by Matt Kibbe
DAVID SCHWEIKERT: It came to me as a teenager. Somehow I got my hands on an Ayn Rand book. And unlike most people, I started with a book called We the Living. In Arizona it’s really hot during the summer, so you’re just inside going through the pages. And I fell in love with the heroine in that. And from there it just sort of built into understanding the power of the individual. And I have to admit, even in the high school I was in, there were probably a dozen of us who became Rand devotees.
THOMAS MASSIE: My gateway issue was gun rights. When I was eighteen I went to school in Massachusetts from Kentucky. I’d read about people who wanted to ban guns, but I’d never met one. And instantly I found myself surrounded by these people that wanted to ban guns. And that was my liberty issue.
MIKE LEE: I was raised with a real love of the country. My parents taught me that America is a special place, that America is unlike other countries. And we’re very privileged, we’re very fortunate to live here because of these shared values and the heritage that we have inherited from prior generations. My parents taught me about the structure and how it’s set up from an early age. One of the things that I’ve been frustrated with since at least the age of ten is the fact that the federal government is doing too many things. We were always supposed to have a limited-purpose national government, a federal government with only a few basic responsibilities. It was supposed to perform those really well, and it was supposed to take care of those things to the exclusion, in many circumstances, of state authority. But outside of those areas, it was supposed to stay out and let state and local governments take care of the rest, along with civil society.
JUSTIN AMASH: I was done with college, done with law school, and noticed that my views on politics were a little bit different than some of my Republican colleagues. It was the [George W.] Bush era of Republican politics. So, I decided I’d do a Google search and threw some of the terms into Google that I thought matched my viewpoints. Up popped F. A. Hayek.
I like Hayek’s style. It’s an intellectual style. There’s a strong focus on spontaneous order, the idea that order pops out of our free interactions with each other. I found that very appealing and when I read Hayek’s works, they really struck a chord with me.
MK: Hayek talks about how individuals come together in voluntary association and create institutions, and those institutions both inform, and are a constraint on our behavior. I always thought that that interplay between community and the individual made a lot of sense and explains how the world holds together and works so well without some benevolent despot telling us what to do.
JUSTIN AMASH: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. He’s very good at making the distinction between government and society. There can be societies where people interact, where they cooperate, where they form groups together. But you don’t have to have a government deciding how all of those interactions work.
MK: The left loves to use this atomistic caricature that we’re all Ayn Randoids, selfish individuals willing to do absolutely anything to get what we want. But that’s the complete opposite of what I get out of Rand. Her work was really focused on individual responsibility. We need to take the word “community organizer” back, I think, and take the word “community” back.
JUSTIN AMASH: Right, and a lot of what libertarians are about this idea that people work together, that they cooperate, that they form these sort of social groups. That’s perfectly acceptable as long as they’re voluntary associations.
MK: Let’s talk about politics for a little bit. I think that we’re in the midst of a realignment, maybe even a paradigm shift. That same disintermediation, decentralization, more power to the individual dynamic is happening in our politics. And people like you are beating establishment candidates with all of the traditional advantages: more money, more people jetting in from Washington, D.C., to endorse them. Tell me that story.
THOMAS MASSIE: I think the old model was that you ran for state legislature and you became a state representative, then you became a state senator, and you were a good party player, a good team player, and then somebody recommended that you get into a congressional race, and you come up the ranks. That’s been turned on its head.
There are some guys here in Congress that have never held an elective office. Ted Yoho, he’s great. He’s a large-animal veterinarian. Jim Bridenstine, he’s great. He was a Navy fighter pilot. Neither of those guys held an elective office, and they beat an incumbent Republican in a primary to get here to Washington, D.C. That’s only possible with grassroots support. Social media is part of it. Alternative media through talk radio is part of it. It’s enabled a different model of coming to Congress. You have the grassroots, these outside organizations like FreedomWorks, which are immensely important in the races, and not just in the races, but after the race is won in influencing these congressmen when they get here.
TED CRUZ: I think there is a fundamental paradigm shift happening in the political world across this country, and that paradigm shift is the rise of the grass roots. In the Texas Senate race, when we started I was literally at 2 percent in the polls. Nobody in the state thought we had a prayer. My opponent was the sitting lieutenant governor, who was independently wealthy. He ran over $35 million dollars in nasty attack ads against us. And what we saw was just breathtaking. We saw first dozens, and hundreds and then thousands and then tens of thousands of men and women all across the state begin rising up, begin knocking on doors, begin making phone calls, and going on Facebook, and going on Twitter, and reaching out and saying, “We can’t keep doing what we’re doing. We are bankrupting this country. We are threatening the future of the next generations if we keep going down this road.”
It was breathtaking, the grassroots tsunami we saw. Despite being outspent three to one, we went from 2 percent to not just winning, but winning the primary by fourteen points and winning the general by sixty points. It was an incredible testament to the power of the grass roots, and I think that’s happening all over the country.
