Building a Broad Coalition - Ron Paul Congressional Staff Panel at RPI Media & War Conference
How can we defeat the warmongers and interventionists? Rep. Paul's Congressional policy team reunites (with the addition of Liberty Report co-host Chris Rossini) to talk about how to reach out not just across the aisle but beyond the aisle.
How can we defeat the warmongers and interventionists? Rep. Paul's Congressional policy team reunites (with the addition of Liberty Report co-host Chris Rossini) to talk about how to reach out not just across the aisle but beyond the aisle.
How can we defeat the warmongers and interventionists? Rep. Paul's Congressional policy team reunites (with the addition of Liberty Report co-host Chris Rossini) to talk about how to reach out not just across the aisle but beyond the aisle.
Election Spoilers and Ideological Trade-offs00:15:18
I worked with several of the people up at this table for years in Dr. Paul's House of Representatives office.
And we'll be talking today some about coalition building.
And I just wanted to start off with a couple comments about a related matter, and that is the elections that happen for congressional offices every two years and president every two years, every four years.
And one of the byproducts of that being that people end up putting themselves into two distinct categories for the most part of being Republican or Democrat and how that separation of people into those two categories can help prevent the coalitions that need to be built,
the kind that Dr. Paul did on issues of foreign policy and civil liberties in the House of Representatives because people see themselves as being members of one team or the other.
And things that threaten that identification of people in one team or the other can be threatening to the establishment that depends on that to continue to work in a bipartisan fashion on things like war and the expansion of government that many people oppose.
Just this August 7th, there was a Green Party candidate in Ohio who just won a little over 1,000 votes in a congressional special election.
And it turned out that his votes could possibly, they say, have shifted who won that special election.
He'd be called a spoiler, spoiling the chance of the Democrat winning.
And this is something we've seen plenty of other times, too, where when people vote for libertarians, for example, in an election, it's said that the Libertarians spoiled the election for the Republican.
Back in 2014, there was an article in the Washington Post that said just in the months leading up to the general election then that Libertarians could spoil 11 elections for U.S. Senate and even some governor elections causing Republicans to lose.
And the whole concept here is that in this more recent election that Democrats own these votes that the Green Party candidate won.
And in these other elections with Libertarians, that the Republicans somehow own these votes.
And this is a dangerous concept because it's a way of stifling people from voting for the candidate they believe is best.
It's a way of forcing people into a categorization of libertarians or conservatives and greens are liberals and they thus have to identify with Republicans or the Democrats.
And I just wanted to look back at something that I did before I worked for Dr. Paul.
Back in 2002, I was the co-manager of Ed Thompson's libertarian campaign for governor in Wisconsin.
And in that election, he won 10.5%, which is a very high number for a libertarian candidate in statewide governor office election.
And the incumbent governor who lost to the Democratic challenger said that he lost because Ed Thompson was a spoiler.
Well, we had some funds left over after the election, and we did a Scott Res Mussen poll to find out who people who voted for Ed Thompson would have voted for if he had not been in the race.
And what we found was that his votes would have gone 30% to the Republican, 30% to the Democrat, 27% to the Green Party candidate, and the other 10 or so percent of people said they wouldn't have voted at all.
So it was just one example of how the media likes to portray people who stand outside the enforced norms, who decide to go their own way, voting for a third party candidate in this instance, in other instances, standing up for civil liberties or being anti-war, and mischaracterize who they are and what they believe.
And that's something we need to watch out for with this election coming up.
Go in there, vote for the candidate you think is best, but don't let yourself be categorized as being in one team or the other.
Always look to the fundamental issues, the interests of protecting individual liberty and protecting people from an expansive empire abroad as well.
Now I'd like to introduce the next person on the panel.
To my left is Norman Singleton.
Norman Singleton is the president of the Campaign for Liberty.
And before that, he was the legislative director in Dr. Paul's House of Representatives office.
Thank you.
Can you hear me?
The button says...
Um, I...
Adam's remarks remind me of whenever I hear Republicans or Democrats complain about third parties, quote, stealing our votes, I always wonder if the boardrooms of Coca-Cola and Pepsi ever sit around and complain about RC stealing their customers or if they actually try to figure out why are people rejecting us.
Maybe instead of trying to vote shame, is that a phrase?
Did I just coin a new phrase?
Libertarians into voting for the Libertarian Party or Greens to voting for the Green Party, progressives voting for Green Parties, the two major parties should try to offer something that actually appeals to us and makes it worth our while to waste our time standing in line to vote.
