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Editor's Note: This is the first installment of The Insurgency, our description of the current crisis in American life. The conclusion will appear tomorrow; what this series proposes and foresees is a transformation of American culture and politics.
Mass political movements often begin with a single, striking event. The Insurgency began in the fall of 2008, when President Bush, Senator Obama, and Senator McCain appeared together to endorse the TARP bailout. At that moment the lights came on for many Americans. It was glaringly obvious that both political parties jointly operated the system, and the system existed to protect the well connected at the expense of everyone else. The public opposed the TARP bailouts; the banks got their money anyway. The Insurgency, long brewing, began.
The Insurgency is a movement of citizens directed against unsustainable government taxation and regulation, and spending, both of which benefit insiders rather than ordinary people. The target of the Insurgency is a leviathan in Washington, D.C. that will ruin us all if it is not dismantled.
The Insurgency is part of a long tradition of mass political movements in our history. It has the potential to make a fundamental change in American life—for the better.
1. What is the Insurgency fighting against?
The American government has become a gigantic regulatory juggernaut. It decides the fate of individuals, businesses, whole industries, and entire regions. A few lines in a statute, or a paragraph in one of the many administrative codes that enmesh our productive lives, can mean wealth or ruin. This is a huge, unchecked, and increasingly unaccountable power. Where there is such power, as our Founders knew, it will be abused. Picking better people won’t solve the problem, because where such power exists, it will corrupt the people who have access to it. This is a political law almost as universal as those of Newton and Maxwell in the realm of physical phenomena. A regulatory state this powerful will necessarily be corrupting, venal, and suffocating.
"The most powerful force drives the leviathan-state:
rational self-interest."
This inevitable process is not a matter of party affiliation, or of Left versus Right, or of business versus government. It is much worse than that. The most powerful force drives the leviathan-state: rational self-interest. The self-interest of the politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists and their employers (mostly businesses), drives this vampire-leviathan to grow more and more powerful, to consume more and more of the assets and energy of the American people, to became the only path to wealth and status and independence. Americans who once would have sought to invent and create and innovate, to seek wealth and status and self-fulfillment in private enterprise, are driven instead to become courtiers and lackeys and wire-pullers. The regulatory state has become wealth-consuming, wealth-destroying, and wealth-preventing. It is hollowing out the enterprising and autonomous spirit of the American people, as well as bankrupting them.
The Insurgency is primarily a struggle against this power. It has come as a shock to the political establishment of both parties, which are used to carrying on with business as usual, and not being noticed. That is no longer possible.
No one is fooled.
The Democrats have been the main advocates of bigger government, so they are the most threatened by the Insurgency, and their servile allies in the legacy media have responded with the usual dishonest campaign of vilification. They have tried to demonize this new mass movement, and to alienate it from the center of the American electorate. So far, they have enjoyed only limited success in their shrill efforts at defamation. Labeling as “racist” all disagreements with any so-called Progressive position is an overused, worn-out weapon at this point, for instance—and leftists similarly overused and neutralized the word “fascist,” as George Orwell memorably recounted over 60 years ago. No one is fooled.
Nonetheless, the Republican Party will derive little joy from the Insurgency. It has similarly been stunned by the appearance of this massive outbreak of popular feeling and activity. The post-1994 decay of the GOP, especially during the Bush era, has shown the American people that no relief will come from the Republican Party unless it reforms itself first. The voters repudiated the GOP in 2006 and 2008, and with good reason.
The GOP seems to have initially believed that it could somehow ride public anger to victory in 2010 without offering any basic change in the way the game is played. The ongoing political massacre of establishment GOP politicians shows that this was incorrect; the public is onto their game. Time is running out for the GOP. The years 2010 and 2012 will be the GOP’s last opportunity to reform itself, and if it fails to do so, the GOP will be the first major victim of the Insurgency.
2. What is the Insurgency? Why now?
For now the Tea Party movement, ignited by Rick Santelli’s “Rant Heard Round the World,” is the dominant component of the Insurgency; Glenn Beck’s gathering of hundreds of thousands of people in Washington, D.C. is another, overlapping one. The people who have gathered around Governor Sarah Palin form yet another part of the Insurgency, as do the libertarian-minded citizens who read blogs like Instapundit. Many of Rush Limbaugh’s, Sean Hannity’s, and Mark Levin’s listeners are part of it. Various long-established conservative groups that have always opposed big government are now parts of the Insurgency.
