by Matt Kibbe
That every citizen willing to work and capable of working shall receive a just and living annual wage which will enable him to maintain and educate his family . . .
I believe in nationalizing those public necessities which by their very nature are too important to be held in the control of private individuals.
I believe in upholding the right of private property yet of controlling it for the public good.
I believe not only in the right of the laboring man to organize in unions but also in the duty of the Government which that laboring man supports to protect these organizations against the vested interests of wealth and of intellect.
I believe in the event of a war and for the defense of our nation and its liberties, if there shall be a conscription of men let there be a conscription of wealth.
I believe in preferring the sanctity of human rights to the sanctity of property rights. I believe that the chief concern of government shall be for the poor, because, as is witnessed, the rich have ample means of their own to care for themselves.34
If, circa 2012, all these government-will-solve-all-your-problems platitudes seem tired, recycled, that’s because they are. And they were even when Father Coughlin pitched them in 1934. Van Jones, like Father Coughlin and a countless line of political snake oil salesmen before him, is like the salesman CEO of that failing corporation described by Apple’s Steve Jobs. He’s trying to repackage and resell a product that no one wants to buy.35 What is needed is a better product based on better ideas, not a slicker sales pitch. Jones’s Contract for the American Dream, I predict, will work about as well as the distribution of scarce resources at Zuccotti Park among the infinite demands of the entitled.
There will be no leftist, progressive imitation of the Tea Party. There can be no real sense of cooperation, no sense of community, without respect for an individual’s life, liberty, and property. You don’t say “please” or “excuse me” to someone who is trying to hurt you or take your stuff.
CHAPTER 5
WHEN AMERICA BEATS WASHINGTON
Come on, this affects all of us, man. Our basic freedoms. I’m staying.
—Walter Sobchak, The Big Lebowski
OUR GOVERNMENT IS HEADED IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION OF EVERY cultural and technological trend toward more freedom, more choice, more transparency, and more individual accountability. Those in power are not only pushing back against the liberation of individual preferences seen elsewhere in society; they are pushing back hard against anyone who wants to be let inside the castle gates, anybody who wants to be part of the process of deciding. Ensconced inside, the political class seems to be looking down from castle turrets at the rest of America.
Their disdain is palpable.
They see unwashed rubes, amateurs who could not possibly understand the complexities of governance. We are just too simple to understand, not quite smart enough to take care for ourselves on the big issues of the day. They, the experts, have drawn a line in the sand that you, a stakeholder in the American Enterprise, shall not pass.
It is said that politics abhors a vacuum. In 2008, the gap between where we stood, as Americans living in a radically decentralized world, and where government was headed, constantly imposing more top-down solutions to problems that can only be solved from the bottom up, was too large. The gap between their fantasy and our reality was a yawning expanse, and growing bigger by the day. Government was spending too much money it did not have and getting too involved in things best left to consumer-imposed accountability. Something had to give, one way or another. Something was going to fill that vacuum.
That’s exactly what millions of Americans began to say in the summer of 2008. Too much spending. Too many bailouts. Too many special interests taking care of themselves first, at the expense of our families. Too many politicians thinking that they knew best. The tipping point was the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the $700 billion bailout of a select group of Wall Street investment firms. “Look,” said President George W. Bush in December 2008, in defense of this extraordinary expansion of government power over market processes. “I obviously have made a decision to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse. I have abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.”1 This remarkably Orwellian turn of phrase would roll off the tongues of Tea Party protesters for years to come when asked what had prompted them to first show up and fight back.
COLLUDING AGAINST US
DESPITE MASSIVE GRASSROOTS OPPOSITION TO TARP OUTSIDE THE Beltway, the leadership of both parties joined together to push it through Congress. Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, and Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, both endorsed the need to bail out Wall Street, and both voted for the legislation. Either could have killed it single-handedly, and changed the course of history. But when push came to shove, they both fell in line with the establishment to prop up big banks that did not deserve taxpayer-financed propping. The Republican Bush administration worked closely with the Democratic congressional leadership, both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, to whip the votes to jam it through the legislature, starting with the House of Representatives. On September 29, 2008, from the well of the House floor, Speaker Pelosi urged her colleagues to vote for TARP: “It just comes down to one simple thing. They have described a precipice. We are on the brink of doing something that might pull us back from that precipice. I think we have a responsibility. We have worked in a bipartisan way.”2
Bipartisan is such a curious word. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word as “relating to, or involving members of two parties (a bipartisan commission); specifically: marked by or involving cooperation, agreement, and compromise between two major political parties (bipartisan support for the bill).” This last usage is often invoked in Washington in lieu of a substantive argument for or against pending legislation, as if all credible legislation were bipartisan, and all bipartisan legislation were credible. Votes that should not have been cast are inevitably defended as having been a “bipartisan” imperative. “Partisanship,” on the other hand, is ipso facto bad. Beltway pundits worship at the altar of bipartisanship, prioritizing the virtues of the process by which legislation is developed over the importance of substance of the legislation itself.
