At least a dozen beer cans covered the top of the table in the BlazeTV studio when we sat down to talk with Matt Kibbe. Some were fancy IPAs and Pale Ales that Matt likes, but there was also Venezuelan and North Korean swill. Matt had a simple plan for our interview on his show: he wanted us to do the economic equivalent of a Drunk History video. But first, we had a different type of experiment for him.
We decided to “live write” a postscript for this book by interviewing Matt. The three of us share broadly similar economic, philosophical, and historical views when it comes to capitalism and socialism. But Matt’s not an egghead academic like us. He’s a freedom fighter who has fought the grassroots political battles in the trenches.
Matt’s currently the president and chief community organizer at Free the People. Before that he was the founder and president of FreedomWorks for many years. Under Matt’s leadership, FreedomWorks played an important role in sparking and organizing the Tea Party movement a decade ago. FreedomWorks was the lead organizer of the Taxpayer March on Washington in 2009.
This puts Matt in a different position than Bob and me to provide insight into the grassroots socialist movement energizing young people today. A decade ago, it was a youth for Ron Paul movement that he folded into the Tea Party. What’s changed with young people today?
Much like the rest of this book, we did this interview by the seat of our pants, while consuming a fair bit of beer. So, we’ve edited the transcript to make it a bit more readable.
Powell: Matt, take us back to the 2008 presidential campaign and Ron Paul in the primaries, and the big push that young people gave for what the mainstream commentators and Republican Party would call “a crazy old man” who articulated liberty. What was it with him and his movement that young people identified with that gave him the legs to get to the national stage, and really launch what became the Tea Party movement afterwards?
Kibbe: Two things. First of all, it was his authenticity. You can sort of struggle with this because Ron Paul is not a typical movie-star-looking kinda guy. He’s not necessarily someone that can always tell the most articulate story. But he’s the real deal. He’s been talking about ending the Federal Reserve and getting out of our endless wars since day one. So that was part of it, I think. That was part of his sales pitch. He’s authentic, he’s talking about principles.
The other part is technology. The Ron Paul money bombs online were some of the first demonstrable, measurable, primal screams from the grassroots—an early indicator that the establishment was about to be challenged by insurgent outsider candidates who had a different perspective. He was not from your mother’s Republican Party. He was something else. And so there was this process by which technology decentralized politics a little bit and empowered disenfranchised voters. The Tea Party took that and ran with it, and created a sustained social movement . . . bigger perhaps, and not so dependent on a personality like Ron Paul.
But, fast-forward to today and you could say the same thing about Bernie Sanders, you could say the same thing about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and even Donald Trump in a different way. He is sort of a pop-star character from his television shows. All of these candidates use technology. All of them, in their own way, are sort of authentic.
Powell: So, before we jump so far ahead to the socialists and what’s resonating now, what happened to the movement that became the Tea Party? It was this grassroots movement that was decentralized, and it challenged the mainstream Republican Party and elected a wave of candidates in 2010. Where has it gone?
Kibbe: So those people are still there. And I still view the Tea Party—as someone who was fully involved in it—as one of the most influential social movements in my lifetime, second only to the civil rights movement. They had core values. You could wander into any Tea Party crowd in 2009 and 2010 and virtually any individual activist would tell you: “I’m for individual liberty, fiscal responsibility, and constitutionally limited government.” They would all say the same thing and those values held it together. That’s what made it such a potent social movement.
Then opportunistic politicians jumped up on stage, and that ultimately broke the party up. You fill the National Mall in Washington, D.C., with people representing potential votes, and politicians are going to be attracted, sort of like flies to . . . flypaper. You thought I was going to say something else, right? So yeah, like flies to shit. All of a sudden, the community moved away from those principles and started thinking about political wins. Politics divides people, and Donald Trump’s candidacy succeeded in breaking up the once mighty Tea Party once and for all. But you know, politics happens at the margin, and small margins lead to big differences in outcomes. Those liberty-minded activists, at least the ones from the Ron Paul movement and the libertarians and the constitutional conservatives, they are still there, but they no longer represent a cohesive social movement that will impact political decisions in the same way they did in 2010.
Lawson: Could you draw some similarities to the socialist movement around Bernie and AOC today to what you saw watching the Ron Paul movement? Also, maybe you could prognosticate, how is it going to turn out for this social movement? Is this socialist movement going to work out better or worse for them than the Tea Party movement did for its participants?
Kibbe: Some of my Ron Paul friends get upset about this, but I often compare Bernie Sanders to Ron Paul, because they have a similar persona. The one thing about their authenticity is they’ve been talking about the same stuff from day one. Ron Paul was always this cranky antiwar libertarian and Bernie Sanders was always this cranky socialist independent. Both were railing against both Democrats and Republicans. I think part of the attraction is their consistency, because people get tired of politicians who just say whatever you want to hear.
But dig a little bit deeper. When Bernie rails against crony capitalism, or rails against permanent war, or rails against the surveillance state, or the criminal justice system that has packed our prisons, Ron Paul could be giving the same speech. And it’s not until the end of the story, when Bernie says: “That’s why we need to grow the size of government and give bureaucrats more power,” that people hear a difference. That’s Bernie’s cognitive dissonance: railing against the evils created by too much government power, and then pushing for more government power to solve the problem.
