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.
In any endeavor, managing our energy or creative rhythms can help us perform at a sustained, high level over time. It’s not enough to believe in the cause—we all need food, fresh air, and sleep.
Over the years working in politics, these are some of the creative rhythms that I’ve found are critical for sustaining high performance.
Burnout is the inevitable result of ideology and division and will always be their outcome. But we should look deeper at its root, and the reason for its root, in the same way that we did in the last two journal entries for ideology and division. In doing so, my observation based on firsthand experience in the American economy while running Liberatus is that the root of burnout is The Great American Deception.
We can be proud of our country, but we can’t rewrite history to say that all people were included. Still, it stands to reason that any objective fault we might find with the generations before us will also be found in us by the generations after us. It’s imperative that we work to make the country more just and free so that the next generation is stronger, so they can take up the quest for the generation after them too.
Since the cycle of dysfunction begins with ideology, we should explore its root, the reason for that root, and we should explore the way out to freedom so that we can find relief from it. For this series, I am defining ideology not simply as having ideas for possible solutions that we then consult with each other about, but rather ideas that don’t take into account the full picture and are then polarized to force us to take sides.
How we use power matters. It is not a question of whether we use power. As citizens of the United States, we all already have power, and the choices we make are a use of power. Voting is a use of power. Not voting is a use of power. Organizing politically is a use of power. Indifference is a use of power, too.