I guess you get the little I voted sticker, so it's not a complete waste of time.
I wanted to just talk a little bit about some of the challenges we face organizing broad coalitions in the age of Trump.
It used to be possible from 2001 to 2009, it was very, it was, we had great success as libertarians in organizing with the progressive left, although against the war, although even back then there were some problems.
The big problem is, as Adam touched on, is what I call the face painters after David Putty from Seinfeld.
Those of you who are fans of the show might remember the episode where he painted his face the color of his favorite hockey team because you've got to support the team.
That, to me, is a symbol of mindless partisanship.
And you see that infecting the anti-war movement.
You see that infecting the thoughts of progressives today really irrationally.
I mean, when did it become treason by the progressive left to question the word of our intelligence agencies?
I honestly wish that we had treason like that emanating from the White House in 2002 and 2003.
And if doubting the words of the people who said it's a slam-dunk case that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq be treason, then let's make the most of treason.
By the way, I enjoyed knowing all of you because I have a feeling that I won't make it back to my car in the parking lot after those remarks.
And we see this, we see partisanship, and it actually is a recognized psychiatric diagnose disorder right now called TAD, Trump Anxiety Derangement, or Trump Anxiety Disorder, among some psychiatrists today, really infecting our discourse.
An example of this is there was an event on Capitol Hill with Representative Barbara Lee, a woman of the progressive left, and Representative Justin Amash, who's one of the two most libertarian members of the House of Representatives, to talk about overturning the 2001 authorization of the use of military force, which was designed to allow the president to send troops to go after those who did 9-11, not to try to impose the National Organization for Women Agenda in Kabul.
People seem to forget about that, plus the myriad of other things that's been used.
But Code Pink showed up to the event.
Bless their hearts.
Instead of praising Justin Amash for reaching across the aisles to form a left-right alliance against the warfare state, they decided to grill him about his ties to the National Rifle Association because clearly they were putting the interest of the left, which at the time in the wake of the Partland shooting was making gun control their signature issue once again, over their so-called commitment to being anti-war.
Parenthetically, I will say that I heard from someone on Justin Amash's staff who was laughing about it, who said that she didn't have the heart to tell them that the truth is they don't really get along well with the NRA because Representative Amash actually puts the interest of the Second Amendment and of individual citizens' rights ahead of the interests of the Republican Party.
So you see that.
I've seen in my own coalition work on civil liberties, people who I thought were strong civil libertarians who actually were very outspoken in defense of Snowden in opposition to President Obama's attempts to expand the wireless surveillance state,
who stood with Senator Paul and his efforts to stop the renewal of three of the worst Patriot Act divisions, now jumping on the entire, oh my God, Russia is coming narrative.
And actually, even in one case, a journalist who I had great respect for this person's work on surveillance issues, turning in a confidential government source to the authorities because this journalist became convinced that they were actually acting as a Putin agent.
The world has gone crazy.
So I think this is a problem.
I don't know how to solve it, but I think being aware that it's a problem is the first step in finding a solution to it.
The best we can do is continue to promote our ideas.
And as Daniel said, we need to continue to remain kind of above the partisan fray, not Trump haters, not Trump lovers.
I do see this creeping into the libertarian movement.
Unfortunately, TAD Trump anxiety Disorder has come into a lot of libertarians I see, some of whom are on the verge of actually betraying their ideals because whenever Trump does something that we would agree with, whether it's not start a new Cold War, whether it's not nuke North Korea, they either downplay it or they find a reason to dismiss its long-term significance.
On the other hand, I have libertarians who defend all the spending, who defend all the warmongering, all the sable rattling, all the assaults on civil liberties with the argument that I just am not bright enough to understand President Trump's four-dimensional chess.
I may not understand four-dimensional chess, but I can read a figure of numbers, and I know that what an increase in spending looks like versus a decrease in spending.
I know what an increase in the military-industrial complex budget looks like, and I know what that money is used for.
And I know that for all the good things that President Trump has done in foreign policy, the fact is that you can't remain anti-war.
You can't be credibly anti-war when you keep throwing money at the Pentagon.
One final point, because I've talked about progressive, I've talked about libertarians.
I want to spend a moment if I can, without going over my allotted time, on conservatives.
Conservatives need to end their love affair with the warfare state, or they need to stop pretending to be fiscal conservatives, because it's clearly you can't be both.
And the reason that I think that it's coming now is the map is just not going to hold up any longer.
They can't continue to say we're for lower taxes, lower spending, but we want to continually fund this insane global crusade.
