Chapter 1: How Did We Get Here?
January 27, 2024
New York City
A group of illegal migrants savagely attacks two NYPD officers near Times Square. The unprovoked beating is captured on surveillance cameras. Of the more than a dozen assailants, only five are arrested. Those taken into custody are quickly released without bail. Barely two weeks later, one of the released illegals, Darwin Gomez-Izquiel, is arrested again and charged with shoplifting from a Macy’s in Queens in an incident in which a security guard is punched in the face.
May 1, 2023
New York City
A disturbed homeless man, Jordan Neely, threatens passengers on the F Train. A Marine veteran, Daniel Penny, seeking to protect his fellow subway passengers, wrestles Neely to the floor and restrains him in a chokehold. Neely later dies. Penny is charged with second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide. He faces nearly twenty years behind bars if convicted. Thankfully, he is found not guilty and released.
These kinds of perversions of justice do not just happen in Gotham. Violent migrants attack American citizens with impunity all across this country. Dangerously disturbed petty criminals threaten and harass riders on buses and subways in almost every major city. A parade of Democratic House members as well as Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador to show solidarity with a deported, violent Venezuelan gang member, Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Meanwhile, American victims are left wondering why they are standing alone against the violence with a government more interested in the criminals than the victims.
How did we end up in a world where the Darwin Gomez-Izquiels of the world flout our laws without consequence and heroes like Daniel Penny face long legal battles—and the threat of even longer prison sentences? How did we come to the point where instead of condemning these scandals, a major political party and its allies in the media defend and promote danger and decay?
I could share hundreds of other similar anecdotes. I suspect you can think of many yourself. Separately, these stories of misplaced justice are bewildering. Taken together, they are a damning indictment, and not just of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. How did we get here? How did we end up in this upside-down world where criminality is celebrated and virtue is condemned? How have we handed over so much of our power to elite forces that despise our values? As one friend put it to me recently, “I always knew the left hated us. I just didn’t realize they had this much power to put that hate into action.”
Seeing a hero like Daniel Penny in handcuffs makes me furious. Watching millions of illegal, often violent, immigrants flow over the border by design, and then watching as every roadblock possible is erected when the Trump administration attempts to return them, is exasperating. I know many of you share this anger, and some of you have channeled that fierce emotion into political activism. A healthy anger, though, isn’t just one that gets directed toward creating change. A healthy anger seeks to understand the root of the problem in order to ensure that the change we want is the change we get.
This book explains the origins of our contemporary crisis. Far more importantly, I think, it also offers a blueprint for effectively restoring the American system to its sacred and essential origins. My own understanding of “how we got here” began with a question.
May 2006
With the entrees cleared away and the coffee poured, I sensed my opportunity and turned to the distinguished gentleman seated next to me.
“I have one question, if you don’t mind. Why is it that when conservatives are elected, they immediately begin moving to the left, and when progressives are elected, they simply move further left? Why is it no one moves to the right once in office?”
The organization I helped run held regular meetings with like-minded state and federal officials, and on this occasion, one of our guests was Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma. A successful businessman and obstetrician, Coburn had delivered some 4,000 babies before entering politics. Elected to the House in the Republican wave of 1994, Coburn ran successfully for Senate in 2004. He was, I sensed, very familiar with challenging questions from frustrated conservatives.
Coburn laughed. “I can explain that. Oklahoma is as conservative a state as it gets. And yet . . . as soon as I arrived in Washington, my calendar began to fill up with all the important people from back home. The oil men, the farmers and ranchers, the car dealers, all sorts of people who had supported my campaign in one way or another. Every last one of them bought into our vision of limited government. But somehow, the conversations were always the same: ‘Dr. Tom,’ they’d say, ‘we sure are proud of you back home. You’re doing a great job holding the line on spending and earmarks. Keep up the good work. Now, there is one little thing I need to talk to you about . . .’”
The constituents who lobbied Senator Coburn thought of themselves as conservatives. They would have bristled at the suggestion they weren’t. They saw these “favors” as a necessary part of good government. They also thought of themselves as smart businessmen who needed just a little help from the government—a tax incentive here, a new bridge there. The net effect of helping each of these constituents was, invariably, an expanded and more activist government. The folks who lobbied Dr. Tom shared his vision. They didn’t think of their requests as hypocritical exceptions to their conservative views, and they certainly didn’t think they were damaging the conservative cause.
The left wants to expand the reach of government. Most left-wing policy and advocacy groups focus on emboldening and encouraging ever more substantial government intervention in public (and private) life. Lobbying a typical Democrat for a more activist government is like pleading with a toddler to eat more candy. You are urging them to do something they already very much want to do. Their instincts and philosophies are already oriented toward expanded government—when the left lobbies their own elected officials, it’s mostly about quickening an already willing and enthusiastic pace.