In reality, both parties typically cooperate in a bipartisan manner to grow the power and reach of government. Where do the taxpayers, back home working to put food on their table, sit at this bipartisan negotiating table? There is no third chair. Isn’t this form of cooperation really just collusion by another name? In the private sector it would be. Consider a legal definition of the term:
Collusion occurs when two persons or representatives of an entity or organization make an agreement to deceive or mislead another. Such agreements are usually secretive, and involve fraud or gaining an unfair advantage over a third party, competitors, consumers or others with whom they are negotiating. The collusion, therefore, makes the bargaining process inherently unfair. Collusion can involve price or wage fixing, kickbacks, or misrepresenting the independence of the relationship between the colluding parties.3
Such behavior is illegal in the private sector, where no individual has the peculiar advantages of monopoly power granted to government agents. And yet elected representatives regularly collude, “in a bipartisan way,” as Nancy Pelosi puts it, to give some an unfair advantage over others. Elected officials regularly deceive their constituents. Cabinet agency heads conspire with their allies—health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, for instance—to fix prices, limit supplies, encourage certain types of consumer behavior, construct barriers to entry, manipulate markets, and crowd out competition. Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, coauthors of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America, refer to Republicans and Democrats as a “duopoly” that seems more intent on protecting its own interests, not ours. “Though rhetorically and theoretically at odds with one another,” they wri
te, “the two parties have managed to create a mostly unbroken set of policies and governance structures that benefit well-connected groups at the expense of the individual.”4
TEA PARTY 1.0
YET, FOR ALL ITS BIPARTISAN GLORY, THE INITIAL VERSION OF THE TARP legislation was gloriously defeated moments after Pelosi’s September 29 floor speech, against any and all expectations among Beltway interests. How was it killed? By the American people, who had simply had enough. They stopped yelling at the TV, got up off their couches, pushed away from kitchen tables, and started calling their representatives in Washington. Many had never called before, but they had to do something to stop the insanity. So many did so, in fact, that the Capitol switchboard was shut down, and congressional staffers were besieged by a deluge of constituent anger.
It was David versus Goliath. And it was awesome. That was the day the Tea Party was born in America. Something had to give. The fortress gates were bound to buckle, sooner rather than later. It was the emergence of the Tea Party that kicked the doors down. Activists seemed to come out of nowhere, newly armed with easy access to multiple, competitive sources of information. Enabled by the lower costs of connection and association with like-minded neighbors. Ignited by the easy availability of virtually costless technology that allowed unknown millions to coordinate plans. And fueled by the unspoken but ingrained sense of collective outrage over the violation of the principle that we shouldn’t hurt others or take their stuff.
Republicans and Democrats quickly huddled, larded the bill with nongermane spending earmarks for favored constituencies—constituencies that would cooperate—and passed the bailout legislation. It passed in a bipartisan fashion. But they had awoken a sleeping giant, We the People.
The modern Tea Party has been widely characterized as a partisan—as in negative, a bad influence, not bipartisan—phenomenon, a Republican uprising against a newly minted Democratic administration. It is not, of course; it never has been. The Tea Party was never a political party the way Republicans or Democrats are. A party’s only purpose is to get its candidates elected. Tea Partiers were bound by a set of values, not a slate of candidates. Their interest was in the ideas of freedom that formed the basis of the American experiment. Political parties are, at best, a necessary means in the cause of good ideas. More naturally, parties collude on bad ideas, with the hope that their slate of candidates wins in the next election.
The “partisan” narrative allowed the mainstream media and the political elite to ignore the emerging Tea Party uprising as it grew in strength in the early months of 2009.
The first tangible iteration of this grassroots uprising for fiscal sanity—call it Tea Party 1.0—was as a street protest, as people started to gather in town squares. This phenomenon was particularly remarkable because of an ingrained penchant of functional libertarians not to take part in the political process, wanting most of all just to be left alone to work, live, raise our families, and prosper, free from too many top-down intrusions. Why would you show up if you didn’t want something, didn’t expect something? Because all other options had been taken off the table. Lo and behold, as people left their homes for the streets of America, they started to discover that they were not alone in their angst over an arrogant political establishment run amok.
A February 2009 gathering of a dozen protesters in Fort Myers, Florida, grew into hundreds protesting in Seattle in March and thousands demanding accountability in Atlanta in April. All this protesting culminated in the September 12, 2009, Taxpayer March on Washington, attended by more than a million citizen activists. They put official Washington on notice: We will be ignored no more. That day was a little like karaoke night, where just about every group involved had their two minutes at the microphone. It was the biggest mutual support group ever assembled: “I am not alone, and I’m not crazy to have spent the family vacation fund to come to Washington, D.C., to petition my government for a redress of grievances.”