Powell: You’re finding a similarity between radical socialists and radical libertarians in identifying problems that young people see. Is it that the young people don’t understand the solutions and just identify with the politicians that point out the problems?
Kibbe: Conservatives have this phrase that I don’t like at all called “low-information voters.” And I don’t like it because it’s sort of a derogatory term. I think all of us, including me—we’re all low-information voters.
There is so much that you don’t know, and you can’t know, about what the government is doing, about what politicians are really thinking. So, “We the People,” to the extent that we pay attention, it’s only an inch deep. In practice, you might give a little bit of attention to presidential politics, and if Bernie is railing against the machine, and you’re nodding your head yes, like, “Yeah, I get that,” you’re not so much focused on comparative economic systems, or the type of cost-benefit analysis economists use.
I think if you look at the appeal of Bernie, it’s all that anti-establishment “rage against the machine.” I think we probably were too optimistic about the Ron Paul movement. We thought it was made up of self-identified libertarians who knew all about property rights and the importance of limiting the power of government. But fast-forward to Rand Paul’s run for president in 2016, and Rand lost half of the Ron Paul coalition to Trump. So, raging against the machine could be populist, it could be libertarian, or it could be socialist. I think part of our challenge is to fill in the blanks to show that if you don’t like those things contrived and corrupted by Washington power brokers, what you are really saying is, you don’t want too much government control over your life.
Lawson: One thing that was striking when we interviewed young people at the big socialist conference in Chicago was how few socialists there were. I’d talk to a random person and ask them, “Why are you a socialist?” And they would say, “I’m for abortion rights.” Abortion is an important issue but it’s not clear to me how that aligns with socialism. There were people that were there for various environmental concerns, immigration rights, and other “progressive” causes. Somehow, to those attending the conference, all these things came under the banner of socialism. Did you see that at the Ron Paul movement? People identifying as libertarians, but who were there really because they liked guns or smoked weed? Did you see these single-issue people who couldn’t broaden their overall philosophy past their primary issue?
Kibbe: There are a bunch of things that a libertarian or conservative coalition would disagree about, but there is a difference between that and the sort of disagreements of the progressive-democratic-socialist coalition. There were core values the Tea Party coalition did agree on: constitutionally limited government, individual freedom, fiscal responsibility. By the way, those ideals in politics are sort of homeless right now. I don’t recognize either party pushing for that stuff anymore. Maybe there’s an entrepreneurial opportunity there?
The progressive coalition has always been a collection of grievances and identity silos, and they try to check all the boxes, but it is not at all clear that they have a set of common interests that bind them together as a community. So, that’s one of the reasons why I’m not so panicked about young people gathering around the banner of socialism. I am not sure that the word “socialism” to them means what you and I think about when we think about government ownership of the means of production.
Powell: It feels like young people are identifying with socialism in a way that they identified with libertarianism a decade ago. How can we turn the tide and show young people the value of liberty, why it should matter to them, and why they should go whole hog on libertarianism and not just on a side issue here or there?
Kibbe: I think we should borrow a page from Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and more important, the new “It Girl” in socialist politics, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She had this viral video that sort of created her career. You watch it and she talks about dignity, and she talks about how it is that her opponent is this incumbent-for-life Democrat who’s more cozy with Wall Street then he is with “our community.” He lives in Washington, he doesn’t represent our values, he’s all about crony capitalism. He’s part of this machine in a faraway place. He’s not us. What Ocasio-Cortez believes, at least as represented in this viral video, is something akin to people working together, people cooperating, people trying to solve problems at the community level, from the bottom up. And that, according to her, is how we’re going to make the world a better place. And then, at the end, she sneaks her real agenda in: that’s why we need Medicare for all, and that’s why we need to socialize this, that, and the other thing.
But it’s almost an afterthought, it’s not a policy or ideological pitch. It’s an emotional, populist appeal to people who don’t trust the system anymore. And when I hear it at that level, I am like, “Hell yeah, I’m on board.” I totally get that it’s an emotional appeal, but we can learn from that. What we have to do is rage against the machine. The machine sucks. The machine colludes to help insiders and wealthy corporations game the system against the rest of us. We have that absolutely in common with her. What we have that’s different is a beautiful story about cooperation. Remember that whole thing that I just described, about communities working to help one another? That’s not socialism, this bottom-up system of tapping into the hopes and dreams of all of us, that’s the free market. That, even though I don’t like to use the word, is the capitalist system.
Powell: The voluntary system.
Kibbe: The voluntary system. We have to come up with some way to describe what it is we’re talking about. Not in terms of the brutal economics of costs and benefits, and supply and demand, but the personal aspirations of people to be free to do cool stuff. Which, by the way, is why I talk about beer so much on my show. Good beer is the product of free-market, entrepreneurial innovation, and it just doesn’t happen if people aren’t free to choose, and risk, and create, and fail. I use this metaphor because I think people who think beer is cool are probably not going to be reading some of the academic journals that you guys publish in.
Lawson: In fact, that’s one reason why we wrote the book. It’s because we realized people aren’t reading our journal articles. So we figured, we better write something people will read and have fun doing it.
Powell: And leave us all, to paraphrase Milton Friedman, “free to booze.”
Kibbe: Free to booze. Free the beer. Beer is freedom. Let’s just end it there before we get too boozy. Cheers.