Heartland’s theme for this year, and perhaps future years too, is “freedom rising.” It expresses our dedication to the most powerful idea ever discovered by mankind – freedom – and our optimism about its future.
But not everyone agrees freedom is rising.
One donor wrote to say, “You see freedom rising. I see it floating away.” The truth is, freedom has been lost at a frightening pace at the national level at least since the election of Barack Obama. If we want to restore it, we need to recognize how the world has changed and how we need to change, too.
How Has the World Changed?
In the past seven years, President Obama has wiped away many of the modest gains achieved by the free-market movement in the previous three decades. Modest progress in education, energy policy, health care reform, and even battling the national debt seemed to peak around 2006.
Obama benefitted from the concurrence of two mega-trends. The first was completion of the “Gramsci project,” the Left’s tactic of capturing the culture in order to clear the path for political revolution. The Left began to capture the media, universities, and political bureaucracies in the 1960s and effectively finished its “march through the institutions” during the past decade. This is documented by numerous polls of journalists and college professors and recent pronouncements and actions by universities, church leaders, and bureaucrats.
The second mega-trend is the unprecedented concentration of power in the office of the President of the United States. Frank Buckley in The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America (2014) does a great job explaining how the checks and balances and constitutional barriers erected by the Founders to ensure the president would be subservient to Congress and the states were repealed or circumvented. Today, just as they feared, the president is virtually a king, ruling over a staggering $3 trillion annual budget.
Obama had a historic opportunity to advance the Left’s agenda, and he took it. Let the record show, however, that while Obama advanced a socialist agenda at the national level, many states were privatizing, deregulating, reforming, and cutting taxes. Governors and state attorneys general fought valiantly, if not always successfully, against Obamacare, the Clean Power Plan, and other expansions of federal power.
Who Is to Blame?
Are the losses of the past decade due to the failure of organizations on the Right (including The Heartland Institute) to win their encounters with the Left? Is there anything we could have done to prevent them?
We “all” thought we could win the war with an issue-by-issue strategy by producing superior research and commentary and appealing to the heads or the hearts of voters and elected officials. We thought the sum of winning battles would be to win the war. This is now exposed as a failed strategy.
We defeated, repealed, or at least reformed many bad laws and government programs, but with each passing year we lost control over more institutions to the Left, and the size and power of the president increased. We were too busy writing op-eds defending Uber’s right to compete with taxicabs in Cleveland to see and write about the Left’s existential threat to our way of life.
Groups on the Right only infrequently observed and wrote about the Gramsci campaign, not wanting to risk offending media, opponents, or donors by questioning the motives of people and organizations on the Left.
In retrospect, that decision appears to have been a mistake. It allowed the Left to pose (as Malcolm Muggleridge once put it) as referees when in fact they are players. One result is we now have left-wing ideologues posing as journalists, teachers, judges, and even scientists.
Groups on the Right more frequently commented on the growing concentration of power in the executive branch, but most often in eloquently written op-eds and seldom-read books. We eschewed the only viable solution – constitutional reform via Article V conventions of the states. Had we been talking about this during the Bush I and Bush II days, we might be in a very different place today.
How Should We Respond?
Knowing all this, what should we be doing differently? The Heartland Institute has responded with several new projects:
Expose the Left: In 2014 we retained Ron Arnold, the dean of researchers on the funding and tactics of the Left, to produce profiles of leading individuals and groups to post on a new website called LeftExposed.org. So far, he has written and we have posted 34 profiles and 24 commentaries.
Constitutional reform: We studied the movement for an Article V convention of the states, identified its leaders, and launched a project to promote all valid efforts in this direction. Our Center for Constitutional Reform has full-time staff and an excellent website, is doing regular mailings, meetings, and calls to elected officials, and is helping members of the often-fractious movement to work together.
College campus outreach: Even as the Left completed its takeover of college campuses, groups such as the Leadership Institute, Students for Liberty, and TurningPoint USA have been more effective than ever in creating student chapters. We have greatly ramped up our distribution of free literature and email contacts to their members, challenging the Left’s efforts to suppress dissent and indoctrinate the next generation.
K–12 school choice: Heartland was one of the first and remains a leading advocate of school choice, in particular vouchers. We were among the first to advocate for education savings accounts, and we are virtually the only free-market group to recognize the powerful potential of California’s Parent Trigger. The school choice movement is making considerable progress, and we continue to press hard for new programs and to expand existing ones.
Common Core State Standards: We are writing and publishing more in opposition to Common Core, the Left’s effort to circumvent choice by taking over the curriculum of all schools, than any other “mainstream” think tank. We are using the issue to forge new partnerships with homeschoolers, high school debate clubs, and organizations such as the National Association of Scholars.
Michael Parry Mazur Library: The Left is increasingly exercising control over Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, and even Twitter, making opposing ideas “disappear” by having them no longer show up in Google searches, plundering the Wikipedia sites of conservative and ibertarian groups and individuals, and selectively deleting and editing historical documents. Heartland is fighting back by creating a new physical library containing some 10,000 volumes, the best library on freedom and limited government in the Midwest.
Community-based advocacy: We are making better use of social media and automated marketing technology to educate and empower our donors, allies, neighbors, and civic and business leaders. True power in public policy debates doesn’t come by having an op-ed appear in The Washington Post. It arises from having a network of advocates using your ideas to participate effectively in policy debates with friends, strangers, and elected officials, often online and often during chance encounters rather than at conferences and fancy dinners.
Freedom Rising … or Floating Away?
Freedom is rising at the state and local levels in much of the country. It is being lost – “floating away” – at the national level.
Conservatives and libertarians are partly to blame for our losses. We didn’t call out the Left’s takeover of important institutions when it occurred and we didn’t support constitutional limits on the power of the president when others proposed them. Now we have a president with almost limitless power and too few allies in the media, universities, and other institutions willing to join us in stopping his reckless abuse of our freedom.
The good news is that we can learn from our mistakes and adopt new strategies and tactics to stem the losses, turn the tide, and rescue the nation. Freedom will once again rise. It is our duty to make sure it does, and we won’t quit until we’ve won.
