A former presidential writer for George W. Bush and son of former
U.S. Congressman Jim Ryun, Ned Ryun is currently the head of American
Majority (www.americanmajority.org), a national organization committed to identifying and
training liberty‐minded leaders. Ned was the co‐founder and former director of the Generation Joshua
program. Ned earned degrees in English and History from the University of Kansas and has co‐authored
Heroes Among Us and The Courage to Run with his father and
his twin brother, Drew. Ned and his wife, Becca, reside in Northern
Virginia with their sons, Nathaniel and James. The views expressed on this blog are solely those held by Ned Ryun and do not necessarily represent the views of his current or previous employers.
Archive for April, 2010
04 27th, 2010
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.
04 12th, 2010
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.
I’m cross-posting my post from Big Government:
Post-Party Summits: Organizing for a Free America
by Ned Ryun
We are in a fascinating period in American history, where a confluence of developments has transformed our citizenry’s relationship with government. The mainstream media is distrusted and dying. The majority of our elected officials – let’s not bother with terming them “leaders” – no longer care to represent the interests of the people. In response, the American people are rising up in protest at a rate and in a manner not seen in decades, if ever.
Congressional approval ratings are at historic lows at around 14% (an acquaintance joked that during the American Revolution, the British Crown had double that approval rating, with roughly a third of colonists supporting the Crown and Parliament). Rasmussen recently reported that only 21% of Americans believe our government has the consent of the governed, and CNN reports that 56% of Americans believe that our government poses an immediate threat to American citizens’ rights and freedoms . . . well you get the idea.
The American people are making it clear where they stand, and in an unmistakable manner. Next week, on April 15th, more than one million people will be at more than 1,000 Tea Party protests across the country as more and more Americans come out to protest where elected officials are taking this country.
These events, though, are more than simply about venting and having their voices heard. They serve to connect people and communities and grassroots organizations. They also allow us to celebrate and remind the rest of our fellow citizens about our Nation’s founding principles: free men, free markets, and the rule of law, which so many in Washington and in state capitols seem to have forgotten.
But we must not allow all of our efforts and energy on April 15th to dissipate on the 16th. If our voices are truly to be heard, we need to build on our protests and begin implementing. A return to our founding principles as a way of life will only occur if those in the Tea Party and 9-12 movement dig into their local communities, hard-wire their electoral precincts, identify and get people trained to run for state and local office, build muscular grassroots coalitions to keep their elected officials accountable, and create greater transparency in local government. Only thenwill we begin to see real change.
That’s why American Majority, Smart Girl Politics, the John Hancock Committee for the States and RedState.com are joining together to conduct the Post-Party Summits: Organizing for a Free America. The time for the Tea Partiers and 9.12ers to organize in a concerted fashion has come.
The Post-Party Summits will not be about firing people up with motivational speakers, though we’ve got some great talent coming in to do just that. It will not be about whipping up emotions and telling people, “We need to fight. We need to have our voices heard,” and then sending those people home with no mission or goals or tools to achieve them. No, the Summits are about empowering people. They are about giving people the useful tools for making the necessary and great changes needed to turn this country around. Each Summit will have 15 workshops with topics ranging from how to hardwire your precincts, to running for office at the state and local level, to conducting voter registration drives, to learning how to become an investigative journalist. The Summits are about organizing, networking, and more importantly, about winning. After all, the people who get to create policy are those who make it across the finish line on Election Day.
Let me explain why they are called Post-Party Summits. It mostly has to do with the fact that they are in the weeks following April 15th. However, it is also about the idea that freedom-loving conservatives must take it upon themselves and move past a reliance on traditional political parties. The country will not be saved by political parties. A party for party’s sake isn’t going to get us very far. Do we really think that simply electing Republicans in the fall solves our problems? We’ve been there, done that. We do need a change of leadership in Washington and elsewhere, but America will only be truly saved by those Americans who take it upon themselves to do the hard work necessary to turn this country around.
Our summit is all about reinvigorating American Exceptionalism: the ideal that it is the individual – not the government – who is capable of rising to the great tasks and accomplishing great things. I challenge people when I speak that they should not assume that the person standing to their right or left will do anything to save this great country; they, themselves, must act. For too long we’ve assumed that the right things would be done by our elected officials; as a result we as a country are in something of a political depression, lost in those wrong assumptions.
No more.
We have awakened and we know the tasks before us: we must have new political leadership that puts into policy the great ideals of our Founding: limited government, free enterprise and individual freedom. We must have new leadership that reflects the values and interests of the American people, not the interests of the political class or those I call the patronage system cronies. We must have responsive government that respects the American people. We must have the American people engaged and demanding greater accountability and transparency from its government and leaders, and that accountability must be ongoing, irrespective of who is elected to office. The time for that change is now.
A good model in American history is what the Progressives were able to achieve between 1912-1920. In those eight years, they fundamentally changed American government and the culture. Their “reform” included the 16th Amendment and the income tax, which led to the formation of the Internal Revenue System. The Progressives founded the Federal Reserve, the Food and Drug Administration, and a myriad of other regulatory agencies that have now become overbearing and intrusive into Americans’ lives. Their so-called “progressive” reforms have led to less freedom and liberty for the American people, and an explosion in the growth of government and its spending (the U.S. government’s entire spending was 2.5% of GDP in 1900. That percentage alone would not cover Medicare’s costs in 2010).
But what the Progressives, or as I call them, the Regressives, did a hundred years ago, liberty-minded people can do now: we can bring about the greatest change in American history over the last century. We can stop this slouch towards statism, this growth of government into every nook and cranny of our lives, and return this country once again to the classical liberalism of our Founders.
However, these changes will not come easily: do you really think the Left is going to roll over, or the political class is going to willingly relinquish power? The only way we bring about the changes needed is if we organize in meaningful ways and become the long-term political force that I believe the Tea Party and 9-12 movement can, and must, become. And those of us involved with the Summits are certain that the Post-Party Summits can be important contributors to furthering what our fellow citizens have started.
If you’re interested in organizing for a truly free America, come join us at a Summit.
Come join the new American Revolution.
04 8th, 2010
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?
