POLITICO (“FreedomWorks Is Closing — And Blaming Trump“):
FreedomWorks, the once-swaggering conservative organization that helped turn tea party protesters into a national political force, is shutting down, according to its president, a casualty of the ideological split in a Republican Party dominated by former President Donald Trump.
“We’re dissolved,” said the group’s president, Adam Brandon. “It’s effective immediately.”
[…]
In an exclusive interview with POLITICO Magazine, Brandon said the decision to shut down was driven by the ideological upheaval of the Trump era.
After Trump took control of the conservative movement, Brandon said, a “huge gap” opened up between the libertarian principles of FreedomWorks leadership and the MAGA-style populism of its members. FreedomWorks leaders, for example, still believed in free trade, small government and a robust merit-based immigration system. Increasingly, however, those positions clashed with a Trump-aligned membership who called for tariffs on imported goods and a wall to keep immigrants out but were willing, in Brandon’s view, to remain silent as Trump’s administration added $8 trillion to the national debt.
“A lot of our base aged, and so the new activists that have come in [with] Trump, they tend to be much more populist,” Brandon said. “So you look at the base and that just kind of shifted.”
This same split was creating headaches in other parts of the organization as well. “Our staff became divided into MAGA and Never Trump factions,” Brandon said in an internal document reviewed by POLITICO Magazine. It also impacted fundraising.
“Now I think donors are saying, ‘What are you doing for Trump today?’” said Paul Beckner, a member of FreedomWorks’ board. “And we’re not for or against Trump. We’re for Trump if he’s doing what we agree with, and we’re against him if he’s not. And so I think we’ve seen an erosion of conservative donors.”
Brandon, for his part, said some donors would contact him to complain that the organization was doing too much to help Trump, while others called to complain that they weren’t doing enough to help Trump. “It is an impossible position,” he said.
In trying to balance these competing pressures, Brandon said he resolved to “keep a working relationship [with the pro-Trump populists] on the issues we agreed upon.” This too created conflicts.
In an interview with POLITICO Magazine last September, an ex-FreedomWorks employee claimed that the organization under Brandon’s leadership had turned its back on its values while Trump was in office; during this period, for example, the organization issued tweets spreading election conspiracies and deflecting criticism of the Florida legislation that came to be known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. “He let a bunch of right-wing nutjobs turn FreedomWorks into a MAGA mouthpiece,” the former FreedomWorks staffer said.
Brandon said he “did my best to balance the two competing ideologies.”
In the midst of this turmoil, FreedomWorks launched an effort last fall to rebrand itself as a more centrist organization, one that could target the independent voters that its leaders believe would be more receptive to libertarian ideals. But the effort failed to get traction, Brandon said, largely because the independent voters viewed FreedomWorks as a right-wing group. As a result, Brandon and the board began discussing the possibility of shutting down FreedomWorks altogether.
“This has been my life for so long and to turn the lights off, it’s a real emotional thing,” said Brandon, who joined FreedomWorks in 2005 and has been president for about a decade. “The problem is that it’s just not the best vehicle for our [libertarian] principles and values set.”
FreedomWorks, which was founded in 1984, grew out of the Koch-funded group Citizens for Sound Economy. FreedomWorks split apart from the Koch political network in 2004.
Dave Weigel at SEMAFOR (“FreedomWorks collapse marks the end of the Tea Party era“):
Founded in 2004, spun off from the Koch-funded group Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks was one of the first right-leaning groups to organize conservative grassroots opposition to the Obama administration in 2009. (Stand Together, the network Charles Koch founded, is an investor in Semafor.)
After CNBC pundit Rick Santelli went on a viral jeremiad against the new president’s mortgage relief proposal, FreedomWorks launched an “Angry Renter” campaign to organize conservatives against it. As the Affordable Care Act moved through Congress, Brandon’s group put together a “Taxpayer March on Washington,” and trained activists across the country on how to elect more Republicans.
But FreedomWorks lost relevance and donors after Donald Trump’s 2016 primary victory, as the remnants of the Tea Party movement got behind a candidate whose economic nationalism clashed with the group’s philosophy.
[…]
The end of FreedomWorks comes a few months after Americans for Prosperity — the other libertarian group created by the 2004 split — abandoned its effort to beat Donald Trump in the GOP presidential primary. Neither organization was part of the Republican Party per se. But their retreats confirmed one of the biggest Trump-led changes in the party: The victory of right-wing populism over big-tent libertarianism.
FreedomWorks veterans told me today that the 2023 reboot, backed by polling and demographic research, was doomed by the group’s longtime identification with the conservative movement.
It was stymied when it actually reached out to independents and Democrats, who looked up what the group stood for, and saw stories about its work to elect Republicans (true) and its association with the most-demonized conservative donors in America (false, It was famously born from a 2004 split in the Koch donor network, which backed AFP). The group got too close to Trump and “MAGA-world,” I was told; after the Trump presidency and the 2020 election, that baggage was simply too much for non-Republicans, who’d found plenty of other ways to advocate for “individual liberty.”
Wikipedia reminds me that, when FreedomWorks was created in 2004 by a splintering of Citzens for a Sound Economy into two groups—and also a merger with yet another organization called Empower America—it was led by Reagan era holdovers Dick Armey, Jack Kemp, and C. Boyden Gray. So, really, the Trump era travails marked a third era for the group, with the Tea Party era the one for which it became famous.
The collapse demonstrates the difficulty of maintaining an ideologically-based organization in a political system dominated by two parties. In theory, a libertarian advocacy group could work across the aisles, as Democrats are much more libertarian on social issues (drugs, pornography, and the like) while Republicans are more libertarian on economic issues (taxation, regulation, etc.). In reality, almost all activist organizations align with one of the two major parties and FreedomWorks was, from its outset, Republican.
A principled libertarian group pretty much has to reject Trumpism. Aside from tax cuts, he’s pretty much diametrically opposed to their entire agenda. But its membership and donor base were, at the end of the day, more committed to keeping Republicans in power—or, at least, Democrats out of it—than they were to their ostensible ideology.
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Author: James Joyner
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