A POCKET PRIMER FOR PATRIOTIC AMERICANS By Matt B. Kibbe To America’s Founders and the Sons of Liberty, who won our freedom; and to Saul Alinsky, whose rules we expropriate to win it back. TABLE OF CONTENTS: Rule 1: Freedom Works Rule 2: Freedom’s Right Rule 3: Freedom Requires Work Rule 4: We Win by Building Rule 5: Government Goes to Those Who Show Up Rule 6: Winning is More Important Than Who Gets the Credit Rule 7: Think Like a Revolutionary Rule 8: Drive the Conversation Rule 9: Everyone is a Printing Press Rule 10: The Day After Election Day is Even More Important Rule 11: Leviathan Won’t Go Away in a Day Rule 12: Recruit for the Future Rule 13: Don’t Tread on Me » DOWNLOAD THE PDF RULE 1: FREEDOM WORKS What follows is for those who want to set America on a path toward liberty, and who understand that freedom works. Few of our elected political leaders or bureaucrats give this simple axiom more than a brief thought. “Freedom works” – but what does the phrase actually mean? When we understand that freedom works, we understand why it is such a dangerous idea, a revolutionary idea, an idea so many tyrants throughout the history of the world have worked to destroy, an idea so many organizations today labor to eliminate. Freedom works as an organizational principle. It means that by giving people the freedom to strive and equal opportunity to succeed to the best of their own abilities, to risk what they will toward a goal they believe in, we achieve great things as a nation and a people. There is always, of course, the other path—letting elitist leaders with plans control every aspect of our life, as if they know what’s best for us. But accepting a top-down imposition of equality of outcomes never works. The ends are never truly equal, corruption and vice are inevitable. The best laid plans of the elites are so out of touch with the aims of the people, eventually the economy and the government collapses. This is what happens when there are people in power who you wouldn’t trust to watch your dog or manage a cash register being given responsibility over your life savings and trillion-dollar budgets. There are some well-meaning people who deny freedom because they don’t trust people’s abilities to make choices for themselves. But the true enemy of freedom is the radical or the tyrant—people in love with power who always deny freedom, not because they think it doesn’t work, but because they know it works. A free world simply is not the world they want to see. We saw this clash of ideals clearly during the Cold War, but this is a much older battle than that, dating back through centuries of human struggle over the rights of humankind. As in so many areas, America’s Founders understood far more than what we could have guessed. They knew that when we choose freedom, we choose a better future and a better life for ourselves and our children than any centralized government could ever achieve. As he studied America in the early 1800s, Alexis de Tocqueville saw free citizens waking up to what they could achieve in a nation where freedom thrived. He wrote about how “countless little people, humble people, throughout American society, expend their efforts in caring and in the betterment of the community, blowing on their hands, pitting their small strength against the inhuman elements of life. Unheralded and always inconspicuous, they sense that they are cooperating with a purpose and a spirit that is at the center of creation. The Constitution of their nation undergirds and strengthens this activity.” De Tocqueville’s description from two hundred years ago might well have been written about what we call the Tea Party movement, Freedom movement, or Liberty movement today. We are making ourselves heard as the unheralded community of hard-working, dedicated, honest people at the heart of a nation founded on liberty and opportunity. We are standing up in defense of the Constitutional values that made the America we love possible. And no matter what the Washington elites do to try and stop us, we will not be silenced. Our message is clear: freedom works. RULE 2: FREEDOM’S RIGHT It is right and just for people to live free. This is a tough idea for many political leaders to accept, but it’s something the people who make up the Freedom movement understand innately. We support the straightforward principles that unite us—individual responsibility, economic opportunity, and constitutionally limited government—not just because they work, but because they are right. Many politicians are used to the idea that politics is a game where you have to triangulate your position between opposing views in a way that makes enough people happy on both sides. They think this way because they’ve been trained to think like that by dozens of consultants and advisors over the years. But the truth is that politics is not a game. The policies implemented by politicians concerned about their short-term political success do real, wide-ranging damage to the people and society for generations to come. We know better. Good policy is good politics. The measure of policy impact isn’t found in the political careers of Washington elites, or how things play on the cocktail circuit, but in what kind of nation we pass on to our children. We, through our representatives, make law that sets the course not just for our generation but for future generations as well. The Freedom movement is rising up because we know we can’t leave public policy to the politicians, or to the self-styled “experts,” or to someone else with a parochial agenda. They come to politics with an approach that often comes at their benefit and your expense. This broad community of patriotic citizens, standing together to take our country back from an unholy alliance of government power and privileged interests, is making a difference because we speak in defiance of the conventional wisdom of politics. The elites didn’t expect something like the Tea Party to ever happen. A political comedian once joked that anytime the political Left protested something, they showed up en masse with signs and bullhorns and prepped talking points, while when the Right protests something, you just see two VFW members with an American flag. That’s why Washington elites and special interests have assumed that they are “Too Big to Fail”—they are used to just taking what they consider theirs, and never having anyone stand up in opposition. What they never counted on was the great mass of America, the new center of American politics, to stand up for what they believed in, in defense of our liberty and the inheritance we want to give the next generation of Americans—the freedom to work and achieve by the sweat of their brow. The Tea Party has evolved from a spontaneous political protest into an organized social movement, the Freedom movement. We the people are a force more powerful than one any special interest can create, and we are motivated by a drive to reclaim our great nation for our sake, and the sake of future generations. George Washington