Posted this earlier on RedState.com:

I’ve been studying the Progressives the last few months, and I think this post will be the beginning of a series, or at least a conversation starter for another post or two. It’s struck me in my studies that the Progressives and America’s Founding Fathers are on the polar extremes of two very important issues: the nature of man and the role of government. And if you’re coming from two diametrically opposite worldviews, it of course leads to opposite conclusions. The problems we face today are a direct result of the fact that Progressive beliefs and the Founders’ beliefs, as found in the Declaration and Constitution, are like oil and water: they will never mix.

Progressives view man as perfectable, essentially good, and see centralizing power in national government as necessary for the advancement of society. You might even say the Progressives thought the state in the hands of an educated elite was, and is, a benevolent force for good. Because of their views on man, and government, the Progressives were, and are, utopian statists. By that I mean they believe in the goodness of the state for the advancement of society; but such beliefs, and the belief that man is essentially good, are utopian: such beliefs are not rooted in reality. For empirical evidence, look no further than the 20th century, which is full of evidence as to why virtually every form of statism attempted not only did not work, but also eventually resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions. The word “utopia” literally means “nowhere,” and utopian statism has never worked anywhere. It never will because those who hold to such ideas fail each time to understand the actual nature of man and the proper role of government.

The Founders’ views on man and government were diametrically opposed to the Progressives: they knew man is not essentially good, nor should a government made by man, and ruled by men, have great centralized powers. Why? Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Number 6 that: “Men are ambitious, vindictive and rapacious,” with James Madison writing in Federalist 51, “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Nor did the Founders view centralized power, even government, in the most positive of lights: Washington would write, “Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

This is not to say the Founders were cynics. Instead, they were optimistic realists. While they believed that man is capable of great good, they also felt that he is not capable of sustained good; in their view, man is an imperfect creature in an imperfect world. So how could one realistically provide for the greatest amount of freedom and prosperity in this imperfect world? That was the challenge of the Founders when writing our founding documents. They were ultra-realistic about the nature of man and the nature of man’s governments–and yet created a form of government that was able to give America the most freedom and prosperity any nation has ever seen by limiting the role of government and providing for, and protecting, individual freedom.

One of the great tensions we are seeing today in America is that of the worldview of Progressives coming up against the worldview of the Founders. The American people are awakening, via tea party protests and the growth of 9.12 groups, because I believe that deeply engrained in the American people are the beliefs of the Founders with regard to human nature and government. The protests we’ve seen over the last two years are a natural reaction to the false god of statism being foisted upon them, and not just by the current administration and unpopular Congress. While the Bush administration was not as egregious as the current White House (nor was the attendant Republican Congress) both those entities were statists with a small ‘s,’ preferring to not make the truly difficult choices, and instead, growing the size and role of government in our lives. That’s why I virtually ignore party affiliations, and even find the terms “conservative” or “liberal” to be almost meaningless. I choose to evaluate candidates in light of whether they are statist or non-statist: do they believe in expanding the role, scope, and size of the state in the lives of the individual, or in limiting the power of the state (government) so as to provide for the greatest freedom within the bounds of ordered liberty? Government has a role in our society: national defense to provide for protected space within which a free people can flourish, the enforcement of the rule of law and the right of contract to provide for a just society, the protection of private property, etc. But the list of where government should be is a very short one, and the rest of society should be left to the private sphere.

Americans are seeking non-statists to govern this country, and though I think this fall’s elections will be “progress in the right direction,” but let me say that simply electing Republicans is not the solution because there are plenty of Republican statists parading about. The way toward ensuring liberty is in electing men and women who have deeply held views on the role of government, individual freedom, and the free enterprise system. Some will happen to run as Republicans, but dare I say, even as Democrats in some locations—but it is only this originalist worldview (shared by the Founders) that will turn our country around and put us back on the path of prosperity and freedom.

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I’m pretty excited about American Majority’s 20/20 video series on how to become more effective online. Austin James, who is AM’s new media director, has put together the series, which will be 20 minute videos, done once a week and delivered to your email inbox, between now and Sept. 20th. I would strongly encourage you to sign-up for them. The videos are free, and will absolutely be beneficial. To sign-up for the videos, go here: http://americanmajority.org/20-20-program/

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I posted this yesterday at RedState.com:

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I was in Pittsburgh over the weekend for the first Post-Party Summit. I have to say, having done many trainings personally, I came away fired up, and quite frankly, so did many in attendance. Some of the feedback afterwards ranged from:

“The whole workshop was BEYOND my expectations! I never expected the degree of excellence. The information was needed….I look forward to follow-ups to learn even more!”

