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

by Kurt Schlichter

  The insurgents locked in their victories. Marlowe—aided by the strong majorities in Congress that had come from the insurgent ground game (an organizational campaign facilitated by the technological mastery of many new adherents)—acted with an aggressiveness that stunned the liberal establishment. Obamacare had alienated millions of Americans with both its substantive failure and the government’s shameful abuse of the private medical information it held to embarrass the administration’s foes. Though many establishment Republicans had given up on ever repealing Obamacare, signing its repeal was one of Marlowe’s first acts.

  And she replaced it with . . . nothing. Conservatives felt that the federal government had no business in the health care field, and they acted on that principle. They offered no “alternative.” The insurgents upended the paradigm by refusing to remain within the envelope the establishment had defined.

  Firmly in control of the federal government, the constitutional conservatives repealed a mass of other additional health care statutes and regulations as well, and left it to individuals (and individual states, if they chose) to take responsibility for their health care in a free market. The market responded with a tsunami of new options. Some people without health insurance chose to be without it, instead wanting to pay cash, while others unwisely risked the consequences of forgoing coverage knowing that they were on their own.

  Next, Marlowe and her Congress proceeded to gut the rest of the welfare state, slashing those programs they did not entirely eliminate. They bombed the rubble of the liberal establishment.

  This return to personal responsibility culminated in the ratification of the Thirty-Second Amendment, which placed the responsibility for each individual’s self-support unequivocally upon the individual himself. The insurgents (who still felt themselves fighting a lonely battle against the establishment even though they now held the reins of power) were not content to just prune the branches of the tree but instead, as one exasperated liberal senator put it, “dig out the roots and sow the ground with salt.” The size of government at the end of Marlowe’s second term, in actual dollars, was just over half the size of when she took office—and that took into account her massive rebuilding of America’s shamefully degraded military.

  The Obama and Clinton administrations had taught the insurgents a lesson that more traditional conservatives found difficult to accept—a disregard for old norms and traditions that would restrain their actions. They had attempted to evade GOP power in the Congress through executive orders; now, Marlowe used the same executive power remorselessly to dismantle the bureaucracy and impose her will. Liberals, frustrated by filibusters that obstructed their initiatives, had repealed the ancient senatorial rule years before; insurgents now gleefully passed dozens of bills that gutted liberal programs while liberals watched helplessly. Their passionate speeches full of renewed fear of majoritarian rule were met with howls of laughter.

  They had handed the conservatives the sword that slew the liberal welfare state.

  But the raw exercise of unconstrained power in a democratic republic is hardly conservative. The insurgency’s stated goal was always to return to the Founders’ ideal, but the realities of the battle it faced required putting off that restoration. Even today, the norms and customs that preceded the Obama administration have not been completely restored. A generation of conservatives has arisen that never experienced them; they largely know only political/cultural warfare in which principle does not always take priority over expedience.

  Marlowe’s “conservative court packing” illustrated the challenge. Faced with a liberal Supreme Court, Marlowe did not hesitate—not even for a second—to drive the impeachment of three liberal justices so she could pack the Court with insurgent jurists. She did the same in lesser courts—Obama had overseen the end of the filibuster to create a majority on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and Marlowe engineered a scheme to repack it by adding 10 new seats.

  These, and other similarly aggressive actions, brought howls of outrage from liberals. A few more traditional conservative voices objected, but in vain. Sixteen years of facing ruthless aggression by the Obama and Clinton administrations had left the insurgents utterly indifferent to their objections and pleas for mercy.

  Liberals made politics a zero-sum blood sport but forgot that the rules would apply to their opponents when they got the ball. It remains to be seen how well the insurgents have learned the same lesson.

  Today, America defines itself as a “conservative” nation, but it is a different conservatism than the one that existed in 2008. Gone are many of the issues that fueled the national debate back then. Gay Americans are accepted with little or no thought to their orientation. Abortion, though still occasionally bubbling up to cause rifts between conservatives, was essentially papered over by being punted to the states. Marijuana is legal (though scorned by most American as hopelessly tacky), while laws regarding more serious drugs are much less severe. Women operate at the highest levels of the GOP without comment; in fact, women were at the forefront of the insurgency. The ubiquitous charges of racism hurled by liberals lack potency where a slim majority of Americans (including conservatives) classify themselves as “multiracial.”

  These changes came less as a result of ideological shifts on the part of conservatism but as a result of the necessary ideological winnowing process the conservative insurgency underwent as it built and grew and fought. Conservatives were forced to make choices, both about where to focus their efforts and about which issues would harm the cause and which would help it. Some issues, hugely important in 2009, are essentially meaningless today in 2041.

