One of the phrases that I use again and again is this one: stick to your knitting. A person who sticks to his knitting long enough is going to have an impact on those around him.
In the American conservative movement, one person above all the rest stands out and someone who has relentlessly stuck to her knitting: Phyllis Schlafly.
She came onto the scene nationally in 1964 with her book, A Choice Not an Echo. This was a call to action in support of Barry Goldwater's campaign. It established her reputation as a leader within the conservative political movement, which was tiny. It clearly established her position as the most important female leader of the movement.
This book might not have amounted to anything, except that she knew how to build on her own reputation. She created a decentralized, state-by-state organization, the Eagle Forum. She began to mobilize women who knew something was fundamentally wrong with the American political system, and she taught them how to become effective political organizers locally. In my view, this was the most important single development of the American conservative movement over the last half-century. Virtually all the rest of the movement has been geared to trying to influence legislation from inside the Beltway. She never had any illusions about that pot of fiat money at the end of the rainbow. She spotted it for what it was: a mess of pottage.
Because of the Eagle Forum, the United States was spared the Equal Rights Amendment. I think the ERA would have passed without her steadfast opposition. It would have been a disaster, and she and her troops stopped it. Nobody else can plausibly take credit for that. Nobody else in the conservative movement can plausibly take credit for having stopped anything of comparable magnitude.
She is still active in the field of political education. What she began in 1964, she is still pursuing today. She writes. She has a website. She does interviews. She gives speeches. She warns against a Constitutional Convention (con-con).
There are professional politicians whose careers lasted longer than half a century. Strom Thurmond comes to mind. But I don't think Strom Thurmond ever had the influence that Phyllis Schlafly has had. He could get himself re-eelected, even when he was not on the ballot. (He was the first United States senator ever to be elected with a write-in vote. It is only been done once since then.) But he did not mobilize a national movement of political activists. He never became the spokesman for a large section of the conservative movement. Jesse Helms did; Thurmond did not. Left-wing organizations in search of a bogeyman to scare donors into sending them money did not select Thurmond as their candidate. But Phyllis Schlafly is always good for this purpose.
LOCALISM
In terms of political theory, conservatism is inherently local. The conservative movement, with the exception of Schlafly and her Protestant imitator, Beverly LaHaye, has not been committed to grassroots politics. There is a reason for this. It is hard for a single organization to raise money for grassroots politics. Money gets raised by sending out letters that scare donors into writing a check. This means national politics. The focus of conservative political activists is almost always on national politics. Worse, it usually has to do with opposition to a liberal President. Everything is focused on getting out the national vote in a Presidential election year. That was how Schlafly started in 1964. But she deviated from this outlook almost immediately.
The great mistake of virtually the entire conservative movement has always been to believe that the heart of politics is inside the Beltway. It has lured dozens of organizations and hundreds of millions of dollars of donations into the sinkhole that is Washington, DC.
I'm not talking here about lobbying organizations. I'm also not talking about public interest laws. I am talking about organizations that promise to provide leadership for the restructuring and reform of big government. It will never come out of Washington, DC. That's because the donors' money flows into Washington, DC. It is a black hole for money. I have written about this before: //www.garynorth.com/public/12170.cfm
It is possible for a lobbying group to get a lot of people to write to their elected representatives, and once in a while this will stop the bill from getting passed. But it will not stop a constitutional amendment from getting ratified.
The futility of operating inside the Beltway is the futility of being endlessly co-opted by big government projects and the lure of big government reform. Big government never gets reformed. Every dollar spent on trying to get big government reformed is a wasted dollar.
If conservatives donated 80% of their political money and 80% of their political time to local elections, they could create barriers to the expansion of federal power in their local communities. But they do not understand conservatism as a philosophy. They do not understand conservatism as a political movement. So, like sheep to the shearing, they write their checks to organizations that are inside the Beltway. It never does any good.
There is a Great Default coming. The unfunded liabilities of the Medicare system are sufficient to bankrupt the government. The government will avoid this bankruptcy only by defaulting on Medicare and Social Security debt. This is going to create a major political transformation in the United States. Preparations for that transformation must be made at the local level, because when the money from Washington stops flowing, political authority is going to shift to local politics. That is when the resistance movement is going to have is great opportunity. When Washington's checks bounce, the opportunity will present itself. Phyllis Schlafly has been preparing women for this opportunity for half a century.
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