Conservative Insurgency: The Struggle to Take America Back 2009 - 2041

by Kurt Schlichter

  The Tea Party revolt of the first Obama term was a direct reaction to Middle America being excluded from power. The Tea Party movement was fueled by a critique of the establishment that centered on the primacy of the Constitution as written and a suspicion of the poor/powerful coalition of government rent seekers. What distinguished it was its bottom-up nature—it was organized not by a formal cadre of “community organizers” (the left’s preferred model) but by individuals spontaneously springing into action across the country. Traditionally entrepreneurial—it is no surprise that many Tea Party activists were small business people and that their targets included the large corporations that succeeded largely through government lobbying—these activists turned those skills from commerce to politics. Soon, seemingly overnight, hundreds of Tea Party–affiliated groups were up and operating.

  The establishment took notice and, in conjunction with a mainstream media that absolutely toed the establishment line, reacted. It was not merely the Democrats who did so. Moderate Republicans whose view of big government could be summed up as, “Well, okay, we’ll expand it, but not quite so much right now,” were especially threatened. They were as much a part of the status quo as any overt Democrat statist. So, before the Tea Party could take on the Democrats and return America to what it saw as its traditional politics, the insurgents needed to seize control of the GOP. That meant that the first targets for the Tea Party were other “conservatives” who were not quite so conservative in practice.

  In 2010, Tea Party activism—supercharged by the Democrats’ ram-through of the disastrous Obamacare medical insurance reform plan—led to the recapture of the House of Representatives. But it was much less successful in 2012, when several Tea Party–associated candidates made rookie mistakes that likely cost the GOP the Senate—although it was less widely noted at the time that several “traditional” Republican candidates also lost what should have been easy races even as Obama was reelected.

  Over the years following Obama’s reelection, the Tea Party fought on two fronts, both against a liberal administration that was attempting to translate a slim electoral victory into a mandate to move even harder left and a GOP establishment that was reluctant to fight for the principles it paid lip service to during the campaign. The conservatives, labeled the “Tea Party” even though that name had less and less meaning over time, forced a confrontation with the administration that led to a short government shutdown. GOP moderates engineered a capitulation, hoping this defeat for their internal opponents would quell the rebellion forever.

  The anti-Tea Party reaction was vicious, and its excesses went hand-in-hand with the other actions of the Obama administration that demonstrated to the budding insurgents that America was being fundamentally changed for the worst. The media and popular culture savaged the Tea Party, painting it as racist, as crypto-fascist, and astonishingly, as a tool of the very large corporations the Tea Party itself opposed. Vilified in polite society, the Tea Party—or, rather, the label “Tea Party”—largely vanished. But the insurgency it had sparked only grew.

  That growth was fueled by the plummeting credibility and the increasing lawlessness of the Obama administration. Within weeks of the ignominious end of the shutdown, the fiasco that was Obamacare became undeniable. The website that allowed users to participate in the insurance exchanges simply failed to function. While this embarrassing lapse would be remedied over time, the fact that the law would throw millions of Americans off their insurance plans in favor of new, Obamacare-friendly plans that covered needs they didn’t have with higher deductibles at much higher prices could not.

  While moderates hesitated, grassroots conservatives savaged the administration for its outright lies, producing video compilations of Obama promising Americans, “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” The liberal media was forced to take the position that millions of infuriated Americans should have known better than to believe what they were told. It was a harsh, but indelible, lesson for millions of Americans who had bought into the idea of “hope and change.”

  Frustrated by an opposition that dared to defy it, as time wore on the Obama administration and its liberal allies would reject the norms that had previously governed American politics and act without regard to the customs, practices, and even laws that had restrained previous presidents. It turned the Internal Revenue Service on Tea Party–aligned groups. It ended the 200-year-old tradition of the filibuster in the Senate. As the curtain came down on the Obama presidency, the liberal establishment began to actively seek to suppress free speech. Power prevailed over principle, and the conflict within the culture intensified.

  This trend would continue through the Hillary Clinton administration. It would eventually lead to liberalism’s defeat as ascendant conservatives mercilessly dismantled the welfare state while liberals watched helplessly, their power to stop it hamstrung by the very majoritarian precedents they had used to build it.

  The Obama administration and the liberal establishment’s exercise of raw power began early. They passed a huge stimulus in the first months of 2009 without any bipartisan support. It was, essentially, a trillion dollar payoff to Democratic voting blocs. It did nothing for the economy, which would languish throughout both the Obama and Clinton administrations. They forced through the failed Obamacare plan without a single Republican vote, choosing to reorganize a sixth of the economy over the objections of every single member of the opposition. Obamacare’s utter failure, which could not be foisted off on liberalism’s opponents, would be one of the weights that would help drag liberalism down.