  The insurgency succeeded by not creating a rigid checklist of many specific, and mandatory, policy prescriptions. The liberals had built up their own inflexible, immutable list, and they were bound to it. Their positions were based less on principles than on the needs and demands of each of the Democratic Party’s myriad interest groups. Unions had their demands, for example, and those demands were incorporated into the checklist regardless of whether they supported or undercut some overarching principle. It created intellectual incoherence and a huge vulnerability to a principled opponent. When Carrie Marlowe and the GOP took back power in 2024, they were able to do so in part because the Democrats were so inflexible in their positions that the insurgents were able to outmaneuver them again and again. The liberals locked themselves into a platform of failure.

  The insurgents, on the other hand, were able to succeed because they embraced a few general principles. They wanted a small government of limited powers, a federal government that stayed out of people’s lives and focused on the relatively few tasks given it under the Constitution, like national defense.

  They wanted a culture where self-reliance was assumed, and where powerful elites did not control and plunder the country without restraint. They wanted their rights honored, including the right to speak freely, to practice their religion, and to keep and bear arms. Importantly, for the surveillance state revelations drove many libertarians to the insurgency, they demanded that the government respect the privacy of its citizens.

  The insurgents, in sum, rejected the liberal establishment’s authoritarian, poor/powerful coalition’s dominance. However, their response to that dominant liberal paradigm disregarded many of the same political and cultural norms and customs they sought to restore. That tension between principle and expedience remains today. The insurgency is ascendant; regardless of how it sees itself, it is no longer the insurgency but the establishment.

  But the question remains—made even more pressing by the recent GOP corruption scandals—whether principle or expedience will prevail. Governance is far different than insurgency.

  Even as it faces the challenges of the present, the conservative movement can look back on a remarkable achievement. The story of the insurgency is not the story of a great leader. Rather, it is the story of a great people, a people who refused to allow their nation to be taken from them
while being handed the bill. Taking as inspiration the wise authors of a document that was two-and-a-half centuries old, and acting largely as individuals in the face of the scorn and sometimes even active oppression by the establishment, they took their country back.

  This is their story.

  Chapter One: The Long March

  “We Never Really Had a Plan Except to Resist”

  Just 28 years ago, as Barack Obama began his final term in office, and with the Tea Party success of 2010 considered merely a blip in leftism’s relentless advance, conservatism appeared to be at its nadir in every arena of society. America, it appeared, had been “fundamentally transformed” into a poorer, less free, shadow of its former self.

  Conservatism, the establishment agreed, was doomed.

  But in 2041, the individualistic, free market ideology of constitutional conservatism rules in every major sphere of society. Progressivism is isolated and mocked. The most pronounced changes are outside of politics—constitutional conservatives are firmly established within the culture. In the media, in academia, the world of entertainment, and in everyday life, constitutional conservatism is—astonishingly to those over 40—the dominant paradigm. It is the cultural default, while its enemy, progressivism, is at best mocked as an archaic curiosity but more often scorned as a failed ideology of petty tyrants and elitist hypocrites. On television, it is the progressives who frequently find themselves the butt of jokes—and the conservatives are often the heroes.

  This change did not simply happen. It was decades in the making, the result of a conscious and dedicated effort by constitutional conservatives to retake their country from the purveyors of progressivism. But it was not merely a political effort. Winning more political offices was a necessary, but not sufficient, goal. It was the culture that had grown to promote progressivism that would have to change.

  It did not happen quickly. It faced many setbacks. But like Chairman Mao when he was forced to move his communist forces across China to escape destruction, it ended in victory.

  Call it the constitutional conservatives’ Long March.

  * * *

  Rob Patel (President-Elect)

  It is hard to imagine any American who has managed to avoid learning president-elect Robert Manuel Patel’s life story. In fact, in the last election his opponent famously sputtered in frustration, “He’s nothing but biography!” But, of course, that sold Rob Patel well short. A savvy political operator who understood how it resonated, he ensured his uniquely American story was front and center throughout the campaign. Combined with his unapologetic conservatism, it helped earn him a 60 percent popular vote landslide.

  The president-elect agreed to meet me the day before the inauguration in his suite of rooms in the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, DC. Security was tight—as always, the Secret Service was tracking multiple threats, many from leftists enraged at his plans to push forward the conservative policies of his two predecessors. They know better than to ignore the profound frustration of the disenfranchised left in light of the assassination attempt on the vice president in 2039 by a pair of self-described anarcho-socialists from Yale Law School. If one had not accidentally shot himself in the toe with his pistol, it might have ended in tragedy rather than farce.

  Patel welcomes me and offers me coffee. The ostentatious appointments of the Presidential Suite seem to embarrass him. “We fought against people who were devoted to the trapping of power,” he says. “And look at me now, in here, in the Ritz-Carlton! We need to keep reminding ourselves where we came from or we’ll become the establishment.” It’s an illuminating analysis from a successor to 16 years of conservative rule—in many ways, the constitutional conservatives still see themselves as outsiders.

  We sit, him on an overstuffed chair and me on the sofa, and he begins . . .

