Since 1973, the citizen legislators of the American Legislative Exchange Council have advanced a common sense conservative agenda based on the fundamental principles of free markets, limited government, federalism and individual liberty.
It's a restrictive, exclusive agenda, designed to counter the new (in 1973) reality of government by the people. Since one of the obligations of all citizens is to propose/draft legislation, the designation "citizen legislators" represents an effort to distinguish those who have been elected to serve in an official capacity as special. The rest of the verbiage is similarly peculiar -- i.e. it doesn't mean what, to the casual reader, it seems to say. So, to translate:
common sense = a substitute for "common man" and non-sensical, to boot, since the senses which inform are unique human attributes. Our common senses, such as they are, are what we share with the brutes.
conservative agenda = recipe for keeping things as they are (by adding lots of sugar)
free market = substitute for free person and free lunch since "to market" is to distribute for money and depends on first creating a need. "Free market" is like "citizen legislator," a redundancy whose parts effectively cancel each other out.
limited government = control without obligation that's exercised by an elite or clique. The cohort of citizen legislators is perhaps larger than they'd like but, with some effort, manageable.
federalism = states' rights. If the cohort of citizen legislators is perhaps too large, it's preferable to a national dictatorship that's proved hard to maintain. Letting the people pick their own tyrants has proved an acceptable alternative to military or ecclesiastic designation, over time, if only because the resistance it spawns is less. In any event, it maintains the primacy of the process (how people are managed) over the rights of the person (the ostensible object of the Constitution). What needs to be countered is government by the people, based on universal suffrage and the principle of equality.
individual liberty = a chimera. Given the primacy of the state and the subordination of the person, individual liberty is a sham. When all resources are owned and sustenance has to be bought, then the only option is to drop out and die. Because in a free market there is no free lunch.
The ALEC motto should probably be "if you can't beat them, join them." If universal suffrage can't be undone because, after all, it represents the fulfillment of an original agenda that had obviously been deferred as long as possible, then the only practicable alternative is to infiltrate and undermine the agenda from inside. Limiting most citizens to voting and rendering the process as unattractive as possible helps. On the other hand, the hoards of youth swarming to the polls in 2008 were evidence of failure on a gigantic scale. So, new measures had to be rushed into place in as many as forty states.
The turning point --