When you lobby a liberal politician for “one little thing,” they might reply, “Why not ten big ones instead?” When you lobby a conservative for “one little thing,” no matter how good or sensible that “thing” is, you are slowing (if not actively derailing) a genuinely conservative policy agenda. Tom Coburn was as staunch a conservative as ever served in the modern US Senate. Even he had difficulty resisting the sum total of all the requests for “one little thing.” Less conscientious conservatives (and we can stipulate that phrase characterized most of Coburn’s colleagues) found it much easier to give in to the pressure. And as Dr. Coburn implied, at least some of the activists who lament that Republicans “always move to the left when elected” need to look in the mirror. Too many who support conservative ideas in theory lobby hard for pet exceptions to the policy consequences of those ideas.
The end result is disillusionment on the right and a government that never stops expanding.
That conversation with Dr. Coburn crystallized a theory that I had been formulating for years: the notion of the Political Vise. Now let me be clear: the Vise is not inherently good or bad. It is a mechanism that can be used to achieve good outcomes or bad ones. The success of the Vise is not a sign that our system is hopelessly corrupted, or that we need to return to some idealized time—perhaps to the era of the Founders—when the Political Vise did not exist. The Vise has always existed.
The problem is that the right doesn’t know it exists. The left, on the other hand, understands the Vise intuitively. The left has invested in and built a complex and highly effective infrastructure around deploying this powerful tool. The right doesn’t even understand the tool is there.
Go to any conservative conference or policy gathering, and you’ll hear the same laments. How did we get here? Why are we winning so many battles but losing the larger war? How is it that the left is able to implement so many unconstitutional, immoral, and clearly unpopular policies with so little resistance? We will hear that we need to fight harder, raise more money, recruit better candidates! We need to take back this school board, that legislature, this governor’s mansion! I’m all for raising money, fighting hard, identifying great leaders, and winning elections. I also know that if we don’t understand how to use the Political Vise to our advantage, none of that will matter.
A vise, political or otherwise, is a tool for applying pressure to achieve a particular outcome. A toothpaste tube is a kind of vise. You don’t get your Colgate or Crest onto your toothbrush by pressing just one side of the tube. You take off the cap, press from both sides—and then later press from the bottom—to get the paste you want. The Political Vise works much the same way.
Once elected, politicians find themselves operating inside the Vise, and they do so under constant pressure from all three sides. That pressure is necessary. If there is no pressure, nothing gets done. The problem isn’t that pressure inherently produces bad outcomes. The problem is that too many, especially on the right, do not understand how to apply the correct “squeeze” to produce the desired result. In order to understand how to do that, we first need to understand how politicians generally respond to pressure. For more than twenty years, I have been informally interviewing politicians of all stripes (like Senator Coburn) to discover how they make voting decisions. What I have found is that they have three primary decision-making filters.
The first filter is political expediency. This filter involves the standard currency of Washington (or any state capital): compromise. I will vote for your bridge in your district if you vote for my new highway in mine. Deal- making is a normal part of politics. Sometimes dealmaking is honorable and serves the public’s interest. Most of the time, this dealmaking serves a special interest at the expense of the public. That special interest has applied sufficient pressure and has earned their desired result. A back-of-the-envelope estimate, based on years of observation, is that 65% of all votes cast in legislatures are cast through the expedience filter.
The second filter is fear. The one thing incumbents from both parties have in common is a deep fear of losing their seat in the next election. This worry unites them to work collectively against policies that would make incumbents more vulnerable. That is why the push for campaign finance reform, which inevitably restricts the people’s ability to hold elected officials accountable, is always a bipartisan project. The fear of offending an important constituency (climate change lobbyists, public-sector unions, or Second Amendment advocates, for example) also drives voting decisions. Bad publicity, unhappy donors, and unhappy allies guarantee unhappy voters, and unhappy voters mean you’ll soon be looking for a new job. I estimate that the fear filter drives about 30% of all votes cast.
I grew up believing that most political decisions were made based on principle. Yes, I was naïve! As Senator Coburn explained, even the most committed politicians eventually abandon their principles under pressure. Expedience or fear win out almost all the time. Not always—I estimate that perhaps as many as 5% of all votes are cast based on genuine principle. The reality is that while many politicians start out with a political philosophy, for most that philosophy quickly gets crushed by the pressures of the Vise.
What are the different sides of the Vise that apply pressure? As shown in the diagram in the introduction, they are the media, influencers, and the people. When you think of the media, you might think of cable news or legacy newspapers like the New York Times. When you think of influencers today, perhaps you think of celebrities selling products on TikTok and Instagram, though for our purposes, we’re thinking more of powerful lobbying groups like the trial bar, trade unions, and the Green Lobby. The truth is that all three sides of the Vise were present at the very beginning of our nation, long before the internet and television. Though the nature of both media and influencers has changed enormously over the past two centuries, both media and powerful influencers have applied intense pressure to politicians from the very earliest days of our republic. That pressure has shaped the destiny of our nation.