  I was a young man out of college with a ton of student debt in 2012. I don’t know—maybe $120,000, which was serious money then. I voted for Barack Obama because I really thought that government should and would take care of me. I thought it would care for me. After all, my teachers had taught me that all through my years in school. But then I got out into the real world, and there was nothing. No jobs, just lots of student loan debt weighing me down. It was the same for most of my friends.

  Hope and change, Obama promised us, but all I saw was despair and decline. Yet as bad as the economy was, and it was really bad, the real problem was inside me. Like many in my generation, I had internalized a lot of the values and ideas of an American culture that had gone off track. I didn’t yet have the tools to succeed. I think liberals liked people like me being that way.

  I tried and tried to get a job in my field, marketing, and no one was hiring. I remember talking to one employer and kind of demanding to know why he wouldn’t give me a job, like he owed me a job. The guy looked at me, shook his head, and asked why he should hire anyone now when he couldn’t be sure the government wouldn’t put some new regulation or tax on him next year. He told me he didn’t know how much I was going to cost from month to month because of all the things the government was doing “help” me, and that’s why I wasn’t getting a job. It really opened my eyes, or rather, started to.

  When I finally got a job with an energy company out in Montana, my eyes were opened even wider. I was working very hard but my taxes were increasing, while more and more of my peers were sitting around doing nothing (often by choice) and getting paid for it!

  Then the final straw came when the Obama administration’s EPA essentially banned fracking and I got laid off. I figured out that the only people liberals cared about were their fellow elitist progressives in Manhattan, Hollywood, Chicago, and DC. People like me were collateral damage, acceptable losses, for making their dreams come true.

  I registered as a Republican while working at a McDonald’s.

  * * *

  Colonel Jeremy Denton, US Army (Ret.) (Insurgency Expert)

  This gruff former Army War College instructor and Iraq/Afghanistan veteran lives outside of Atlanta, north of his old haunts at Fort Benning. He wears a .45 on his hip, largely as a political statement. His specialty on active duty was counterinsurgency warfare, but his passion was conservative politics. It was only after leaving active service that he got personally involved, but that did not keep him from turning his professional eye toward what was happening from the outside. As we talk, he seems to shift personas—from Army officer to college professor to barstool smart-ass and back again.

  As we enjoy a cold Dos Equis on his porch, the colonel observes, “Now, insurgency is not a perfect metaphor for what happened. There was no real fighting, though I think there could have been if things happened differently. I don’t even want to think about that. But I see so many parallels to an insurgency that I think using it as the paradigm is the best way to understand what happened since 2009.”

  The best reason for embarking on a conservative insurgency was the fact that we did not have a whole lot of other strategic options. We didn’t have a strong, organized majority that could try to push through what we wanted politically, and we had no real infrastructure to do it in the social and cultural spheres. With the eight-inch artillery that was the liberal mainstream media out there ready to call a fire mission in on any concentration of conservative power, there was no other viable strategic option. It wasn’t a conscious decision, of course—it just happened organically. We never really had a plan except to resist. That’s pretty much the best way for an insurgency to happen.

  Look back at where we were at our low point in early 2013. Even if the political correlation of forces was different—say, if Romney had won in 2012 and perhaps the GOP had retaken the Senate—we still would probably have had to choose insurgency. Romney’s primary asset was that he wasn’t a liberal—well, at least that he wasn’t a liberal anymore—but he was certainly no constitutional conservative. He wasn’t a bad guy. He just wasn’t committed to the cause. He got a lot of support from the kind of milquetoast Republican who would
bloviate about “working together” and “compromising” and “doing the job the American people sent us here to do” as a prelude to sticking real conservatives in the back. We would have had that fight with them if he had won; turns out, we had to have it anyway before we could really take on the liberals.

  So even if we had Obama out of the White House, we would not have had a true constitutional conservative in it. And just because we might have had a Republican president would have done nothing for what was arguably the bigger problem conservatives faced, the liberal culture.

  Say we had Romney and a GOP House and a GOP Senate and even a stronger GOP-inclined Supreme Court . . . so? At the end of the day, that would have been just a temporary correlation of forces. Parties change quickly, but culture . . . the culture changes slowly, and its impact dwarfs the transitory changes in Washington.

  We conservatives had very little hold on the culture, and little combat power to retake it. Even with the political reins of power in our hands, the culture would remain progressive, incubating the virus of collectivist thought like monkeys in the jungle provide a reservoir for the Ebola virus. I like that—liberalism as a political Ebola virus!

  Anyway, liberalism would just sit there, in the bastions of cultural progressivism—academia, the arts, the media, entertainment, and some sectors of the nonprofit and religious communities—waiting for a chance to spread once again.

  No, even if we were stronger, our strategic choice would have to have been an insurgency. We couldn’t hit the strongholds of cultural progressivism head-on, not without causing massive resistance and a cultural fight we’d have had little or no chance of winning. Remember, they wanted to be victims, to be rebels—we’d be throwing them in the locally sourced, organic briar patch.