Kurt Schlichter: Conservative Insurgency

It is only fair to share the credit, or the blame, for this book. There are many folks who provided assistance of many kinds. I’ll try to name as many as I can, but please forgive the oversight if I miss someone, which I undoubtedly will.

First, there is my hot wife, Irina Moises. She put up with this latest insanity, like all the other insanities that came before.

Thanks to my agent, Jennifer Cohen, who shepherded this through the process. Along the way, David Limbaugh and Adam Bellow provided a lot of good advice.

I got plenty of support from my friends Larry O’Connor, Cam Edwards, Cameron Gray, Tony Katz, Ben Shapiro, Hugh Hewitt, Greg Garrison, and Derek Hunter. Drew and Sue Matich, Stephen Kruiser, Owen Brennan, and Michael Walsh also provided some great suggestions. And I took a lot of ideas from the writings aggregated at Glenn Reynolds’s Instapundit site, which has been my first read of the day for over a dozen years.

I wish Andrew Breitbart were still around to thank. I expect he is looking down, smiling.

And there are more—Kellie Jane Adan, Kim Tabin Mann, Kevin McKeever, Sean “Salty Hollywood” Salter, Gary Eaton, Fingers Malloy, Thomas LaDuke, and many others who I have met within the real-life conservative insurgency.

And, of course, I want to thank all of my Twitter followers for all of their caring!

“I still don’t understand it,” she sighs, staring out the plate-glass window overlooking San Francisco Bay. “In 2013, we were on the verge of truly transforming this country. We progressives had won the argument. We had the conservatives beat. And now… I just don’t understand.” She looks at me dead on, her wet eyes equal parts baffled and furious.

“ How did this happen?”

It’s overcast and cold outside, the mid-January gloom mirroring Gail Partridge’s mood. At 64, she is still the “Proud Voice of Progressivism” and currently the star host on the Quantum satellite/web radio network. Her commitment to the liberal cause is literally a part of her. Poking out beneath the left sleeve of her floral blouse, etched into her wrinkled bicep, is the lower half of a tattoo of a face. If you concentrate, you can make out the mouth and jaw of Barack Obama. His visage has aged with her.

“They made progressivism a joke,” she mutters. “Bastards.”

In three days, the third conservative president in a row will be inaugurated. As what today we know as “constitutional conservatives” lock in their political power—and more importantly, their grip on American culture—it seemed appropriate to spend time with a legendary bête noire of the right.

When I messaged her requesting an interview, she was suspicious. “Are you some sort of right-wing hack writing another book about the glories of being heartless?” she had asked. “Are you one of them ?”

That was a very good question, and it goes to the heart of this story.

I told her the truth, which is that I am a professor of history and politics at the University of California, San Diego, and that I don’t think of myself as a constitutional conservative or, actually, any kind of conservative at all. I think of myself as a moderate, but part of the point is that what is “moderate” today in 2041 was considered extremely conservative 30 years ago. How that change came to be is the story.

I was a graduate student when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, and I voted for him—twice. I did not consider myself particularly political. I just shared the same views as those around me, and being in academia, those views were uniformly progressive. But, as what became a conservative insurgency against the progressive mainstream establishment developed over the decades that followed, I changed along with society. I, and most Americans, moved right. Gail Partridge and her fans did not.

“Do you want some milk?” asks Partridge. “It’s raw.”

“Kind of ironic, you drinking raw milk when that was one of the flashpoints for so many people on the left turning right,” I say, probing.

She scowls. “Nonsense. You know, five years ago a little girl in Kansas died drinking raw milk.” She watches me, almost smiling. It’s clear she’s used the little girl anecdote before when the issue of government overreach and raw milk farmers comes back up. Almost 40 years of talk radio and Internet shows prepares you for any argument.

“So you were okay with the government jailing people for selling raw milk? How did you feel about the juror revolt against the prosecutions? That seemed an organic expression of opposition to authority. As a progressive, wouldn’t that be something you would applaud?”

“A legitimate government has a right to exercise authority as it sees fit. The Supreme Court was absolutely right to put a stop to that juror misconduct. You can’t change the system if shortsighted people are standing in your way.”

“What about this government? This conservative government we have today?”

“I said a legitimate government,” she sniffs.

Gail Partridge does not watch any media or popular entertainment besides other leftist hosts on her network. “The damn conservatives pop up on television and movies all the time now, and half the reporters seem to be looking to cover stories that hurt the progressive cause,” she complains. “I liked it better when there was some balance in the media, and I could turn on the video feed without having to have any conservative crap come into my living room!”

She finds the constitutional conservative America of 2041 an alien and forbidding place.

“America may be fiscally better off, but it is morally bankrupt,” she fumes as we sit in her penthouse apartment, looking out the window. “Patel makes a huge deal that he’ll be paying off the national debt before the end of his term, but what about human need? Look out down there, down there in the streets. There are people hungry and cold down there right now. I don’t care how they came to be hungry and cold. Maybe they didn’t feel like working. Why should we judge them for that? I don’t get why we should punish people for making different choices. It’s fascist.”

In three days, president-elect Rob Patel will be sworn in, and now Gail Partridge must prepare for another three-hour show devoted to venting her frustration at the new world she has found herself living in. I thank her for the raw milk and her time and prepare to leave. She walks me to the door and pushes the button to open it.

“I still don’t understand how we got here,” she says, sounding resigned. “I don’t think we ever even saw the conservatives coming.”

Throughout this book, the interview subjects (and the author) refer to the two main political forces in conflict in American politics between 2008 and 2041 by a variety of terms. This leads to occasional imprecision, since the terms are not necessarily synonymous.

For example, those on the right can generally be referred to as “conservatives,” but the activist, small government conservatives who made up the conservative insurgency discussed here seem to prefer the more precise term of “constitutional conservatives.” This distinguishes them from what they would call “establishment conservatives,” who they would often deny were conservatives at all.

There is considerable overlap between the “constitutional conservatives” and the “Tea Party,” though the term Tea Party lost favor in the 2010s and was rarely used after 2016 except by its opponents. They used it as an epithet, sometimes very effectively.