Let’s examine a few short examples of the Traditional Political Vise in action, chosen from three pivotal moments in American history.
When Thomas Jefferson lost the 1796 presidential election to John Adams, he immediately began considering a rematch. As he assessed what he needed to do differently to get a different outcome, Jefferson realized he would need to do something that hadn’t been done yet in our country’s very brief history: campaign. He needed to shape public opinion and create pressure on potential electors. As Jefferson wrote to his close political ally, fellow founder, and future president, James Madison, “The engine is the press. Every man must lay his purse and his pen under contribution.”
In other words, he needed to put the electors in a vise. As was so often the case, Jefferson’s planning proved prescient. The election of 1800 ended in an electoral college tie, and as the Constitution provided, the House of Representatives was required to choose the president. If you’ve seen the musical Hamilton (or maybe paid attention in history class), you know what happened: the House chose Jefferson over Aaron Burr. The popular musical
gives a tuneful explanation, but the real reason Jefferson prevailed was that he was the first—but by no means the last—aspiring American politician to grasp the decisive power of the Political Vise.
Nearly a century later, the United States was divided over the question of whether to intervene in Cuba’s fight for independence from Spain. President William McKinley was initially reluctant to involve the country in a foreign conflict. History teachers often emphasize the pivotal role of the media (particularly the newspapers controlled by legendary publisher William Randolph Hearst) in “beating the drum” for war. Others—Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt chief among them—saw not only the moral obligation to assist the Cuban people but grasped that a war would serve American interests both in the Caribbean and in the Pacific. The coordinated efforts of the media and influencers (like Roosevelt and the great advocate for naval power Alfred Thayer Mahan) drove public opinion and turned the handle of the Vise. Squeezed from three sides, President McKinley was forced to act. America entered a war that would make us into a global power.
Few things are rarer than a politician voluntarily relinquishing power. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson’s surprise decision not to run for re- election was described as a “political Pearl Harbor.” In part, LBJ didn’t want to run again because he felt tired and unwell. The far more significant reason was that he had grown deeply unpopular. LBJ was despised by his own Democrat party, which was angry at the president’s mishandling of the Vietnam War. Conservatives, meanwhile, were aghast at Johnson’s profligate spending, rapidly rising crime and disorder, and spiraling inflation.
Many around the president expected him to defy the pressure and turn a deaf ear to his critics on both the right and the left. Instead, Johnson decided that the media, the influencers, and popular opinion were right: for the good of the country, he should step aside. By letting the Vise work as it was intended, LBJ reminded Americans that the system still functioned as the Framers intended. As historian Matthew Dallek put it:
Much of the public and the news media interpreted Johnson’s announcement as a Godsend that made the project of national repair more feasible for 1968; LBJ’s withdrawal offered hope, however scant, of national reconciliation, hope that new leaders would step up and somehow unite a fractured Republic. John- son’s decision not to seek re-election was a sign that the political system was still responsive to the people’s will.
That last sentence captures one of the most important functions of the Political Vise: when it operates as it was designed, the public is reassured that the system is “still responsive to the people’s will.” I don’t need to tell you that very few Americans have that confidence today.
The fourth side of the Political Vise is the output. In 1800, that “output” was the triumph not only of Thomas Jefferson but of a political philosophy that sought to decentralize authority and maximize freedom. In 1898, the output was not only a popular war but an America ready to accept its destiny as a global power. In 1968, the output was an incumbent bowing to popular will—a reminder to Americans that their president is a servant, not an emperor.
More often, though, the output isn’t a single resignation or a declaration of war but the establishment of an enduring policy—and a bureaucracy to implement and entrench it. The Vise worked to compel Johnson’s resignation. It also worked to compel that same president’s most famous achievement, the establishment of Medicare. Over the last sixty years, bureaucrats have worked hard to entrench Medicare and other entitlement programs, rendering them impervious to pressure to reform. What was created by the Vise often seeks to use the Vise for its own survival, at all costs. Generations of conservatives (like Senator Coburn) have come to Washington and discovered that the moment they seek to cut or reform a bloated government program, the Vise tightens. The opposition by the media and the left to the Department of Government Efficiency proves this point in spectacular fashion.
