I would see my liberal friends use the most vicious, hateful, sexist words about conservative women. I was no Sarah Palin fan, but one day this feminist bookstore owner called her the “c word” at a reading and I stood up and said, “As a feminist, I can’t accept you using that term about another woman.” I got booed, and the woman hissed at me, “That conservative bitch isn’t a woman!” The feminists all clapped. It was crazy to me.
I would have loved to see their faces when President Marlowe appointed Ambassador Palin to the United Nations and she told those crooks and thugs to shape up or ship out of New York City!
I knew something had changed in me. I hadn’t changed any of my core principles. I think the thing is—and I saw this with a lot of liberals who became constitutional conservatives—is that I actually believed in all that stuff about treating people fairly and equally and about civil rights and so forth. But a lot of liberals seemed to think those principles were only important as long as they helped liberalism. When they didn’t help, they abandoned them. The liberals were leaving me, not vice versa.
I was a big pro-choice supporter, but I never thought abortion was right for me. I wasn’t going to judge others, but for me, I just wasn’t going to have one. Then I got pregnant, and I naturally decided I was going to keep the baby. I thought that being pro-choice meant that I had a right to choose, but when I said why I chose to have my daughter even though I was very poor and fairly young—and suggested that other people should try to do the same, even if inconvenient—you’d think I had just burned a cross. I guess they were all for choice if you chose their way.
Suddenly, I had feminists telling me that I was somehow betraying feminist principles by having the baby. It seemed like it was important to them that I atone for not being more than just pro-choice. They had forgiven me for defending Sarah Palin, but I finally got kicked out of the feminist bookstore reading club for good for that.
And it wasn’t just the feminists. This environmentalist feminist I knew named Gaia Borgnine—I don’t know if that was her real name—actually came up to me in my shop and told me having a child was an “Earthcrime.” I asked whether I was going to be arrested by the “Earthcops,” and she said, “If I had my way, you would be!”
These people were nuts. And dangerous.
I started reading and learning about the people I had always held in contempt. It took a while, but after finding that liberal “freedom” was really no freer than the caricature of conservatism I had grown up believing in, I committed the ultimate act of defiance. I started my own Tea Party group, and I used the name “Tea Party” explicitly to confront the haters. And there were plenty. Of course, being Portland, I emphasized that the tea was locally sourced.
Chapter Two: Guerrilla Politics
“I Felt Like a Viet Cong Guy in a Polo Shirt and Dockers”
Success in the political realm was not sufficient for victory, but it was necessary for victory. Conservative politicians were under fire not only from the Democrats but from establishment Republicans, as well as the media. Not yet strong enough to pass any initiatives on their own, they moved into the guerrilla mode of defeating their opponents’ attempt to govern. Using spectacle to highlight establishment weakness, and choosing fights where they had a good chance of winning, constitutional conservatives began to exercise a power beyond their relatively limited size. Leveraging grassroots enthusiasm and making use of the sanctuary of the states (where much of the work of the conservative comeback took place), conservatives began to shape the battlefield for eventual victory.
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Tony “Gator” McCoy (Chief Advisor to President Carrie Marlowe)
Gator McCoy played football at Florida State, where he majored in cheap beer and right-wing activism. A shattered knee put him on the sidelines, but his keen, competitive drive found a new outlet: politics. Starting out as a Sunshine State campaign prodigy winning elections that the establishment had written off, he built a wide network of contacts within the constitutional conservative movement. The network paid off when Carrie Marlowe brought him on board to manage her run for governor in 2018 and her eventual run for the White House in 2024.
It’s only 10:30 in the morning when Gator guides me out to his back porch and cracks a Budweiser. I decline his third wife’s offer of a brew—at 30, she is half his age—and take a seat. Gator kicks off his flip-flops and puts up his feet.
After the 2012 election, the weenies of the GOP started looking around for an excuse for their screw-ups—of course, their defeat couldn’t be because of their milquetoast policies and Beltway worldview. Oh no, it had to be, uh . . . who? Why, those conservatives! Oh, and also a lack of inclusiveness—which, of course, just happened to dovetail with their own preconceived, establishment notions about immigration. They blamed everyone and everything but themselves.
There was something to be said for expanding the GOP voter base, but it wasn’t being said by the establishment. Their big contribution to the discussion was the bright idea that if us crazy constitutional conservatives would simply adopt the Beltway consensus on immigration, Latinos would come rushing into the GOP from their Democrat home because, well, uh . . . See, they never had a good answer.
Oh, I raised hell with them. I was challenging their shaky premises and asking simple questions like “Why do you believe that is true?” when I was supposed to sit back and let the geniuses who brought us winners like McCain and Romney tell me what to think.
No friggin’ way!
Florida was always a big melting pot, so I know something about appealing to different voting blocs. I tried to tell them that networking was not about taking a look at a census spreadsheet and pointing to a category like “Hispanics” and saying, “Let’s target them!” Leaving aside that “Latinos,” “Hispanics,” or whatever they were being called are not some sort of homogenous voting bloc, the whole thing was totally unconservative.
