CHICAGO, Illinois — Living in Boston these past two years I
have had many opportunities to visit the Old Granary Burying Ground, where several Boston
Massacre victims are enjoying their final rest alongside John
Hancock, Paul Revere and Samuel Adams. During my sole semester in
the Emerson College Master’s program last fall, these little forays
became a near daily ritual. At this point I have tagged along on
more of the free tours of the graveyard than I can count.
In all that time, however, I don’t believe I ever heard as much
talk of Samuel Adams as I did during two days at the Americans for
Limited Government (ALG) conference last month in Chicago. Mary Adams, the group’s Activist of the Year for
decades of anti-tax work in the imploding welfare state that is
Maine, spent nigh her entire speech extolling the virtues of
Sam the Publican, going so far as to grandly
label her young acolaytes “the political sons of Samuel Adams.”
At first the comparison seemed a little overblown, and to a
large degree it still does in the context of the kind of
“revolution” ALG is fomenting — essentially the group provides
funding, assistance and advice to groups attempting to gain control
over issues of state spending, property rights and judicial
accountability via ballot initiatives and referendum — but it
didn’t take long to see the origins of the basic corollary. The
general conference consensus seemed to be that politicians, in the
best existing example of bipartisanship in Washington, D.C., have
failed to honor the Constitution and America’s political
traditions, and as such the time had come to find a way to
circumvent them for the good of the Republic.
At the opening plenary, for example, after some requisite
bashing of the “biased” press in attendance, ALG President John
Tillman told the 200 or so gathered they were all actors “in a
drama playing throughout the country,” the underlying theme of
which was simple: “Can the people rein in an out of control
government?” That evening ALG Executive Committee Chairman Eric
O’Keefe expanded the critique, urging activists to “step outside
the party structure” where they are forced to support members of
Congress who are “a collective and individual disgrace” and instead
work to “build a coalition against the political class.”
Indeed, aside from Pennsylvania Club for Growth Executive
Director Kathryn English relaying her preferred methods of deposing
RINOs, party politics mostly took a back seat to discussions of
how to organize petitioners and deal with physical and legal harassment from unions and others
opposed to small government reforms and the grassroots like.
If there were any rah-rah Republican Party apparatchiks
in the audience they surely realized their mistake during the first
panel, “Does Anyone Really Care about Limited Government Anymore?”
wherein the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner blasted the Bush
Administration’s pursuit of an “activist government for
conservative ends” and a de facto “conservative welfare state,”
while Tim Carney laid out the frightful collaboration between
Big Business and Big Government even under Republican Party
rule.
Once the bad news was out, though, the rest of the conference —
save Senator Tom Coburn’s closing address — belonged to the little
known activists fighting mostly unsung battles against Big
Government encroachment in North Dakota, Maine, Michigan, Illinois,
and several other states. These were the stories that made the trip
to Chicago worthwhile because it was not about furthering the cult
of personality of some politician or another but rather about a
philosophical and moral stand in favor of individual liberty made
all the more romantic by the hitherto lack of recompense.
“Liberty will not be restored as a gift from our fake
representatives in Washington,” O’Keefe said during his Friday
night address. “We were not born to be subjects of a government in
London or D.C.”
Stirring stuff, no doubt. Nevertheless, as cases in
Massachusetts, where the legislature has
balked at implementing a constituent ordered income tax
rollback, and Arizona, where politicians of both parties have
worked assiduously to subvert Proposition 200, have proven, the political
establishment does not always take kindly to voters taking an end
run around them. AmSpec political columnist and Wall
Street Journal mainstay John Fund warned during the panel he
moderated on keeping the parties accountable, “if you try to hold
politicians accountable, they will fight back.” Often as not, he
said, a barometer of success is “how viciously you are attacked.”
It will only be when that resistance Fund talks about begins to
more fully materialize that we shall see what the real potential
(or lack thereof) this proposed peoples’ revolt holds.
Near the end of his opening remarks, John Tillman said the
country was beginning to hear a “rumble of deep discontent.”
“That rumble is you,” he said.
Will the rumble become a political earthquake? Or is it destined
to be a murmur calling forward the disaffected but never quite
reaching the ears of the electorate en masse? While ALG is making
some impressive strides in communities across the country, the
answers to those questions are not yet known. Still, it’s good to
see so many people interested in a principled opposition.