Again, the numbers just aren't there.
And you've already had one Warhawk senator, Senator Lindsey Graham of, well, he's supposedly from South Carolina, but he's actually the deep state's favorite senator, say that he would gladly work with the left on increasing taxes if the left would agree to protect and expand the Pentagon's budget.
That conflict is real, it's coming, and a lot of conservatives try to paper over that difference.
I've even been told that what Rand Paul and people like myself need to understand is that we can't have good tax policy until we come to an agreement with Lindsey Graham, which means that we have to stop complaining about Pentagon spending, which is not just an ideological error, it's a reality error, it's mathematics.
And I would say that those of us in this room who are libertarian, who work with conservatives on issues like repealing Obamacare and limiting spending, we have to start pressing them harder and harder and harder on cutting the Pentagon's budget.
And I also think that in a lot of ways, we saw this happening with the dearly departed Tea Party movement in 2009 and 2010, that fiscal conservatism, if the message is presented in a way that talks about you have to include the Pentagon, can really be a gateway drug into adding that final piece of their worldview that's missing, which is a non-interventionist foreign policy.
And so I think that that's something that we should redouble our efforts with our conservative, misguided friends on foreign policy and on Pentagon spending yet, and on Pentagon spending, and hopefully we can win a few more converts over to our cause.
And we'll probably never get Lindsey Graham will never show up at a Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity conference.
He's more likely to have a conference on war and poverty, but we might be able to make him the outlier in foreign policy and make Rand Paul and others the mainstream voice in the Republican Party.
least that's my crazy dream.
Making Peace Mainstream00:03:17
All right, our next speaker is Chris Rossini.
Chris is the author of a book on monetary policy and the Federal Reserve.
He works at the Ron Paul Institute with a focus on matters related to the Ron Paul Liberty Report, where you may have seen him often as the Friday co-host with Dr. Paul.
Hello, everyone.
Thank you.
And thank you for everyone that watches every Friday.
Usually my segments are about economics.
Dr. Paul and I talk about all the bad stuff government does, whether it be licensing, subsidies, the Federal Reserve.
But from a personal point of view, war is the number one concern when it comes to libertarian issues.
War is government at its worst, not only from destruction, but from the fear that it creates.
And government capitalizes on that fear.
They pass the Patriot Act.
They pass all the surveillance.
Fear is where government thrives.
So that's why all the economic issues are very important that we talk about, but they're less important to war.
So that's why conferences like this and the fact that we're sold out is incredible because people want peace.
And people have been voting for peace for decades.
We've been let down over and over, but you can tell that people are interested in peace and do not want war anymore.
So in building coalitions on a personal level, on an individual level, anybody, whether they be left, right, center, whatever they call themselves, if they're against aggressive war, they're a potential ally.
That's how I view.
And then you worry about the other stuff.
Talk about the minimum wage with them afterwards.
But the more anti-war people that we have in this country, it will stop the wars.
If you think about Vietnam and even recently with President Obama and Syria, it was public support or public opposition that ended those wars and prevented the Syrian bombing from starting.
So government will fight the wars that it can get away with.
And if they can't get away with it, with people that know and understand the Constitution, you know, war is for defending yourself, and it's the last possible thing that you should do.
You know, anybody that has family, like I did, that went through World War II, if you hear the stories of what they went through, it's horrendous.
But we're so sheltered here in America that it's out of sight and out of mind.
But hopefully our conference meets, reaches more and more people to get them against war.
And that's on an individual level, if they're socialists, whatever they call themselves.
If they're anti-war on that one issue, be with them, spread the message.
And, you know, when we stop wars, we stop the worst of government.
Next up, we have Daniel McAdams.
Paul Cover: Keeping Them Guessing00:03:20
He's the executive director of the Ron Paul Institute.
And before that, he worked in Dr. Paul's House of Representatives office largely on matters related to foreign policy and the U.S. military.
Well, I've been talking at you all day, so I'll keep mine very short so the others will have more time.
I just want to note before I start that on a slightly emotional level, actually, Chris, I'm sorry, you aside, but this is, I think, the first gathering of all of Ron Paul's policy staff as he exited Congress since he's exited Congress.
it's really an honor to be up here with each gentleman who I've worked with and respected for so long.
The Washington Times had a piece and the mainstream media does it all the time.
It periodically It's almost like they have a schedule.
They had a piece out last week or a few days ago, Ron Paul on the cover.