DAVID SCHWEIKERT: I’ve had a handful of brutal political elections. It feels like every time I run I end up having the establishment folks against me, because I’m not sure that they want some of their little special deals examined or taken away. And what you’re finding is that the activists, the public, because of that access of information through the Internet, are sort of learning, “Oh, this is reality. This is my alternative, and there are options that do work.”
THOMAS MASSIE: We look at communist countries and socialist countries and see how the Internet has changed them, or the countries that are led by despots. When they get the Internet, they sort of start coming around and there are revolutions there. That is happening here, we just don’t notice it. But it’s happening slower, because we’ve got a peaceful process for doing that.
RAND PAUL: Our Facebook [following] is now bigger than several of the news networks’. I’m not saying that to brag, I’m saying that because there is power in Facebook. There is power in Instagram. There’s power throughout the Internet. It really has led to an amazing democracy.
MIKE LEE: And I think it’s important to point out, Matt, that that is not our power. That is power that we have from the people. It is power that we have only because we connect to the people, and only to the extent that we connect to the people. What has changed is that, with the power of social media and other new channels of communication, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the small handful of media outlets that have in the past been the exclusive conduits of information about what’s happening in Washington no longer have a monopoly. The cartel is broken, and with the breaking of that cartel, the people are empowered. And they’re empowered by a new generation of elected officials who are there to stand for the people and not for their own perpetual reelection, and not for the perpetual expansion of government. That’s a game changer. That’s how we bring about the restoration of constitutional government.
MK: Do you think something different is going on in terms of the relationship of Am
ericans with their federal government?
RAND PAUL: Yeah, and I think the people are probably ten years in advance of the legislature, and probably always are. The grass roots and the public react in a way, but it takes a while for their will to get transmitted to Washington. Why? Because incumbents win almost every race around here. So there are people who were elected in 1980. They’re still representing the people in 1980 who first elected them. Each successive election becomes easier, and they’re not listening as carefully to the American people. So, the new people, we’re listening pretty carefully. We just got elected.
THOMAS MASSIE: Most congressmen come here with the best of intentions. They want to do the right thing. But eventually they’re like zombies. They get bitten and they become part of the zombie mob, and they vote with their party regardless of what’s in the bill. Some people can make it a month without getting bitten, and some people can make it a whole term. But eventually, just like a bad zombie series on TV . . .
DAVID SCHWEIKERT: Past scandals were often about an individual engaging in a bad act. Now the public is understanding that there is this collective movement of bad acts. And it’s about the preservation of power. The only way to break that down is to radically change those institutions or completely eliminate those institutions and move to a very different model.
RAND PAUL: And I disagree with some people who say we’re too conservative or too much in favor of balanced budgets or too much for lower taxes and less regulation. No, we can be all of those things. We don’t need to lose what we’re for, but we also have to be for a bigger message of liberty. Young people don’t have any money. You ask young people about regulations and taxes and they’re like, “I don’t have any money. I don’t own a business. But I’ve got a cell phone and I’m on the computer, and I don’t like the government snooping on whether I read Reason magazine or whether I go to FreedomWorks’ website. I don’t want the government to know that unless I’m accused of a crime.” They care about privacy, but they may not care about taxes. So, we don’t give up on taxes, but we also need to talk about issues that young people are interested in.
DAVID SCHWEIKERT: There’s incredible opportunity, particularly with that under-forty, under-thirty-five population. We have data that says they’re brand switchers. When they walk into the grocery store they don’t buy Tide because their mom and grandma bought it. They buy what they think is the best value, or what they saw on their social media as having a benefit they want. And I think, actually, they’re about to grow up politically. They have to now realize that they’ve been lied to by this president about privacy—look at the things the NSA has done—about their individual freedoms. This White House has not cared about their individual freedoms. As a matter of fact it’s been more collectivist. I’m waiting for that revolution with young people to say, “And now you’ve basically made me an indentured servant through the debt, through my future tax liability, and now what you’ve done to me health-care-wise.” It’s time for our young people to wake up and understand: The battle’s on.
MK: It’s an interesting time to be here right now, because we’re in the midst of this gargantuan fight. Not just for the soul of the Republican Party, but perhaps for the future of this country. What does this new party look like?
RAND PAUL: It looks like the rest of America if we want to win. I say, “With ties and without ties, with tattoos and without tattoos.” It needs to look like the rest of America, but also in an ethnic way as well. We are a very diverse culture. We need to reach out to African-Americans and say, “Look, the war on drugs has disproportionately hurt the black community.” One in three black Americans is a convicted felon, primarily because of nonviolent drug crimes. We need to reach out and say, “It isn’t fair that we’re targeting black Americans for arrest.” It is said, by surveys, that whites and blacks use drugs at about the same rate, and yet the ACLU recently said that blacks were being arrested at five to six times the rate. Prison statistics show that seventy-five percent of prisoners are African-American or Latino, and it is because the war on drugs is not equally applied. I think we need to tell kids that drugs are a bad thing. I tell my kids to stay away from drugs. They’re a bad thing. But if one of my kids gets caught, I don’t want them in jail forever. I saw the other day, Michael Douglas’s kid is in jail for ten years. He’s been in solitary confinement for two years. Is he hurting himself by using drugs? Absolutely. But I would rather see him in some kind of rehabilitation hospital than solitary confinement.
