A Movement to Identity

A few weeks after the meeting, Cruz’s staff quietly began informing us of the Senator’s intent to announce, and asking us for commitments to support him for President.

Such a choice is hard enough for anyone, but for members of the tight-knit liberty community, it was even harder. We knew that Rand would be rolling out his campaign soon, and banking on all of his father’s supporters to fall in line. Undercutting Rand’s political machine by publicly advertising libertarian support for his competitor was asking for trouble.

I just didn’t know exactly how much trouble.

After a lot of thought and prayer, counsel and research, my wife and I became some of the first members of the Liberty Movement to publicly endorse Cruz.

While we immediately set about building a libertarian network in support of Ted, we paid a personal price all year long, as did others who joined us.

At the time, I was a fairly new writer trying to elbow my way into the political blogosphere; my web traffic took a hit, our personal relationships frayed, and we became the target of relentless discrediting efforts.

Traitors, backstabbers, sellouts, frauds.

The hate was poured on for months, further fueled by our unexpected success: by summer we had assembled a strong team of well-known and respected Iowa libertarians to combat Team Rand’s narrative of a libertarian consensus, including nearly all of our state’s libertarian-leaning elected officials.

We began networking on a grassroots level, breaking out the contact lists and meeting up with Ron Paul friends over coffee or lunch, and talking about the great divide. Some flatly rejected the idea of joining Cruz, others said they were still on the sidelines and not ready to get involved. But some were ready to join, and hit the ground running.

The invisible libertarian network began to buzz with something unfamiliar to us: competition. Team Paul declared themselves to have the only “liberty” candidate in the race, and both candidate and campaign frequently insisted that Ron Paul’s base would never support Cruz.

Their narrative took a hit in September, when Cruz scored an unexpectedly close second-place finish in a libertarian straw poll. Rand’s team released a pointed statement attempting to ward off the Cruz counter-narrative, but the damage had been done — national media picked up the story and with Rand’s campaign on life support, the speculation was on about how much of his father’s base would go to Cruz.

The possibility of Cruz not only splitting the libertarian vote, but actually boxing Rand Paul out of his donor and activist base became team Rand’s top concern, and the campaign abruptly changed course.

In the final four months of 2015, Rand left the party-broadening, let’s-agree-to-disagree charade behind and went, as libertarian insiders affectionately refer to it, “full Paulbot”. His debate performances became much more hardline libertarian. He left the foreign policy tough talk behind and echoed his father on peace and restraint. He touted his record on the Fed and criminal justice reform.

In short, he became the candidate we wished he had been all along.

Rand’s supporters cheered the new direction, and claimed that his earlier, watered-down messaging had all been a carefully-executed scheme to win broader support before revealing his true colors.

Those of us on team Cruz saw it differently. We saw a candidate running out of money and support, changing his message to hold on to what remained of a long-neglected base — the political equivalent of taking the ugly girl to prom when the pretty one shoots you down.

None of that is to suggest that we didn’t have problems of our own. Cruz, whose record on foreign policy was so close to Rand’s that the Kentucky Senator actually accused him of “stealing” his foreign policy ideals, had sharpened his rhetoric to appeal to more hawkish Trump and Rubio supporters. His promise to “carpet bomb” ISIS until the “sand glows” created an opportunity for Rand’s team to counterpunch.

For the final two months before Iowa, Cruz libertarians were told that we were the defectors — a splinter vote that wasn’t representative of the movement as a whole. “Liberty Leaders for Cruz” was mocked, and Rand supporters insisted that Cruz had no more libertarian support than the number of people appearing in the group’s promotion video.

Their assertions were largely unsubstantiated, as few polls allowed voters to self-identify as part of the liberty movement. In place of hard data, anecdotes were thrown around by Paul and Cruz to indicate support, and occasional straw polls offered a snapshot of a competitive race for the libertarian vote.

Within our group, though, we knew better. Rand Paul activists who had stood with him for most of 2015 began to quietly approach us, indicating their support for Ted.

More and more, we saw liberty people accepting the premise of a conservative coalition, and weighing the positives of a Cruz presidencyagainst the internet derision they would suffer for joining us.

Slowly but surely, the movement decided to pursue actual policy change rather than lazy and uninvested ideological purity.