The “output” is very good at ensuring its own survival. Shortly after his re-election in 2004, President George W. Bush declared that his top domestic priority for his second term would be Social Security reform. In early 2005, he embarked on a national tour to advocate for a reimagined— and much more fiscally sound—Social Security system. President Bush saw that, left unchanged, our nation’s most famous entitlement program could not be sustained. He wanted American workers to be able to invest part of their Social Security contributions in private accounts, thus betting both on themselves and on America. Despite the considerable political capital that came with a successful re-election, Bush’s reform effort bombed—or rather, it got squeezed in the Vise. The media and the influencers successfully portrayed the Bush plan as destroying, rather than preserving, Social Security. By September 2005, the president had aban- doned his reform efforts.
What happened with Social Security reform was disappointing. It was also an example of the Political Vise operating as it has for decades. Since the 1930s and the advent of New Deal social welfare programs, the left has deployed the Vise far more effectively than has the right. This isn’t new—it’s at the heart of what the late Dr. Coburn lamented to me nearly twenty years ago. What is new is that the Traditional Political Vise (revisit the diagram in the introduction for comparison) has been almost entirely superseded by something far more sinister, and something far from the intent of the Framers and the Founders: the Progressive Political Vise.
In this new vise, it is the American people who are held accountable to the politicians, to the influencers, and to the media. It is ordinary citizens who are nudged, exhorted, cajoled, threatened, and squeezed. The Progressive Political Vise operates on the assumption that the American people are racist, ignorant, selfish, and stupid. It presumes that our deepest convictions are foolish superstitions. It sees government not as an instrument to serve the people but as a machine for transforming them. Resistance to that transformation will be punished.
People are compelled to make decisions based upon three criteria:
Personal Expediency
Personal Fear
Personal Principle
“Progressive” shouldn’t be a bad word. After all, we all welcome technological, medical, and scientific innovations that help human beings to live longer and more comfortable lives. We all dream of better lives for our children. In that sense, we are all progressives. Of course, that’s not how contemporary “progressives” understand the concept. Their goal isn’t to encourage innovation and invention. Their goal is to coerce and compel individual Americans to live according to a particular set of collectivist, secular values. For these elites, progress is defined not by human flourishing, but by submission to an all-powerful, all-knowing state. It is not government by the people. It is government for the people as the government believes the people should be. Taken to its natural end, as the former Soviet Union did, tens of millions of lives were sacrificed in the name of progress. When coercion and thus submission are required, there can be no progress or progressivism.
What are they thinking? How could they be so misguided? Who could possibly believe that nonsense? Those words have come out of my mouth many times while watching the news in recent years. I’m fairly sure you’ve said similar things. No matter where you are on the political spectrum, there will be moments where you find yourself confronted (and confounded) by the reality that other people frequently come to very, very different conclusions about the real meaning of justice, or democracy, or freedom. I’ll discuss the reasons for this rising tide of ignorance later in this book. What is striking is that it is the progressive left, not the right, that uses the Political Vise to coerce and to crush anyone who disagrees with its agenda. Put simply, conservatives respond to ignorance with efforts to educate. Increasingly, progressives respond to perceived “ignorance” with efforts to eradicate.
This isn’t hyperbole. I wish it were! To name one example (there are many more), think of the way the Progressive Political Vise worked to crush anyone who dared question the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The left mocks anyone who suggests the election was stolen—and yet, given the chance, the left gleefully admits what really happened that year:
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans . . . Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change in public and private funding.
Those aren’t the words of a right-wing crackpot. They’re from a February 2021 TIME magazine article by progressive journalist Molly Ball, best known for her worshipful, award-winning biography of Nancy Pelosi. Rather than deny the allegations that, at least in part, the 2020 elections were rigged, the left—like a criminal unable to resist boasting of his cleverness—seems to be gleefully admitting the rigging. They changed the laws. They spent millions on ballot harvesting. They threw out decades of established practice for counting and securing ballots. (For more on how they did this, I recommend the work of another Mollie: Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, by Mollie Hemingway.) Having achieved the desired outcome—the defeat of President Trump—the left swiftly pivoted to crushing those who challenged the result.
The persecution of the January 6 “insurrectionists” is one very obvious example of politicians, the media, and wealthy influencers putting ordinary Americans in the Vise. It is not just average Americans. There is no living human being whom the Progressive Political Vise is more desperate to crush than Donald Trump. You do not have to agree with all of the president’s policies and pronouncements to recognize that the left is frantically eager to destroy him. The countless criminal and civil suits, the obscenely confiscatory judgments (particularly in New York), and the relentless “lawfare” against his person, his businesses, and his family offer the best possible example of the contemporary left’s ruthlessness.
Of course, it isn’t just President Trump and his supporters crushed in the Progressive Political Vise. It’s girls who just want to play sports—but whose trophies are stolen and whose bodies are injured by young men masquerading as women. It’s parents who demand to know why pornography is in the middle-school library. It’s the likes of Daniel Penny, who sought to protect his fellow subway riders and faced decades behind bars. And of course, it’s countless Americans who dared challenge the progressive regime’s insistence.