We conservatives weren’t about appealing to people based on where their grandfather came from. We were supposed to be appealing to them because they love the values embodied in our Constitution!
I tried to tell the establishment, “Hey, we aren’t liberals!” They wouldn’t listen. Too dug in. Too entrenched. Too stupid.
I quit my GOP establishment job in DC and went home to Tampa. I found good candidates in tough races and helped them win by running as constitutional conservatives. When I ran a campaign, from city council to president, I wanted to sneak in and steal the Democrat base. I wanted to come in under the cover of darkness and rob ’em blind. I felt like a Viet Cong guy in a polo shirt and Dockers.
But networking into groups we had ignored wasn’t going to work if we tried to do it based on gimmicks like an amnesty immigration bill. Seriously, where was the one “Latino” anywhere who had ever been caught on video saying, “Why yes, if the GOP copies the Democrats on immigration I’ll immediately start voting Republican for some reason”?
Never happened before, and when they finally pushed it through, it still didn’t happen.
I got my candidates to aim at people who agreed with our principles but who, because of habits associated with their race, ethnicity, affinity, or whatever, would not support our Republican candidates. And we needed to keep clear-eyed understanding of what we meant by “principles.” The nonsense about how Hispanics were somehow inherently conservative because they are “pro-family” and religious was the kind of fuzzy, half-assed thinking our establishment overlords always confused with strategy.
You know who else is really, really religious? Black women. Did you see a lot of black women voting Republican? You see some doing it now, but it took work, not position papers from DC think tanks. I kept saying, “Clichés aren’t metrics, people!”
Our success came from trying to get people to join us not because of demographic factors but because they shared our constitutional conservative principles. They just didn’t always know it yet. I won campaigns because I showed them!
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Jack Archer (Democratic Strategist)
The retired Democratic strategist is still bitter when he recalls how the conservatives, left with nothing but a shaky grip on the House, managed to hold off the efforts of the Democrats and their media allies to crush them by cleverly avoiding traps and keeping focused on their objectives. In contrast to his old foe Gator McCoy, Jack Archer sits alone in a New York City apartment writing up his memoirs in the hope that they might be of use for liberals hoping to take power again someday. “It’s not really an autobiography,” he notes glumly. “It’s more of a postmortem.”
I hated those bastards. The conservatives didn’t even pretend to respect their role or the processes of government. We couldn’t break their hold on the House. Their states had gerrymandered very, very effectively, so it was structurally difficult to do anyway. We tried and tried, but they kept holding on, and that totally screwed our plans. And we were so focused on their rear guard in Washington that we missed them growing out in Middle America. I mean, occasionally we’d watch a governor’s race in Colorado or Missouri for a little while, but then it’d be back to focusing on DC. What a huge mistake—they were growing like a cancer out in the states.
I’ll be honest—we tried to make them into monsters. It worked for a while. Then the damn Republicans suddenly refused to cooperate. They stopped putting the same mush-mouthed, old white guy losers in front of the cameras as the voice of the party. They coordinated their talking points so we couldn’t get any clips of backbenchers going off message. They got a bunch of conservative trial lawyers to come to DC and train their members on how to talk to people like human beings and to advocate effectively instead of make fools of themselves.
In other words, they got smart. Maybe they realized what we were doing. Maybe they figured out we were serious about making them extinct and taking the country left.
Still, after the shutdown thing at the end of 2013, we figured we’d just keep forcing them into confrontations and pummel them with our media. Yeah, it was our media—it knew what we wanted and was happy to help us. We already hung the “Tea Party” label around the conservative senators like Ted Cruz, and the media was helping to make it radioactive.
Of course, the Obamacare fiasco derailed us. I thought we were going to be finished when millions of Americans woke up to find the Democrats lied to them and they were losing their plans and their doctors. But we got another chance. If those GOP idiots hadn’t decided to push through amnesty in 2014, we would have been crushed and never restarted our momentum.
We played on their divisions in the GOP. We identified Republican moderates, and our media friends tried to get them to break ranks. They fell for it every time. There was this governor in New Jersey, Chris Christie, a big guy—he was always good for a slam on his party. Put a mic in front of his face and he’d trash the conservatives all day with a smile. We loved him. He probably could have been president, too, if he hadn’t burned all his bridges helping us. He went to Iowa and got about 4 percent of the vote. Then he did the “sensible moderate spoiler thing” and got Hillary reelected in 2020. He ended up joining the Democrats and just faded away when he stopped being useful.
But this was a serious fight. We were playing for keeps. We had this great idea about how we were just going to tear them up, wedge out the reasonable ones from the hard-core Tea Party types, and totally destroy the opposition. That’s what we were after—I know we denied it, but we wanted to eliminate any opposition. We wanted the Republican Party dead, and there were a lot of Republicans who seemed willing to go along with it. It was the conservatives who wouldn’t give up. They refused to die.