That day, a protest movement started to morph into something else entirely. Newly minted activists went home and started organizing, community by community, town by town, congressional district by congressional district. Nobody told them to do this, but they knew that marching on Washington was just the beginning. Nothing had changed yet.
But we certainly got Washington’s attention. How do I know? Because of the speed with which the political establishment went from ignoring us to attacking our motives. It was such a monumental event that former president Jimmy Carter felt called upon to impugn the motives of every single marcher, just two days after the March on Washington, with a sweeping statement on race:
I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African-American. I live in the south and I’ve seen the south come a long way and I’ve seen the rest of the country that shared the south’s attitude toward minority groups, at that time particularly African-Americans, that that racism still exists. And I think it’s bubbled up to the surface because of belief among many white people, not just in the south, but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It’s an abominable circumstance and grieves me and concerns me very deeply.5
This baseless charge would seem to be the work of a partisan hack, not a former president. Why would Carter debase himself so? Because he could see the castle gates buckling. Something had to be done.
First they ignored us. This is a typical tactic employed by front-runners, those in charge. Never draw attention to your opponent. Never give them a space on the stage, a microphone, a platform for their agenda. But if your opponent closes in, nipping at your heels, it is time to attack. So it was with the 9/12 Taxpayer March on Washington. We got the establishment’s notice. They took the threat the Tea Party posed to their power position seriously, for the first time. So they ridiculed, like the flamboyant French guard in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.” Then they released the attack dogs.
We were finally getting somewhere.
TEA PARTY 2.0
VIEWING EVENTS AND HUMAN ACTIONS IN REAL TIME IS INTEGRAL TO a bottom-up understanding of economic processes. Real time is constantly changing and the future is uncertain. The world we live in is not a static snapshot of any particular moment or imagined equilibrium state. People, in their purposeful actions, change along with time, new information, new circumstances, and the evolution of things based on the actions and decisions of others. In other words, things can never be exactly like they were before as humans work toward their goals. This is known as progress, but it’s not “progressive” in the sense that Barack Obama might intend it to be. This is an emerging order created by free folks interacting in common purpose, not some grandiose plan conceived by a potentate with a particular goal, to be imposed from the top down.
The difference between those two kinds of “progress” is what made the second iteration of the Tea Party so unique in American political history. There was no grand plan. There was no charismatic leader. There was no particular candidate to rally around. It was a core value of the Tea Party ethos: nobody gets to tell anyone else what to do, and everyone is responsible for their own work and their own actions. We act by mutual consent based on the trader principle—value for value. It’s a contract of sorts, an unspoken agreement that everyone understands. That’s what makes it binding.
The conventional wisdom was that this massive uprising, now acknowledged as very real by mainstream media, would evaporate with the passage of the Democrats’ government takeover of health care on March 21, 2010. After all, stopping Obamacare had become the singular focus of the grassroots movement, the raison d’être of the Tea Party, by the spring of 2010. Those in charge secretly hoped they would go away. That was part of the plan. The likely reason Obamacare actually passed was a predominant assumption among Democrats, which was aggressively promoted by their leaders, that people would go b
ack home, passions would fade, and this formidable protest movement would lose cohesiveness once the bill left the headlines of the Washington Post. This arrogance was consistent with the by-any-means-necessary approach used to pass the $768 billion stimulus legislation in the early days of the Obama administration. Public opposition did not seem to matter, because the insiders were told that voters would shift their attentions, with the next day’s above-the-fold headline.
The extraordinary tactical legislative maneuvers and procedural trickery employed by the Obama administration, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi demonstrated this arrogance; that people would forget, or even learn to like the massive expansion of government’s role in health care. That’s how things had always worked in the past, after all. Crisis, and then an expansion of the leviathan state, and the ratchet effect of government control and expenditures since the halcyon days of John Maynard Keynes.6
Structurally, the Tea Party didn’t stay a protest movement very long following the September 12 march. Certainly there were countless additional rallies all the way until Election Day 2010. But the gatherings themselves took on a different purpose. Street protests serve a particular tactical purpose: to get the attention of the political establishment, and to build sympathy for your cause with the public. By 2010, local gatherings were taking on a different tone. Each group was now building organization at the local level. This somewhat amorphous building process is impossible to quantify, but you could literally see it happening. There were more and more local groups on the ground, and they were growing. Every group that I would visit was either built by someone or contained a substantial block of folks who had attended the March on Washington. Countless times I heard the same story that one young mom told me on August 18, 2010, as we stood on the front stairs of Sciortino’s Restaurant in Brewster, New York, at a rally put together by the Hudson Valley Patriots. “I’ve never done this before,” she told me, “but being there that day on September 12 proved to me that there were enough people out there just like me. I could do this. We just have to get organized.”