“I just came home from the Pittsburgh Post-Party Summit and to think I didn’t even know about your organization four days ago, wow! I am so glad that I followed my instincts and went. It was so informative and now I feel I have a support system in this revolution to get back our country. Thank you for all your efforts…..”

“It was fantastic. I feel like I just robbed you by only paying $50 for this.”
There were almost 270 at the event, with Friday night being inspirational talks by Rose Tennet of the Quinn and Rose Show and Erick Erickson, editor of RedState.com. Saturday was all about training and empowering, with 15 workshops and 2 main sessions, covering topics from building grassroots coalitions to digital pamphleteering to investigative journalism to running for office.

There is a method to the madness as to why the Post-Parties are set up the way they are. First, it is time to move past the protesting and into organizing and implementing. I’ve said it before, but protests are good because they allow people to see they’re not alone, and they let people’s voices be heard. But at the end of the day, despite massive protests last year, from April 15 to the August town halls to September 12, health care still passed. Why?

Because protesting fundamentally changes nothing.

The tea party protests, and the 9.12 movement, are the beginning point, not the end all. However, if the protests are all this is about, then I can guarantee one thing: we will lose.

One of the reasons the progressive left has been winning in recent times is because people with bad ideas and good organization will always beat people with good ideas and bad organization.

And by organization, I mean organizing to win in the political arena. I said it in the L.A. Times a few weeks ago, but I would be more than happy to see the protests of April 15 be the last this year because any time taken to organizing protests this summer and fall will only take away from the more meaningful work of hard-wiring precincts, registering voters, building muscular grassroots accountability, and providing greater transperancy and accountability with investigative journalism.

Second, the topics chosen for the Post-Parties are for a reason. We are confronting a system of government that has been re-enforcing itself since the Progressive Era nearly a hundred years ago, when utopian statists fundamentally changed American government and American society. With every election, this system gets stronger, all the while drifting away from serving “We the People,” and in fact serving the political class and its capitalist cronies. I am convinced that one of the only ways we can break the system, and return this government back to the ideals of the Founding, and to serving the American people, is to create privatized political infrastructure.

The reason I say that is the parties will not save this country: parties, by their very nature, are creatures of compromise. Instead of looking at them as the source of power, the tea partiers and 9.12ers need to see not just the Republican Party, but even the Democrat Party, as vehicles by which they achieve their political ends, much like the progressives did with the Democrat Party in Colorado between 2003-2008.

But this will require the local tea parties and 9.12 groups to focus on such things as identifying and training new leaders for state and local office, even federal office, and then supporting them with money and grassroots work such as door-to-door and phone banking. It will require hard-wiring and micro-targeting precincts. It will require citizen journalists providing greater transparency for government and elected officials. It will require a far more robust presence online, with Facebook, Twitter, wikis and blogs.

And at the end of the day, if the privatized political infrastructure succeeds, then the tea parties and 9.12 movements will control the nomination process, and to loosely quote a far smarter person than myself, “He who controls the nominations controls the party.” But I would say even more than that, he who controls the nominations controls the party, controls the system. And in doing so, we will turn our system of government around from this slouch towards statism put it on the right path towards greater freedom and prosperity.

Come join American Majority, Smart Girl Politics, the John Hancock Committee for the States, and RedState, for the next six Post-Party Summits. Come organize for a free America.

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I posted this earlier today on RedState.com:

An American Armada

I read an article by Malcolm Gladwell, “How David Beats Goliath: When Underdogs Break the Rules,” some months ago and have been thinking about it ever since. In it, Gladwell highlights an analysis of when Davids took on Goliaths in history. The Goliaths, the ones ten-times stronger in the fight, won the encounters over 70% of the time. But in instances when the Davids broke the rules and stuck to a strategy that played to their strengths, the Davids’ win percentage rose to almost 64%. In other words, the Davids won when they chose not to play by the assumed rules of engagement. Something about this just clicked with me, and I believe it might lead to a new strategy for conservatives.