We tried to do what the damn conservatives have actually done to us today. I’m kind of sorry, you know, that we threw all the norms of collegiality and loyalty in opposition out the door, because as soon as the GOP took power it used the same tactics against us. Court packing, executive orders, eliminating the filibuster—we threw out the rules, and then the conservatives came and shoved them up our asses. And now we’re the ones who are almost extinct.
I hated those bastards.
* * *
Tamara Hayes Smith (Professor/Activist)
A Yale political science professor, Professor Smith was one of the first of the new wave of conservative academics to grudgingly receive tenure at the Ivy League schools after a combination of public opinion, alumni activism, political pressure regarding federal funding, and structural changes created by new technology forced liberal academia to diversify.
Yale is one of the few colleges to still use the “traditional method,” with resident students undertaking a four-year curriculum with entirely live professors in both lecture and seminar settings. “I am grateful I have the luxury of face-to-face interaction with students,” she says. “Few academics do anymore. They can blame economics, technology, and themselves for that.”
Her students are the cream of the crop, with the school using its endowment to pay the costs of those who can’t afford the $350,000 per year tuition and room and board costs. With the end of government student loan programs and new laws requiring schools to spend a portion of their endowments annually, both Professor Smith’s students and the school are very focused on making the most of what is, today, a rare educational opportunity.
Professor Smith’s office is plastered with campaign signs from the last three decades, a graphic lesson in history for the students who crowd in during her weekly office hours to learn from the foremost academic scholar of the constitutional conservative movement. I catch up with her as she talks to a few of them one winter afternoon.
The conservatives shook up the establishment because they came into the political process totally focused on their core beliefs, not on the perks of power, and they felt little or no allegiance to the “institutions” or their processes. The GOP establishment was slow to realize that these constitutional conservatives were serious about their goals. You can’t buy off committed ideologues. The establishment politicians were used to people playing conservative at home and then coming to DC and being co-opted.
But the conservatives arrived feeling not a part of Washington or sharing its Beltway worldview, and they felt no loyalty to the status quo. The establishment couldn’t control them, so it decided that it had to try to crush them.
We need to understand the establishment perspective and how disruptive this was to the status quo. Understand that political power was not the be-all and end-all of the conservative movement. This was a fight across every part of society, and while political power was necessary, it was not sufficient. Conservatives saw that, and because personal political power was not their goal, the usual carrots and sticks of Washington—the proverbial cocktail party invitations—didn’t influence them.
This baffled and frightened the establishment of both parties. This is why the insurgents were painted as crazy, or “whacko birds” in the immortal characterization of Senator John McCain.
Until the conservative movement built up enough raw political power, its members needed to avoid decisive fights on the establishment’s terms. They didn’t always do that. In the fall of 2013, the insurgents led by Senator Ted Cruz forced a government shutdown. The establishment Republicans hated it and joined in with the liberal establishment to beat them down. The establishment still had overwhelming power (including the liberal media) that it could use to crush the insurgents when they picked a fight.
Barack Obama, of course, loved it. He sought out crises—he loved them. He thought he would win when he pushed things to the brink, and too often he did. But just weeks later the disaster of Obamacare became all too undeniable, first with the website failing and then with the realization that the liberals had outright lied about what the law would do to regular people’s medical insurance policies. That was a key event, and the insurgents were there pointing out the disaster that liberalism had wrought.
Many establishment Republicans saw this in the context of short-term advantage, and it was a s
hort-term advantage. It was enough to hold the House in 2014 despite the amnesty debacle, but Hillary Clinton would still win the 2016 election. The insurgents saw it as something more, the end of the beginning of the fall of liberalism rather than the beginning of the end of liberalism. Obamacare would fuel their critique of the establishment’s Beltway-based thinking as part of a long-term project to remake American culture.
The insurgents learned not to fight just to fight, but to fight to win. Because they lacked raw political power, they learned to be careful about where they let themselves be engaged. Some felt that they were insufficiently aggressive, and mistakenly lumped them in with the establishment GOP mandarins who were reticent because, below the surface, they did not support the change the insurgents sought. Their statist ox was being gored too.
The insurgents learned to make absolutely sure that the situation and correlation of forces favored them greatly before consenting to engage in battle. Simply put, they picked their fights after the 2013 government shutdown. They understood that they had no solid allies—the establishment GOP, given the choice between conservative change that would disrupt their power and position, would support the status quo when push came to shove.
And it was quite frustrating, not only to the establishment that—try as it might—just could not stamp out these stubborn insurgents because the insurgents would not let them leverage the establishment’s full weight against them, but to the insurgents themselves. The conservatives wanted to fight—they were hungry for the chance to take their progressive opponents down a peg or twenty. But the goal wasn’t merely to fight. Fighting was a tactic, not a goal. The goal was to win in the long run by winning over the culture. So they had to walk away from most fights, and that was very frustrating for a furious grassroots base.
Conservative Insurgency: The Struggle to Take America Back 2009 - 2041 Page 5
