To conclude this series exploring quotes that make up the foundational ethos of the mission, I want to highlight two, bringing the last two journal entries in this series into one.
Speaking of her time leading the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman said this:
“I never ran my train off the tracks and I never lost a passenger.”
What’s inspiring to me about this statement is that Harriet’s leadership included politics, civil rights, forward progress, the human experience as it should be, severe personal trauma, contemplative faith, leading teams—and physical endurance.
I started Liberatus in 2015 partly because it’s ambiguous what exactly we were fighting for in Congress. While we said we were fighting for freedom, in the words of former Congressman Raul Labrador, Capitol Hill “is a place that just sucks your soul.” But why?
“He’s a principled conservative.”
After working within the conservative movement, it’s not clear to me what this statement means.
But I think it means something like this: There’s a conservative view of things that is the truth, therefore, he stands on that truth no matter the costs, achieves top marks on legislative scorecards, and those who don’t hold to principles might be nice to people but they’ll never be champions.
Today, often the farthest we go with this advice is to say that we should “turn down the heat” when things get too ugly. But to govern the country well, we need constructive parameters for what it means to restrain partisanship, in the same way that Olympic athletes have constructive parameters for how to perform at their best, follow the rules of their sport, and uphold sportsmanship.
To the ones who feel burned out and desperate, who want relief from a political culture that robs you of community and authenticity, and eats you alive with its chaos, its constant franticness, and its suspicious fear of everyone around you, come join us. To the ones who long to write beautifully and govern well, come join us.
To put it bluntly, I think the reason the Right, for example, has no coherent unifying plan for where to lead the country is that we’re largely still hung up on problems that aren’t the real problem, and guides who aren’t offering a clear, compelling call to action. We still think the problem is each other, and so the plan for how to govern well will never include each other.
Has there ever been a political speech given for the purpose of complete joy? For those who agree with us, sure—but what if complete joy for everyone was our motive? Or would we rather fall into the slavery and fear of creating artificial enemies so we can gain a bit of artificial safety from them? What does that say about our affections?
The stories we live and tell consist of heroes who can’t and never will solve our problems, of hopes and fears placed in desired outcomes that always let us down. The result of these weak stories is a total degeneration of our political culture; politicians freaking out to move people to vote, or donate, or worse join the fight against their own neighbors.
We have to know what our core values are now, so that when the plot thickens, and we’re faced with problems and guides and calls to action, we have a center, a core, a deep down. And ultimately we need to know what that deep down is rooted in, because it will influence how we see our problems and guides and plans, and which ones we choose to listen to.
Most of the time we don’t even recognize this internal culture of fear and how it affects our outward response, or if we do, we think it’s a good thing—and somehow our work gets twisted and we peddle solutions that are rooted in our deepest fears—and this is what makes the problems in our political culture so obvious and yet so hard to define.