I almost, I wasn't going to buy it, but I grabbed it with the thought of it, and the thing was so thin, it was like tissue paper.
I thought, wow, this used to be kind of a hefty paper.
They wanted a buck and a half for it.
But it was Ron Paul on the cover, and it was the same old story.
You rewrite it over and over, all the lazy journalists.
The Ron Paul movement's dead.
Libertarianism, it's dead.
It's all over.
No one's talking about it.
Trump ruined it.
You know, too bad.
And they do this over and over again because I think, and just to build on what Adam talked about, they can't figure us out, those that are hesitant to glom on to Team A or Team B. You know, those of us that want to color outside the lines and to think beyond where they want us to think.
So they want to keep pronouncing us dead.
Maybe it makes them feel better.
You know, but as I tweeted to the fellow who wrote it, he didn't tweet back, but he should come here and see.
Is the movement dead?
I mean, why are we selling out?
Why we're about to do our thousandth episode of the Ron Paul Liberty Report, and we keep going up in numbers.
So you build coalitions by taking risks, by talking to people who you may disagree with on some things, and agreeing not to talk about these things.
You don't talk about religion at the Thanksgiving table if you've got a divided family.
You just have to take that on board.
So that's what you do.
We talk about the left.
There is a cleave on the left, though.
And Caitlin Johnstone is an example of someone the left has, the medium left has brutally turned against because she'll talk to us.
They'll listen to us.
And there are many like that.
I don't know how many of you read the Black Agenda Report.
It's the voice of the black left.
We may not agree on a lot of things, but you want to talk about some serious, hardcore anti-war articles and also articles condemning the mainstream press for its attacks on Trump based on the idiocy of Russia gate.
So there are a lot of things happening, interesting things happening on the left as well.
We've got to open ourselves up to before they're all banned from Twitter and try to read.
All right.
Audit the Fed Process00:08:48
Next up is Paul Martin Foss.
When Dr. Paul was in the House of Representatives asking questions to the chairman of the Federal Reserve and working on legislation, including Audit the Fed, Paul Martin was a person in the House of Representatives office who was helping Dr. Paul with those matters.
Currently, Paul Martin is at Goldco, where he is editor-in-chief of Red Tea News.
Thank you, Adam.
Since I know we're running a little short on time, I just wanted to briefly bring up four points that I think can make for good coalition building, kind of drawing on my experiences with Audit the Fed.
As Adam mentioned, I was responsible for managing the Audit the Fed and the Fed and competing currencies legislation.
And it really kind of almost took me by surprise when we first introduced Audit the Fed.
I figured, okay, it might be as popular as maybe it was in the early 80s.
And it just took off immediately.
We had, well, within a few months, we had 325 co-sponsors the first time we reintroduced it in the House, which was absolutely amazing.
It was over a two-thirds majority.
And part of that was because we built an effective coalition among Democrats.
I think the first thing, if you're going to build effective coalitions, the first thing you have to do is, number one, remember your end goal.
Your goal is to make, whether it's auditing the Fed, ending war, constitutional carry, whatever issue you're working on, is remember that end goal.
Do not get sucked into politics.
Your goal is to make change, to work for greater liberty.
It's very, the political process and the political environment, especially in Washington, can be very seductive.
You have a lot of people who come in here with very good intentions.
And within six months to a year, they have been completely co-opted.
They've forgotten why they first came here.
They've forgotten the issues they were working about because they have just been sucked into this political process and they've become partisans.
They've become Republicans or Democrats and they don't think about the issues that they originally came up here to fight for.
At least the second point, which is be nonpartisan.
This is not about winning a victory for Team R, Team D, Team L, whatever.
Too many people, I remember when the Republicans were still in the minority in the House, there was a member of Republican leadership who has since become a fairly prominent committee chairman who said, well, I don't care about the principles of this matter.
I just want to make Barney Frank look bad.
And that kind of told me everything I needed to know about so many people on the Republican side was that they would be with us part of the way as long as they could make the Democrats look bad, but they weren't really interested in the arguments and the principles behind things.
It was very, very disappointing.
So you have to be nonpartisan.
Don't write anybody off, even if they're on the left.
Don't get the attitude that, well, we'll sign on to this letter or we'll sign on to this coalition if they then decide to support something that you obviously know they're not going to support.
Like don't say, you know, we'll sign their anti-war letter if they decide to vote against food stamps if it's a liberal Democrat.
That's obviously not going to happen.
You're shooting yourself in the foot and squandering a good opportunity to build a good coalition.
Kind of ties into point number three, which is find principled partners.
