Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto (17 page)

THE OLD WAY OF
doing things in Washington was based on a closed system, an exclusive club that favored insiders and the politically connected over principled leaders with big ideas. Follow the leader. Toe the party line. Shake the right hands. That was the only way to get elected, the only way to even have a shot at making a difference. But within the constraints of the system, the rules are always stacked against freedom, and accountability, and fiscal responsibility.

The emergence of the Internet and social media has begun to change all that. The machinery of government no longer functions entirely behind closed doors, shielded from the light of public attention. Information on last-minute floor votes and arcane congressional floor procedure is tweeted out, posted, and otherwise instantaneously distributed to millions of concerned citizens. Through the magic of live streaming, we can watch events unfold on the House and Senate floors in real time, from the comfort of our own smart phones.

Knowledge is power, and the diminishing marginal costs of getting good information about Washington’s ways is changing the old, tired political calculus. Politicians can no longer hide from their constituents, telling them one thing back home while voting for business as usual in the nation’s capital. As a result, we are beginning to see real accountability, and the effects, though only just beginning to be felt, are amazing.

Thanks to the power of political disintermediation, the American people are making their voices heard in Washington. A new generation of congressmen and senators has emerged to give voice to the formerly voiceless, to keep their promises, and to stand on principle.

This is nothing short of a paradigm shift that gives shareholders a real seat at the table in Washington. Our proxy representation at the board of directors’ table is a growing bicameral “Liberty Caucus,” the size and quality of which is historically unprecedented in American politics.

I was lucky enough to sit down with six of the most exciting figures to emerge from this new political environment, to get their take on things. I asked them about their history with the ideas of liberty and their experiences confronting the political establishment. Senators Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Ted Cruz (R-TX), along with Representatives Justin Amash (R-MI), Thomas Massie (R-KY), and David Schweikert (R-AZ), are leading among those writing the new rules in politics, where power does not go to those most entrenched in a broken system, but remains with the people, where the founders intended it.
^*

These are some smart, fearless guys. Because this is my book, I took the liberty to mash up six separate conversations into an imaginary gab fest between all six legislators. All of their quotes, of course, are the real thing.

Here’s what went down in my imaginary living room:

MK:
We’re talking about the ideas of liberty and the way that the world has changed so much in the last couple of years, but I wanted to ask you first, how you got into these ideas. How did you discover freedom?

TED CRUZ:
As a kid I got very involved in a group in Houston that was called the Free Enterprise Institute. It had a program where it taught high school kids principles of free market economics, and it would have us read Milton Friedman, and Hayek, and Von Mises, and Bastiat, and have us prepare speeches on free market economics. In the course of four years of high school I ended up giving right about eighty speeches across the state of Texas on free market economics, and also on the Constitution. And that became really the intellectual inspiration and foundation for being involved in the liberty movement.

DAVID SCHWEIKERT:
It came to me as a teenager. Somehow I got my hands on an Ayn Rand book. And unlike most people, I started with a book called
We the Living
. In Arizona it’s really hot during the summer, so you’re just inside going through the pages. And I fell in love with the heroine in that. And from there it just sort of built into understanding the power of the individual. And I have to admit, even in the high school I was in, there were probably a dozen of us who became Rand devotees.

THOMAS MASSIE:
My gateway issue was gun rights. When I was eighteen I went to school in Massachusetts from Kentucky. I’d read about people who wanted to ban guns, but I’d never met one. And instantly I found myself surrounded by these people that wanted to ban guns. And that was my liberty issue.

MIKE LEE:
I was raised with a real love of the country. My parents taught me that America is a special place, that America is unlike other countries. And we’re very privileged, we’re very fortunate to live here because of these shared values and the heritage that we have inherited from prior generations. My parents taught me about the structure and how it’s set up from an early age. One of the things that I’ve been frustrated with since at least the age of ten is the fact that the federal government is doing too many things. We were always supposed to have a limited-purpose national government, a federal government with only a few basic responsibilities. It was supposed to perform those really well, and it was supposed to take care of those things to the exclusion, in many circumstances, of state authority. But outside of those areas, it was supposed to stay out and let state and local governments take care of the rest, along with civil society.

JUSTIN AMASH:
I was done with college, done with law school, and noticed that my views on politics were a little bit different than some of my Republican colleagues. It was the [George W.] Bush era of Republican politics. So, I decided I’d do a Google search and threw some of the terms into Google that I thought matched my viewpoints. Up popped F. A. Hayek.

I like Hayek’s style. It’s an intellectual style. There’s a strong focus on spontaneous order, the idea that order pops out of our free interactions with each other. I found that very appealing and when I read Hayek’s works, they really struck a chord with me.

MK:
Hayek talks about how individuals come together in voluntary association and create institutions, and those institutions both inform, and are a constraint on our behavior. I always thought that that interplay between community and the individual made a lot of sense and explains how the world holds together and works so well without some benevolent despot telling us what to do.

JUSTIN AMASH:
Yeah, that’s absolutely right. He’s very good at making the distinction between government and society. There can be societies where people interact, where they cooperate, where they form groups together. But you don’t have to have a government deciding how all of those interactions work.

MK:
The left loves to use this atomistic caricature that we’re all Ayn Randoids, selfish individuals willing to do absolutely anything to get what we want. But that’s the complete opposite of what I get out of Rand. Her work was really focused on individual responsibility. We need to take the word “community organizer” back, I think, and take the word “community” back.

JUSTIN AMASH:
Right, and a lot of what libertarians are about this idea that people work together, that they cooperate, that they form these sort of social groups. That’s perfectly acceptable as long as they’re voluntary associations.