There are appear to be three factors that have caused the rise of the Insurgency now, and the particular form it is taking: 1) technology, 2) a new, heightened awareness of the problem, and 3) the shock of the current crisis.
First, new technology allows massive, decentralized and horizontal organizations to form quickly. The Tea Party is the best current example: There is coordination, but no central direction. There is no one in charge, giving orders, but rather many people and groups cooperating. This is only possible due to current technology.
"[Technology] enabled the Insurgency,
but it did not cause it."
Technology, however, cannot by itself explain the rise of the Insurgency. After all, the political Left actually pioneered in this area: MoveOn was a highly effective internet-based organization, for example. It does seem odd, in retrospect, that a tech-savvy Left would cast its lot with a top-down, government-centric political culture. And there may be some overarching affinity between libertarian-style thinking and the new technology. But that technology is ultimately neutral. It enabled the Insurgency, but it did not cause it.
The second source of the Insurgency is increased public awareness of government spending and government power, and a new realization that many others also want to solve those problems.
It is axiomatic that government power will be employed to favor those who are organized to obtain benefits from it. Businesses and other groups will lobby for laws or regulations that favor them, or seek government money directly. They do this instead of innovating or selling cheaper or better products, or otherwise benefitting the public. This is entirely rational behavior on their part, but it does not benefit society as a whole. These incentives are inevitable when there is a controlling regulatory state that creates its own momentum to become increasingly powerful, expensive, and burdensome. The people who benefit from this system, which they have rigged in their own favor, get enormous benefits from it, and they will struggle to keep it going.
"Society suffers 'the death of a thousand cuts,'
but finds it hard to understand why it is bleeding to death."
Yet each individual person in society—all of whose members bear the burden of this system—only personally suffers a small cost from each new inefficiency, new regulation, each new complication in the tax code. Furthermore, the most important cost is invisible: the jobs that are never created, the new products that are never invented, the businesses that are never started, the innovations that never see the light of day. Benefits are concentrated, but burdens are widely diffused. Lost opportunities are never seen at all. As a result, it becomes very hard to mobilize opposition to the regulatory state. Society suffers “the death of a thousand cuts,” but finds it hard to understand why it is bleeding to death.
Today, this is changing. Alternative media, including talk radio and particularly the Internet, have opened up new sources of information and allowed more people to understand how the regulatory state is hurting our country, and each of us. The new media have also shown that there are millions of people who want real change. More and more people are outraged by the smug and increasingly brazen corruption and favor-seeking that makes up life in Washington, D.C. However, this growing awareness of the problem—and the number of people who wanted to change it—did not get the Insurgency going. People grumbled, and they blogged, but they did not go outside and protest. Something big had to happen first, to set it off.
"Unemployment remains high,with no relief in sight."
The third element that made the insurgency happen was the 2008 financial crisis, and the onset of the ongoing Second Great Depression. The outrageous Bush-Obama TARP bailouts came as a shock, and President Obama’s so-called stimulus package was a second blow; the trillion-dollar bailout of his political allies was obviously not going to stimulate anything. Unemployment remains high,with no relief in sight. The government cash bonfire continued with the passage of the unpopular (and unread, by legislators) health care legislation.
The ongoing, unfair, ineffective and unsustainable spending binge in Washington has caused genuine fear about the future of the country. The total financial obligations of all levels in government seem to go up by trillions of dollars, week by week. Everyone knows we cannot afford what we have spent already.
If something cannot go on, it will not go on. A massive change in how we govern ourselves is now mandatory and long overdue. The existing game in Washington, and at all levels of government, can no longer be paid for. This realization is swiftly spreading.
The Insurgency is mobilizing in response to this disaster. So far, the Insurgency has mostly opposed Obama and his policies. It has also begun to purge out the Republican Party, to make it fit for the necessary task of reform. The Insurgency, through its web of connected citizens, is getting started on the more difficult work of crafting and promoting its own affirmative policy package.
So how should the Insurgency proceed?
Part 2: Tomorrow
