Freedom Caucus will soon find leading is harder than criticizing

In politics, leading is much harder than being the bomb-throwing opposition, a lesson we are all about to watch the Wyoming Freedom Caucus learn in spades. 

Last night, the group appeared to win a fairly decisive victory across the state after a months-long election slog that saw Wyoming inundated with out-of-state campaign mailers, texts, calls and door-to-door knocking. All of which played pretty fast and loose with the facts. It’s safe to say Freedom Caucus leader John Bear imported polarized, national politics to Wyoming to great effect. 

Winston Churchill famously said, “In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.” Many Wyoming incumbents lost Tuesday after being “killed” time and time again in political mailers that promoted outright lies to scare voters away. Young Americans for Liberty used these tactics to win in other states, and Wyoming is now among their victories. They have boasted in the past on their website, “Advancing liberty at the state level, YAL’s Hazlitt Coalition now controls 4.5% of America’s state house seats.” That number has now gone up. Their “control” has grown. 

Last night, Wyoming became another notch on their belt. What they demanded for the same kind of victory in other states will surely be coming here. And while Bear and his crew will no doubt call this a victory for “conservative values,” this conservative disagrees. Young Americans for Liberty is a Ron Paul libertarian outfit that shares only a few common policy similarities to conservatism. We disagree on major issues such as the proper role of government, drug legalization, defunding the police, and hanging our allies out to dry around the world, to name a few. 

But regardless of the subterfuge they used to win, the Freedom Caucus largely succeeded. What a different world they are about to walk into when the Legislature comes back into session in January. Balancing their faraway new Young Americans for Liberty masters while attempting to lead from Wyoming is going to be hard. 

Elections are about telling voters what you are going to do for the future. Voters in Wyoming heard things like eliminating the property tax altogether, giving all the state’s savings to the people, and hand-counting all ballots. These are just some of the issues Bear and his ilk will have to grapple with as new members are sworn in with a fist full of bills and big ideas. 

Messaging has been something the Freedom Caucus has done well, and it’s always easier when you are the opposition party to keep the troops energized through an internal echo chamber. Now, however, the fractious nature of the libertarian temperament must openly collide with a wider marketplace of ideas, as they like to call it. We can expect to see the internal grievances and ideological anarchy of the Freedom Caucus open up for all to see. Frustrated with the inability to deliver on grandiose promises, many will step out of line, especially as the masterminds who got them elected demand and enforce loyalty to their grand design.

It will become much more obvious how many of the ideas being brought by Freedom Caucus members are unworkable. In the past, as members of the opposition, they could bring their flawed, half-baked ideas, watch them fail, and then cry to the press about how the RINOs kept them from succeeding. And they used those same losses to lie to the voters and win. 

But that playbook is now gone. Sort of. 

They will need to lead now, and leading means passing real solutions. Which means they will need to make their unworkable ideas work, or more likely, launch a continual stream of bad bills that will head to our courts or fall under the governor’s veto pen. Both of those options, however, afford them the opportunity to dust off the old playbook and head back to the nearest willing press microphone to cry about “lawfare,” “liberal playbooks,” and “RINOs.”

But here’s the thing. Voters generally have little patience for whining leaders. And their whining won’t be happening in a vacuum. A new opposition of sorts has now opened up, and they get the fun of lobbing bombs just like their predecessors. 

Because like it or not, Tuesday’s election has taught us that national-styled dirty politics have arrived here, and there will be no going back. In future elections, true conservatives might be tempted to master the Bear-style art of dirty politics, but Wyoming voters deserve better, and they should resist. This doesn’t mean, however, that highlighting the unworkable failed leadership policies of the Freedom Caucus can’t happen. It must and it will. 

Those who lost were undoubtedly caught flat footed. Wyoming politeness made it hard for many candidates to accept what was happening to them and to quickly figure out how exactly to fight back. Many of them stood petrified during the attacks, and that stillness was their demise. But those kinds of sneak attacks work only once. Two years from now it’s unlikely the opposition will be unaware of what is coming. And they will be far better equipped to handle it, if they decide to do so.

In her novel, “Meet Me in Another Life,” Scottish author Catronia Silvey wrote, “People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider’s web. It’s not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go.” This describes the day after an election perfectly. 

For those who lost hope last night, today is a new day. 

For those who gained hope last night, leadership requires real character and strength, something not everyone is born to do. I can be accused of being old fashioned, but I like my leaders to have morals, and winning by lying isn’t something a moral leader does. So please don’t lecture me on how “conservative” these folks are — I’m not buying it.

One thing is for sure, all of Wyoming’s problems now lie squarely on the Freedom Caucus’ shoulders. And they will be required to find the right solutions or pay the political price. 

We shall see how well they are able to do it.