MK:
Let’s talk about politics for a little bit. I think that we’re in the midst of a realignment, maybe even a paradigm shift. That same disintermediation, decentralization, more power to the individual dynamic is happening in our politics. And people like you are beating establishment candidates with all of the traditional advantages: more money, more people jetting in from Washington, D.C., to endorse them. Tell me that story.

THOMAS MASSIE:
I think the old model was that you ran for state legislature and you became a state representative, then you became a state senator, and you were a good party player, a good team player, and then somebody recommended that you get into a congressional race, and you come up the ranks. That’s been turned on its head.

There are some guys here in Congress that have never held an elective office. Ted Yoho, he’s great. He’s a large-animal veterinarian. Jim Bridenstine, he’s great. He was a Navy fighter pilot. Neither of those guys held an elective office, and they beat an incumbent Republican in a primary to get here to Washington, D.C. That’s only possible with grassroots support. Social media is part of it. Alternative media through talk radio is part of it. It’s enabled a different model of coming to Congress. You have the grassroots, these outside organizations like FreedomWorks, which are immensely important in the races, and not just in the races, but after the race is won in influencing these congressmen when they get here.

TED CRUZ:
I think there is a fundamental paradigm shift happening in the political world across this country, and that paradigm shift is the rise of the grass roots. In the Texas Senate race, when we started I was literally at 2 percent in the polls. Nobody in the state thought we had a prayer. My opponent was the sitting lieutenant governor, who was independently wealthy. He ran over $35 million dollars in nasty attack ads against us. And what we saw was just breathtaking. We saw first dozens, and hundreds and then thousands and then tens of thousands of men and women all across the state begin rising up, begin knocking on doors, begin making phone calls, and going on Facebook, and going on Twitter, and reaching out and saying, “We can’t keep doing what we’re doing. We are bankrupting this country. We are threatening the future of the next generations if we keep going down this road.”

It was breathtaking, the grassroots tsunami we saw. Despite being outspent three to one, we went from 2 percent to not just winning, but winning the primary by fourteen points and winning the general by sixty points. It was an incredible testament to the power of the grass roots, and I think that’s happening all over the country.

DAVID SCHWEIKERT:
I’ve had a handful of brutal political elections. It feels like every time I run I end up having the establishment folks against me, because I’m not sure that they want some of their little special deals examined or taken away. And what you’re finding is that the activists, the public, because of that access of information through the Internet, are sort of learning, “Oh, this is reality. This is my alternative, and there are options that do work.”

THOMAS MASSIE:
We look at communist countries and socialist countries and see how the Internet has changed them, or the countries that are led by despots. When they get the Internet, they sort of start coming around and there are revolutions there. That is happening here, we just don’t notice it. But it’s happening slower, because we’ve got a peaceful process for doing that.

RAND PAUL:
Our Facebook [following] is now bigger than several of the news networks’. I’m not saying that to brag, I’m saying that because there is power in Facebook. There is power in Instagram. There’s power throughout the Internet. It really has led to an amazing democracy.

MIKE LEE:
And I think it’s important to point out, Matt, that that is not our power. That is power that we have from the people. It is power that we have only because we connect to the people, and only to the extent that we connect to the people. What has changed is that, with the power of social media and other new channels of communication, the
Washington Post,
the
New York Times,
and the small handful of media outlets that have in the past been the exclusive conduits of information about what’s happening in Washington no longer have a monopoly. The cartel is broken, and with the breaking of that cartel, the people are empowered. And they’re empowered by a new generation of elected officials who are there to stand for the people and not for their own perpetual reelection, and not for the perpetual expansion of government. That’s a game changer. That’s how we bring about the restoration of constitutional government.

MK:
Do you think something different is going on in terms of the relationship of Americans with their federal government?

RAND PAUL:
Yeah, and I think the people are probably ten years in advance of the legislature, and probably always are. The grass roots and the public react in a way, but it takes a while for their will to get transmitted to Washington. Why? Because incumbents win almost every race around here. So there are people who were elected in 1980. They’re still representing the people in 1980 who first elected them. Each successive election becomes easier, and they’re not listening as carefully to the American people. So, the new people, we’re listening pretty carefully. We just got elected.

THOMAS MASSIE:
Most congressmen come here with the best of intentions. They want to do the right thing. But eventually they’re like zombies. They get bitten and they become part of the zombie mob, and they vote with their party regardless of what’s in the bill. Some people can make it a month without getting bitten, and some people can make it a whole term. But eventually, just like a bad zombie series on TV . . .

DAVID SCHWEIKERT:
Past scandals were often about an individual engaging in a bad act. Now the public is understanding that there is this collective movement of bad acts. And it’s about the preservation of power. The only way to break that down is to radically change those institutions or completely eliminate those institutions and move to a very different model.

RAND PAUL:
And I disagree with some people who say we’re too conservative or too much in favor of balanced budgets or too much for lower taxes and less regulation. No, we can be all of those things. We don’t need to lose what we’re for, but we also have to be for a bigger message of liberty. Young people don’t have any money. You ask young people about regulations and taxes and they’re like, “I don’t have any money. I don’t own a business. But I’ve got a cell phone and I’m on the computer, and I don’t like the government snooping on whether I read
Reason
magazine or whether I go to FreedomWorks’ website. I don’t want the government to know that unless I’m accused of a crime.” They care about privacy, but they may not care about taxes. So, we don’t give up on taxes, but we also need to talk about issues that young people are interested in.