We were again very fortunate with Audit the Fed that we worked with Alan Grayson's office.
He had just come into Congress.
He was kind of more left-wing than most of your establishment Democrats, but in particular, the staffer I worked with, Matt Stoller, he was a prominent liberal blogger, but he was not a partisan.
He had no Hill experience.
So he came in really focused on the issues, and he was not afraid to take on establishment Democrats when he thought they were wrong.
And on Audit the Fed, they were wrong.
He was willing to call them out.
But he was also willing to work with them and to work with us to get Democratic co-sponsors on the bill and to bring up talking points among Democrats that we may not have been able to make or would not have been taken.
They may not have taken us seriously as a Republican office.
He was willing to step out there.
So you need to find partners like that, people who can be effective.
Sometimes it's just luck of the draw, but if you happen to get a good partner in a coalition like that, it can make all the difference.
Number four is let go of your ego.
Washington is a town of big egos, a lot of people who want to make names for themselves, people who want to take credit for various things.
If your coalition partner wants to take credit for everything, great.
Let them.
Don't get upset.
Don't break up the coalition because they're stealing your thunder.
You'll get your opportunity.
The people who are in the know, who are behind the scenes, understand the work that you've put in.
Those are the people you really need to work about impressing.
Don't worry about headlines or who's getting their names in the newspapers, et cetera.
Keep your head down and continue working effectively in building coalitions.
All right.
Last up, we have Jeff Deist, who in Dr. Paul's House of Representatives office helped Dr. Paul with media and then later worked as Dr. Paul's chief of staff.
After Dr. Paul left office, Jeff assumed the leadership role at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and he's in that position now.
Thanks, Adam.
You know, the two really big issues of our day, war and peace and the Fed, from my perspective anyway, are really nonpartisan.
And if you talk to people, you'll find, first and foremost, on the war issue, there's zero constituency for continuing our wars in the Middle East out in this country.
Outside of the counties that comprise the D.C. metro area, there are zero constituencies for these wars.
So the fact that they continue and continue and continue shows that democracy really doesn't work in the sense that we think that we sort of order our representatives to do what we want.
So it's really an easy in for people.
Even the most ardent people on the left or right in the Trump sphere today are starting to realize that the trillions of dollars in debt we've amassed as a result of being in Afghanistan now, what, 17 years.
We heard Mr. Wilkerson say, or Kooner Wilkerson earlier say we're going to be there for 50 years.
There's just no appetite for these things.
And eventually, that lack of an appetite has to filter down into the voting process and start electing some reps and some senators who just aren't interested in continuing these things.
And it's obviously a great crossover issue because people on the left are more anti-war than left politicians, I would say, and left members of Congress.
They tend to run a little scared once they get here and once they find out who the paymasters are in terms of plum committee assignments and developing a big campaign war chest and that sort of thing.
But when it comes to the Fed, you know what's so great about it is that the American people don't really understand the Fed, and that's no crime.
There are monetary economists who don't really understand how the Fed works mechanically.
There's some complexity to it, and it doesn't lend itself to soundbites.
But people smell a rat.
They sense that there is a class of people who are being unjustly enriched as a result of the central bank process, and especially the primary dealers, the banks that sort of have first dibs on the newly created money and credit.
So they smell a rat.
And even if they can't connect all the dots, it's a great populist message.
You know, we think that libertarianism is so cerebral and it's so conceptual, but you go back to Dr. Paul's two campaigns, and his two resonating messages were populist.
Get out of the Middle East, okay, and the Fed.
Both of these had great emotional pull.
They were great campaign slogans.
They appealed to people across ideological lines.
And I think it's really where we ought to be focusing our efforts because so many terrible things in government flow from the Federal Reserve, which of course makes it possible for Congress to spend more than it collects in taxes, and from war, which sort of immunizes us to the human condition and makes us also more willing to accept police brutality at home, militarization of police at home, TSA groping us.
It sort of denudes, I think, our spirit here at home.
So war in the Fed all day long as far as I'm concerned.
Dr. Paul's Principled Coalition Work00:00:48
Just to conclude things, I think Dr. Paul has set a great example of how you can be principled and at the same time work on coalitions to accomplish particular goals.
And that's something that he's done.
That's something he continues to do.
And one thing I've heard Dr. Paul say many times that I believe is true and people need to think on when they try to reach across to work with people who have different ideas on other issues is that liberty brings people together.
And that was true in Dr. Paul's campaign, and that's true when we try to work with people who may differ on other issues.