The key anecdote for me in Gladwell’s article involved Doug Lenat, the developer of an artificial-intelligence program that he called Eurisko to compete in a war game tournament. Essentially Lenat fed the rules of the tournament to Eurisko, which allowed a gamer to spend $1 trillion on a naval force. The program learned the rules and then spent hours upon hours coming up with a strategy to defeat all the other contestants. “Most teams fielded some version of a traditional naval fleet—an array of ships of various sizes, each well defended against enemy attack.” Gladwell writes. “Eurisko thought differently. ‘The program came up with a strategy of spending the trillion on an astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility,’ Lenat said. ‘They just sat there. Basically, if they were hit once they would sink. And what happened is that the enemy would take its shots, and every one of those shots would sink our ships. But it didn’t matter, because we had so many.’” Lenat won the tournament in a runaway as his P.T. boats swarmed the opposing battleships. He entered the tournament the next year, won again … and was essentially asked not to compete in future tournaments.

So what’s my point? We are confronted by ever-expanding government in DC, and the massive unions are not going anywhere. Yet the current strategy with many conservatives is seemingly to become a mirror image of that which they are supposed to be combating. The conservative movement has been playing by Goliath’s rules for too long. It’s time conservatives built a flexible, nimble American Armada of P.T. boats to beat the Left, but not at its own game.

I’ve always wondered why if we don’t believe Washington has the answers, why do so many conservative groups decide to come to DC?  I’m proposing that the conservative movement change its strategy from DC-centric to more state-based: most conservatives would agree with federalism, yet at times our behavior says just the opposite.

I think in many ways we’ve been trying to create our own battleships in DC to combat the Left’s battleships, and if we continue to do so, we will never win. Many would say that the Heritage Foundation is the largest DC-based conservative battleship, with an annual budget of probably $60-70 million. But to put it into perspective, the National Education Association’s annual budget is $307 million. SEIU’s is $300 million. AFL-CIO’s is $120 million plus. I could continue on laying out the annual budgets of left-leaning groups, but I think you get the point.

We are faced with a massive Leviathan of government, surrounded by a fleet of allied battleships, and we’re going to try and compete with this? We’re going to try and play by their rules? If we play by Goliath’s rule, we’ll never win. All we’ll be doing is fighting rearguard action against the inevitability of statism.

It is time to challenge the way things are done: the Davids only win if they don’t play by Goliath’s rules. They only win, as Gladwell points out, if they do what might be considered socially horrifying at the onset. So what is the new David approach? It’s the 1,000 new light and agile P.T. boats. Let me highlight a few examples of what I believe to be the winning strategy for conservatives.

Most of you have never heard of Wendy Day in Michigan, but Wendy has launched a 501c3 and 501c4 on what many would consider shoe string budgets. For pennies on the dollar, with projects like Make Lansing Listen, she has begun to wreak havoc in their state. State legislators on both sides of the aisle know who she is now. Recently, she shone the light on SB 731, which would have given $4 million in taxpayer dollars to SEIU, not only spreading the word about the bill, but demanding to know what the real reason was for handing over the money to an ally of ACORN’s. Her message is one of honesty and integrity: you promised the voters you would vote one way and yet now that you are in Lansing, your votes reflect an ideology diametrically opposed to that of your constituents.

Michael Quinn Sullivan of Empower Texans, which he runs with the help of one staffer, has brought about significant changes in Texas politics. In 2007, he targeted a Republican lawmaker who was constantly thwarting tax reform and spending restraint. He did mail, phone calls and targeted appearances in the district during the summer. The lawmaker’s response was to mostly ignore the clamor from his constituency, then go to his local party chair and say in essence: “I’ve had enough of Sullivan and his guys talking about my record, so I’m getting out.” He was replaced in the next election by one of Empower Texans’ “taxpayer advocates.” Last year, Sullivan did auto-dial calls into two legislators’ districts to inform constituents of their elected officials’ real voting record. The two officials complained to a reporter that Empower Texans was “behind” mean auto-dials. The reporter called Sullivan, heard the audio and he laughed the whole thing off. But what Sullivan did was provide greater accountability for those officials by informing their constituents of what was actually taking place in Austin.