would expect no less, saying: “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of government are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” It will not be easy. It is a demanding calling, and the rules that follow will be difficult. But we can employ them with confidence, not just because we know that freedom works, but that it is right. RULE 3: FREEDOM REQUIRES WORK When abolitionist Wendell Phillips said that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” he wasn’t referring to soldiers or professional political operatives, but to every American. We’ve learned through experience that we can’t afford to shirk our responsibility to defend our freedom in the public square—if we don’t stand up, the elites win. But what does this mean, and how do we get started? Many of you may be new to the political process. But we’ve all seen how thousands of Americans have become true leaders in their communities, organizing protests and town hall meetings, lobbying their state and federal legislators, and leading get-out-the-vote efforts for limited-government candidates in elections. In fact, a large reason the Freedom movement has been so effective is because it is self-organizing. Best practices and tactics haven’t been imposed from the top down, but learned through experience from the ground up. And while we agree on the basic principles as outlined in the previous rules, when it comes to advocating for those principles, the Freedom movement is an open market for ideas, strategies, and contributions—whether they are shared around the kitchen table or on Facebook. The elites and their allies don’t have that advantage, because they’re used to systems of entrenched bureaucracies. Literary critic Lionel Trilling observed that the limited ideas that survive bureaucracies tend to “be of a certain kind and of a certain simplicity: they give up something of their largeness … in order to survive.” Big ideas, game-changing ideas, come from the ground up. The Freedom movement is a frustrating problem for the elites in Washington, both on the Left and the Right. They are so used to just asking to talk to the man in charge, they don’t know how to deal with any movement where there is no “man in charge.” They desperately want to apply Saul Alinsky’s “thirteenth rule” of Chicago street politics: “Pick your target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it,” but this doesn’t work so well when they try to demonize millions of patriotic citizens—families, small business owners, grandparents who speak out because they want their grandchildren to have a shot at the American dream. We have an incredible opportunity to rescue our liberties from the grasping hands of these political elites by working together, learning by sharing best practices and pitfalls to avoid. This pamphlet is designed to give you the basic tools necessary to become an effective advocate for limited government. By knowing how to organize a protest, be effective in town hall meetings, interact with the media, utilize online tools, hold events, raise money, recruit members to your group, and other essential information, you can be a more powerful force in American politics than any paid professional operative. As you work, keep in mind that we are following the tradition of the original American community organizers, the Sons of Liberty. These grassroots Patriots helped lead a campaign to build public support for the American Revolution, and were the brains behind the original Boston Tea Party in December 1773. As they understood so well, in the words of Samuel Adams, “it does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires of freedom in the minds of men.” RULE 4: WE WIN BY BUILDING Ideas matter, but organizations win. As Alinsky wrote: “Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together.” This doesn’t mean that we should shove ideas to the side—they’re the reason we do what we do—but keep in mind that an idea has never knocked on someone’s door, never given a speech, never printed a pamphlet, and never showed up for a protest. That’s why we have to build toward victory, working together to organize and activate. And that’s why FreedomWorks believes in the chapter concept. The chapter concept allows activists to function in small groups so they can easily relate to one another. It promotes a sense of unity and motivates members to take action in the political system. We currently have state chapters, county chapters, and town chapters all across the country. You can become a part of this network of activists by creating your own chapter and networking with others in your county and state. Each chapter should have a clear mission statement consisting of one or two sentences that succinctly explain the explicit goals of the group and how they will be accomplished. The mission statement provides an important roadmap for sustained effectiveness months and years into the future. As issues arise, it’s helpful to refer back to the mission statement for guidance on which path to take. A smoothly operating chapter has structure. Each chapter should have a chapter leader, communications director, legislative liaison, membership director, and social director. We recommend that these positions be delegated to reliable individuals in each chapter. However, if the chapter is small, multiple duties can be delegated to a few individuals. Members have already formed thousands of groups, and you can create your own or join others on FreedomConnecter at connect.freedomworks.org. FreedomConnector is a revolutionary social media tool developed by FreedomWorks that allows you to connect with individuals in your area in order to further the fight for limited government in your area. The Tea Party began as the product of a perfect storm of political events, and the resulting Freedom Movement is an extension of that. Broken promises from the Right and an aggressive redistributionist agenda from the Left has brought many Americans into politics for the first time. At the same time, new technological innovations allowed us to find each other, to organize and share information in real time, to learn and adapt and have an impact like never before. As liberty-oriented Americans, we have a great advantage over the left in the way we organize. We support and promote the decentralization of power. This allows us far more freedom and flexibility than centralized, top-down dictation. Ultimately, it is more effective. Use this idea when you think about your organization. Our Founders may never have written a blog post or sent an email, but they knew the principles that are driving today’s politics. As Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison, in a choice between “giving energy to the government or information to the people,” we must choose the latter, for “they are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.” And that brings us to our next rule.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 19:21:41 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015