  The Obama administration’s lawlessness, and Clinton’s choice to follow her predecessor’s path, not only sparked anger and distrust in government that fed the insurgency but made compromise impossible. By turning the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies on its political enemies (whether Obama himself knew about the targeting, or whether he merely created an atmosphere that tolerated such un-American activities, remains unclear even now), the Obama administration undercut the moral legitimacy of the federal government. By refusing to enforce laws it disapproved of, such as the crucial enforcement provisions of the carefully crafted comprehensive immigration reform legislation pushed through with the help of the GOP establishment, the Obama administration made compromise impossible. It simply could not be trusted to perform its part of any bargain, so there would be no further bargains.

  The standoff in Washington begun after the Tea Party–fueled takeover of the House in 2010 continued after the brutal 2014 midterm election season. The passage of the comprehensive immigration reform law—an inexplicable lifeline tossed to Obama at his nadir by big business interests and Republican moderates—split the GOP, and the Republicans’ dream of retaking the Senate floundered. Even with Obamacare failing before the electorate’s eyes, the GOP barely held the House, though several new insurgent-affiliated members arrived after having successfully primaried moderate incumbent Republicans.

  The Obama administration doubled-down on its embrace of executive power, largely ignoring the Congress and seizing new powers through the administrative state during its last two years. These abuses of power continued, and the Clinton administration likewise made little effort to hide its use of government agencies to punish its enemies and reward its friends.

  Yet the conservative insurgency grew with each new overreach and each new abuse. The seeds the Tea Party had planted a few years before were sprouting. Activists who had been inspired to take seats on school boards, local Republican committees, and the like now had several years of experience governing as well as enthusiasm. Out in the hinterlands, under the media’s radar and operating where grassroots power could have the greatest effect, they began to have an impact. A growing farm team of conservative leaders was developing, gaining experience, and waiting to move up the ladder.

  Insurgents fought back against liberal power grabs in court, recognizing that because the largely liberal judiciary would ignore the law, the real value of the judici
al process in the short term was as political theater to highlight liberal wrongdoing. The courts themselves aided the cause by overstepping. Hillary Clinton’s replacement for Anthony Kennedy, a liberal feminist academic like most of her appointees, tipped the balance of the Supreme Court hard to the left and drove millions of formerly passive Americans into the insurgency. She was placed on the Court only because the Democrats eliminated the last vestige of the traditional filibuster, a maneuver they would come to regret.

  In 2018, the Supreme Court had issued rulings to the effect that the Second Amendment did not mean what it expressly said, but that the Constitution’s silence on the issue of abortion somehow indicated the Founders’ clear intent that the government would pay for them. Moreover, the justices found a provision lurking within the Constitution holding that doctors could be ordered to perform abortions regardless of their religious objections. Such decisions inspired a campaign of civil—and not so civil—disobedience that in turn called down harsher repression from the Clinton regime. It was a classic insurgency phenomenon—a government further undercutting its own legitimacy by overreaction to the insurgents, who then capitalized on the overreaction to amplify the cycle once again.

  The surveillance state the Obama administration oversaw drove young people away from the smothering embrace of liberalism, though not immediately into the insurgency. It was only as the insurgency demonstrated that “social issues” were not its focus, contrary to the portrayals of an increasingly hysterical mainstream media, that young people began to consider the “liberty option” that the insurgency offered. The fact that liberal economic policies had led to 45 percent unemployment among debt-ridden recent college graduates in 2019 made the conservative alternative that much more appealing.

  The Obama administration had fitfully started reexamining long-term issues like drug and federal criminal law reform, but it had predictably done so not through legislation but with uncoordinated and poorly thought-through executive actions. Hillary Clinton, whose authoritarian instincts at home came to define her presidency as much as her inept foreign policy abroad, quickly undid even these minor changes. With the crime rate growing, she sought to get to the conservative’s right on the issue. The insurgency’s willingness to let her do so, and to consider more humane and wise drug law and sentencing reforms, provided a key opening into the once solid-Democrat minority voting bloc.

  Clinton’s contempt for individual rights, and a Supreme Court willing to limit free speech rights where they threatened the establishment’s hold on power, drove even more formerly apolitical Americans into the arms of the conservative insurgency. Many former liberals joined the insurgency too, often contending (not unlike Ronald Reagan did with regard to the Democratic Party) that they had not left liberalism but that liberalism had left them. But it also set up a challenge for the insurgency that it continues to face today—would the nontraditional strategies and tactics it felt compelled to adopt to compete with the liberal establishment make reinstating a traditional America impossible?

  America found itself on the brink of the abyss during the second Clinton term. Abroad, the military was a hollow shell and the United States was regularly humiliated by foreign potentates who had nothing but contempt for Clinton’s weakness. A botched invasion of the Iranian coast in response to its terrible nuclear strike on Israel on November 30, 2020, led to years of humiliation over the prisoners of war abandoned after Clinton’s panicked retreat order.

  At home, the economy was moribund, with the “new normal” being a lack of upward mobility for the declining cohort of Americans who still sought to work rather than to collect government checks. Worse, as the insurgency grew, the liberal establishment’s desperate grip on power tightened. The administration harassed, abused, and sometimes even arrested its opponents. It clumsily attempted to suppress dissent, whether on the Internet or in the media. And there was violence, as administration-affiliated thugs intimidated designated “enemies” and as states acted to nullify unconstitutional laws. The shootout at an Austin, Texas, airfield between federal marshals trying to enforce Clinton’s federal handgun ban and Texas Rangers determined to stop them left several dead. It could have easily been the first battle in a very different insurgency, one that involved violence instead of peaceful political action.