And then there is the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, with a budget that is a fraction of most conservative organizations, and its forty-plus investigative reporters. It is these very reporters who break stories like last fall’s phantom Congressional districts. American Majority, (which, for full disclosure, is the group I founded and run) with just under 20 staff, did 151 activist and candidate trainings in 26 states last year, training just under 5,000 people, 510 of which were candidates running for state and local office. Just the other month, 71 American Majority alumni filed to run for office in Arkansas, from school board to state senate. In February, 19 of the 25 candidates identified and trained by American Majority won school board races in Oklahoma. While not massive numbers, the model works. I’m pretty sure next year or the next we’ll be saying, “Of the 200 some school board candidates in Oklahoma, 150 plus won.”

What’s my point here? Two things: these are relatively small groups, with very, very low overhead. I joked about this before, but it’s true: American Majority’s entire annual budget in 2009 was less than the Republican National Committee’s 2009 airfare budget. Second, all of the groups mentioned above are focused very much on the idea that not only is all politics local, but all accountability is local.

The problems we face in DC are not going to be fixed by camping in DC and growing our mini-versions of the government aircraft carrier or the Left’s battleships. It’s going to be about creating our American Armada of  1,000 P.T. boat organizations, highly mobile, hard-hitting, able to adapt quickly and hit fast. Only when we shift our paradigm are we going to be able to win.

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I’m cross-posting my post from Big Government:

Post-Party Summits: Organizing for a Free America

by Ned Ryun

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I’ve been beating the drum on this for some time, and will continue to do so. I’ve been making three main points on most of my interviews with radio shows and print:

1. The Tea Partiers are mainstream. The Gallup poll from the end of March shows that the Tea Partiers are in fact mainstream.

2. The American people identify more with the Tea Partiers than they do with Congress. Rasmussen reports that 47% of Americans identify more with the Tea Partiers vs. 26% that identify more with Congress.

3. The Tea Partiers main issues are the economy and jobs (I’ve been adding the role of government in their lives). The Winston Group reported last week that those concerns mirror the concern of the majority of voters in America.

With that all said, and with the left and the mainstream media pushing a narrative that the Tea Partiers are fringe, I would have to say polls reflect the exact opposite, that in fact Tea Partiers are mainstream, that most Americans identify with them, and that in the end, I think it’s fair to ask: if the Tea Partiers are mainstream, what does that make the left and the mainstream media? Fringe?

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Despite the left and mainstream media’s attempts to marginalize the tea partiers, I believe you’re going to see more and more polls like Rasmussen’s from earlier this week that showed 52% of Americans think tea partiers have a better grasp of issues vs. 30% that think Congress does. Here’s another interesting stat from the poll: 47% of Americans think their political views are closer to the tea partiers, vs. only 26% identifying with Congress’s political views.

If you keep reading the poll, the overwhelming majority of mainstream Americans identify with tea partiers more than with the political class. This is exactly what I’ve been saying as I do radio and press interviews: the tea partiers are not fringe. They are mainstream and first adopters of the great American populace; the majority of Americans identify strongly with the tea party ideals of limited government and fiscal responsibility, and that is what the tea partiers are about. It is the political class that is outside the mainstream of America.

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Sen. Jim DeMint has a bill calling for the repeal of ObamaCare. Here’s a current list of co-sponsors:

Sen. Bob Bennett, Sen. Kit Bond, Sen. Saxby Chambliss, Sen. John Cornyn, Sen. Tom Coburn, Sen. Mike Crapo, Sen. John Ensign, Sen. Kay Baily Hutchinson, Sen. Lindsey Graham, Sen. Jim Inhofe, Sen. George LeMieux, Sen. John Kyl, Sen. James Risch, Sen. Pat Roberts, Sen. David Vitter.

I hear that three more Senators are going to sign on today as well. But what needs to be done is have the GOP Senate Leadership all sign on, and I’m not seeing McConnell, Thune, etc. on this list.

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I’m helping organize the Post-Party Summits: Organizing for a Free America. Smart Girl Politics, RedState.com and the John Hancock Committee for the States are co-sponsors with American Majority. I’d encourage those interested in organizing on behalf of freedom to check out the nearest Summit, and then spread the word about the Summits to family and friends.

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