But we have to understand, and as Republicans we need to go to the African-American community and say, “Look, they’re losing not only their freedom. They come out and then they’re a convicted felon for the rest of their life.” You ever try to get a job? They call it “checking the box.” Checking the box of convicted felon. They can never get ahead again. Their child support payments build up while they’re in prison. They come out and they owe four thousand dollars in child support. How do they ever pay that working minimum wage, or not working at all? One thing adds up and it’s this cycle of poverty. I think if Republicans had a message, that message is a limited-government one. This is: The government should protect us from violence against other individuals. The sort of self-inflicted bad things that people can do to themselves, we should try to work as a society to minimize that, but putting people in jail for doing bad things to themselves is just not good for society.
JUSTIN AMASH: And when I go back to my district my constituents are very supportive of what I’m doing, Republicans and Democrats. I think things are changing, and I talk to many of my colleagues who are just entering Congress the last two cycles. They think more like I do on many of these issues. And in fact, when you look at the NSA amendment, for example, newer members were much more supportive of my amendment than members who have been here for a long time. I think there’s a generational shift and it’s shifting in the direction of libertarianism.
TED CRUZ: I think the Republican Party needs to get back to the principles we should have been standing for in the first place. We need to get back to defending free market principles and defending the Constitution. I think what we’re seeing, the rise of the grass roots, is the American people holding elected officials accountable of both parties. I think that’s terrific. I think that should happen a lot more.
MK: But if you were to open to a page in the New York Times, they would describe a libertarian as socially moderate and fiscally conservative. I never thought that was quite right. I always thought it was about our relationship with the government and whether or not we got to control our own lives.
JUSTIN AMASH: That’s right. It’s just about being able to make decisions for your own lives. So, there are very socially conservative libertarians. I’m a fairly socially conservative libertarian. And there are other libertarians who are not as socially conservative. But the idea is that we should have a government that allows us to make those decisions for our own lives, and we can decide as a society whether we like those values or not. And if you disagree with someone, you’re free to tell them. But we don’t need government imposing one viewpoint on everyone.
THOMAS MASSIE: People like to label everybody in Washington, D.C. I’ve been called a libertarian-leaning Republican, a constitutional conservative, a tea party congressman, but I think the one that fits best is when they call me one of the twelve members of the Republican conference who didn’t vote for John Boehner.
MK: It strikes me that it’s no longer so much about Republicans versus Democrats. It may be about D.C. insiders versus the rest of America.
JUSTIN AMASH: Yeah, I don’t think we should ever worry about who we’re working with in terms of Republican versus Democrat versus libertarian or independent. We have to work together here.
TED CRUZ: There is a divide, and it’s a much bigger divide than a divide between Republicans and Democrats. That’s the divide between entrenched politicians in Washington and the American people. There are a lot of people in both parties in Washing
ton who just aren’t listening to the people anymore.
DAVID SCHWEIKERT: Well, think about this. If you’re a bureaucrat, what do we know about bureaucracies, of every kind both private and public? Ultimately the preservation of the bureaucracy becomes the number-one goal. So, if you’re Lois Lerner, you’re at the IRS, is it as much even ideological, as it’s the preservation of the bureaucracy? And you see that all over Washington, because the scandal at the IRS isn’t the only place this type of activity is taking place. It’s up and down government. Because are you going to support the party, the more collectivist party that wants to grow government, wants to give you bonuses, wants to give you certain shiny objects, or the party that wants to hand power back to the states? You end up with a very different incentive system, and it’s quite perverse.
THOMAS MASSIE: Here’s one thing that people don’t really understand, that I didn’t understand. They say that money corrupts the process. I’ve always kind of believed that, but I didn’t know how it corrupts the process. Congressmen raise a lot of money. Some of them raise two or three million dollars an election cycle. But what do they do with that money? Their reelection is virtually assured. It’s more certain than anything that they’re going to come back, because they’re incumbents and they’ve done the right things. So, they don’t need the money to get reelected. They’re not buying yachts and Ferraris with the money. What are they doing with the money? It’s the currency of power.
Here’s what they’re doing with the money that they raise: They’re giving it to other congressmen. And then they become ingratiated. They feel like they owe that congressman something. A vote, maybe on an issue, or a cosponsorship on a bill. So, it’s the currency of influence within Congress, and then you also take most of that money and you give it to your party, whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat.
