The patriot movement had its Concord Bridge moment in 2010, and now it is facing its winter at Valley Forge. Both liberal and mainstream politicians are waiting to see what the patriot movement does during the harsh winter of a second Obama term.
Conservative opinion sites are buzzing with ideas about what to do now. One school of thought holds that the damage done to America in a second Obama term will be irreparable, and that the only sensible strategy is to let the system collapse under the weight of Obama’s policies, and then to rebuild afterwards. Another theme seems to be that patriots should endure, double down on our efforts, and fight on.
The first strategy hopes that a new birth of freedom will rise phoenix-like from the ashes of Obama’s policies. Ironically, that thinking can be seen as a conservative variation of the Cloward-Piven strategy that advocated the deliberate overloading of the welfare system. Out of the collapse of that system would emerge a popular demand for a guaranteed national income and fulfillment of other leftist goals.
The conservative strategy does not try to overload the system, but simply acknowledges that Obama has both the power and the plan to overload and collapse it. Liberal theorists and conservatives agree that Obama’s policies will bring our current system down; the big difference is in what we hope to see emerging from the ashes.
There is an old military adage for leaders in dire circumstances that you have to take the situation as you find it and turn it to your advantage, and that is the challenge for the patriot movement now. Our situation is dire, so we should go on the offensive. We have to stall the left’s advance in 2014 by keeping the House and taking the Senate, and then blocking the most radical court appointees. Find our candidate for 2016 now, and start preparing for the ground game on Election Day.
The left is hoping that the tea party movement is dead. Now is the time to organize, to train, to demonstrate, and to educate a nation in distress. We have to learn how to make the left debate on our terms instead of constantly letting the left define who we are.