  By the end of the Clinton administration, Americans had a choice. And thanks to the conservative insurgency, there was a viable alternative to both the intellectually and politically exhausted liberalism of Obama and Clinton and to the status quo–embracing moderate Republicanism of the John McCains of the GOP. Conservative think tanks had a ready supply of policy prescriptions for the problems facing the country. The mainstream media, thanks to technological changes that bypassed liberal gatekeeping and to infiltration by committed conservatives, was no longer the pro-establishment monolith of the past. Out in the states, conservatives had taken power and demonstrated that the vision of the insurgents would work in practice.

  But, most of all, there was now a generation of insurgents ready to take power—and the last 16 years of defying the liberal establishment’s merciless counterinsurgency had endowed them with a ruthlessness that would ensure they would not hesitate to aggressively impose their conservative vision when given the chance. That ethic remains today within the conservative movement, even as critics now question whether the movement has strayed too far from the norms and values it had sought to revitalize.

  But such considerations paled in comparison with the need for expediency in seizing back the apparatus of the federal government. The insurgency’s chance came in 2024, when the governor of Florida was elected president over yet another doctrinaire liberal. President Carrie Marlowe was less significant as an individual than as a representative of the insurgency.

  Liberalism’s aging playbook simply did not apply when faced with what she represented. It was hard to decry a “War on Women” when, like perhaps a majority of insurgency activists, Marlowe was a woman. Other conservative women had been targeted in the past, but Marlowe cleverly sidestepped such political land mines as abortion by refusing to take a national position and insisting—in keeping with the firm federalist inclinations of the insurgency—that the issue be remanded to the states. That, in conjunction with a cultural turn against the idea of abortion, brought the Bill Clinton formulation of abortion as “safe, legal, and rare” to fruition. Today, only eight states allow it, and combined with society’s distaste for it, the numbers are a fraction of those in the past. However, the Marlowe compromise did not completely disarm the issue—it still comes up in Republican primaries today, with no sign of it ever being completely resolved on the horizon.

  Marlowe also set out to redefine the GOP’s relationship with minorities. Her sentencing reform platform and active outreach to minorities, which she began as Florida’s governor, earned her a hearing with minority voters not offered to other Republicans. While she did not win a majority of minority votes, she won more than the Democrats could afford to lose.

  As would be expected from one of the insurgents, she refused to apologize for America—she radiated pride in the nation while promising to reign in the excesses of the oppressive surveillance state. Her steely ultimatum to the Iranians following her inauguration solved the prisoner crisis in hours, echoing Ronald Reagan’s resolution of the hostage crisis 44 years before.

  After nearly two decades of ennui, Americans were ready not only to have pride again, but to have a nation worthy of pride again.

  Of course, the political result was only one consequence of the conservative insurgency’s cultural campaign. After all, “politics,” as the late Andrew Breitbart famously observed, “is downstream from culture.” The insurgency was never about just winning political offices. Rather, constitutional conservatives winning political offices in large numbers came only after constitutional conservatives began winning the cultural struggle.

  On the macro side, the insurgency targeted media and entertainment—or, more accur
ately, members of the insurgency gravitated to media and entertainment organically. Developments in technology meant that participation in media and entertainment was no longer restricted to large, well-funded corporations. Even individuals could create media products and, just as importantly, distribute them to consumers.

  Moreover, conservatives themselves stopped self-selecting against careers in the media and entertainment industries. They now went into those fields, expecting to compete even in the face of prejudice by the entrenched elite. As it became obvious that the sexism and racism attributed to conservatives was mere slander, the artificial social barriers to entry into the cultural industries fell. Conservatives began to be seen as regular people again. No longer could they be dismissed as sexist, racist, or homophobic and thereby be marginalized and ignored.

  At the same time, these industries were facing more competition for customers and could no longer afford to contemptuously ignore the huge potential market that expressly conservative Americans represented. In the Obama years, Hollywood tentatively explored appealing to these customers, starting with reality shows. When a television program about a real-life family of bearded, backwoods, explicitly Christian hunters called Duck Dynasty set viewing records in the early 2010s, the industry took notice.

  Soon, even the traditional networks were running shows where the explicitly conservative characters were the heroes and liberals were the butts of the jokes. In music, books, theater, and art, artists took tentative steps to reappraise traditional values and even embrace them. Americans, faced with their own experience of liberal failure, were receptive. But there was a brutal cultural backlash—old outlets like the New York Times savaged any dissent from liberal dogma when it could not ignore it. Yet the market for dissent was there, and as the failure of liberalism became more self-evident, one could see the late-night comics aiming their wit at Obama and Clinton with ever-increasing intensity. The cultural consensus, inspired in large part by liberalism’s manifest failure, slowly changed to first accept conservatism, then embrace it.