied the nonpartisan atmosphere and message of the event. He wore a “Richmond Tea Party” baseball cap, as well as a Code Pink sticker saying “Make Out, Not War.” He is a member of the Richmond Tea Party but not of Code Pink, he said, adding that he “just loved” what the sticker said. Evans said he was attending to protest the “shredding of the constitution” and added that he was happy that “you guys on the left are finally starting to see it.”
“We may not always agree on our belief system,” he added, “but thank God we agree on the Constitution.”42
Code Pink and the tea party? The Internet really does change everything. No wonder John McCain is freaking out.
CHAPTER 7
A SEAT AT THE TABLE
THE OLD WAY OF doing things in Washington was based on a closed system, an exclusive club that favored insiders and the politically connected over principled leaders with big ideas. Follow the leader. Toe the party line. Shake the right hands. That was the only way to get elected, the only way to even have a shot at making a difference. But within the constraints of the system, the rules are always stacked against freedom, and accountability, and fiscal responsibility.
The emergence of the Internet and social media has begun to change all that. The machinery of government no longer functions entirely behind closed doors, shielded from the light of public attention. Information on last-minute floor votes and arcane congressional floor procedure is tweeted out, posted, and otherwise instantaneously distributed to millions of concerned citizens. Through the magic of live streaming, we can watch events unfold on the House and Senate floors in real time, from the comfort of our own smart phones.
Knowledge is power, and the diminishing marginal costs of getting good information about Washington’s ways is changing the old, tired political calculus. Politicians can no longer hide from their constituents, telling them one thing
back home while voting for business as usual in the nation’s capital. As a result, we are beginning to see real accountability, and the effects, though only just beginning to be felt, are amazing.
Thanks to the power of political disintermediation, the American people are making their voices heard in Washington. A new generation of congressmen and senators has emerged to give voice to the formerly voiceless, to keep their promises, and to stand on principle.
This is nothing short of a paradigm shift that gives shareholders a real seat at the table in Washington. Our proxy representation at the board of directors’ table is a growing bicameral “Liberty Caucus,” the size and quality of which is historically unprecedented in American politics.
I was lucky enough to sit down with six of the most exciting figures to emerge from this new political environment, to get their take on things. I asked them about their history with the ideas of liberty and their experiences confronting the political establishment. Senators Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Ted Cruz (R-TX), along with Representatives Justin Amash (R-MI), Thomas Massie (R-KY), and David Schweikert (R-AZ), are leading among those writing the new rules in politics, where power does not go to those most entrenched in a broken system, but remains with the people, where the founders intended it.*
These are some smart, fearless guys. Because this is my book, I took the liberty to mash up six separate conversations into an imaginary gab fest between all six legislators. All of their quotes, of course, are the real thing.
Here’s what went down in my imaginary living room:
MK: We’re talking about the ideas of liberty and the way that the world has changed so much in the last couple of years, but I wanted to ask you first, how you got into these ideas. How did you discover freedom?
TED CRUZ: As a kid I got very involved in a group in Houston that was called the Free Enterprise Institute. It had a program where it taught high school kids principles of free market economics, and it would have us read Milton Friedman, and Hayek, and Von Mises, and Bastiat, and have us prepare speeches on free market economics. In the course of four years of high school I ended up giving right about eighty speeches across the state of Texas on free market economics, and also on the Constitution. And that became really the intellectual inspiration and foundation for being involved in the liberty movement.
