This evening, I'd like to direct your attention to, what I think, are two very important essays addressing the future of the Republican Party. You see ...
When I turned 18, I immediately registered to vote. Not only that, but I became a registered-Republican that same day too! I was proud. Happy. That was 22 long years ago.
During those 22 years, outside of one faint blink of hope ("Contract with America"),the Republican Party has not only failed, but stabbed true conservatism in the back as it did.
I believe the only way to "rebuild" the Republican Party, is to stop buying their products. That is, don't send them money, and don't vote for them. And yes, it's true ... if millions of you join me, our decision presents some real risk.
Larrey Anderson over at American Thinker, talks about this in his article Conservatism's Dilemma - To be or not to be in the GOP:
A divorce by conservatives from the GOP would be a disaster for all of the parties involved. Just like most marriages, the grass may look greener on the other side of the fence -- but it almost always isn't ...
The GOP needs to understand ... that there is no Republican Party without conservatives -- and conservatives need to start acting on this fact.
Conservatives who decide to abandon the GOP will have a rough time finding a new political party to live with. The Libertarian Party is wedded to the "philosophy" of selfishness and Ayn Rand. The Constitution Party is barely a blip on the political radar.
If reconciliation between conservatives and the GOP is going to happen, conservatives must take firm control of the GOP.
I agree with Larrey here, except for his lame, cheap-shots at the Libertarian Party (LP) and Constitution Party (CP). There is nothing "selfish" about the LP. In fact, they're more conservative than the Republican Party right now. As the syndicated powerhouse Glenn Beck recently said:
Every day that goes by, I'm more and more libertarian. I've always been a conservative. But every day I find myself believing more and more in states' rights, individual rights -- let people alone, get the government out of everybody's lives, let everybody rule themselves.
And if conservatives decided to join the Constitution Party, they would no longer be a "blip." The market always prevails.
Larrey does offer some solid advice for giving the RNC a little tough-love:
(1) No more money. The first thing conservatives must do is stop giving any money to the GOP ... In other words, no more conservative money goes to the RINOs. Not a penny ... It is that simple.
(2) No more excuses. Conservatives must stop making excuses for the GOP and start demanding change ... I am sick and tired of defending the lightly veiled socialist policies of "compassionate conservatism."
(3) No more manipulation. Republicans have manipulated conservatives for far too long with empty promises of governmental reform.
(4) New leadership now. The GOP must dump its current crop of congressional leaders. These men seem to be comfortable being in the minority. They know how to say "bi-partisan" and "compromise" -- but they have no clue about how to say the simplest of words: "No."
(5) Finally, let's take this bull by the horns. Conservatives need to start running for office.
Reid Buckley, the brother of famous conservative intellectual William F. Buckley, wrote a stirring piece in The American Conservative, "Up from Conservatism."
I cry within myself, where is the inspiration? Where is the audacity? And I wonder often whether the young radical today reading conservative publications does not suffer from the tedium that suffocated me as a young man reading the liberal press.
Tell me quickly: what is new in conservative political thinking since 1955? Can you come up with a single tenet that rises fresh to the mind in treating vicissitudes that were undreamed of back when my brother founded National Review ...
We conservatives are so self-satisfied that we have incapacitated ourselves from peering beneath the antics of idiots and the wild exaggerations of scruffy environmentalist kooks to the gathering of real dangers that their hysterical rhetoric obscures ...
But within the hysteria and exaggeration of political activists, mostly of the Left, too often supported by cooked science, there is often a kernel of legitimate concern, be it economical, sociological, aesthetic, or environmental. We conservatives have shut our ears.
How stupid ... it's a deplorable exhibition of urban-bred removal from reality. This should be our cause, for pity's sake, not theirs.
Are we not perhaps talking too much to ourselves ... and are we not--all of us--submitting intellectually to conservative political correctness and the inertia of the modern super state?
[I am not] suggesting that conservatives must once again be deemed by society as uncouth, though I feel that it ill-becomes true conservative independence of spirit to feel comfortable in the Rose Garden ... in a big corporation boardroom, in dining rooms where finger bowls are served before dessert, or in any other center of establishmentarian power and complacence.
Please understand me, I am not holding that there is a Euclidian equivalency between boorishness and independence of mind, between the social outcast and genius. But the persecuted Church is oft the true Church. The worldly Church is too often the corrupted Church.
... has anyone had the audacity, courage, and honesty to tell the bald truth-which is that the Republican Party has failed the cause to which my brother Bill and so many other brilliant souls-Frank Meyer, Jim Burnham, John Chamberlain, to mention just a few-gave unstintingly of their lives? Is any establishment conservative organ today declaring unequivocally that conservatives who have any respect at all for the political philosophy they profess must forswear the Republican Party and on many major issues break ranks with government-trusting (and agnostic) neocons?
Today we are trespassing on vital conservative and libertarian tenets without compunction. Here are three.
1. We Americans have turned our backs on the founding ideal of small government.
2. Though reluctant, Republicans have submitted to the takeover of the economy by the federal government, a foray into the corporate state from which we may never recover.
3. Putative conservatives in the White House and in the Republican Congress plunged the country further into debt through legislation such as the farm bill and the new Medicare entitlement paying for prescription drugs, in the meantime bowing to the perpetuation of established entitlements.
It may be understandable--no less disgusting--that our politicians do not have the stomach for it. But independent conservative intellectuals are keepers of the flame or they are burnt cartridges ... One has to suppose they are afraid of sounding anachronistic, of talking themselves into irrelevance, of being disparaged as freaks from the lunatic fringe. But that prudence, that tactical wisdom, seductive as it may be perceived, submits without a fight to the accommodationist politics of the Nelson Rockefeller/Dwight Eisenhower GOP of the 1950s and '60s. Those politics are every bit as craven, mistaken, defeatist, and unworthy today as they were back then. My brother's National Review was born to stand athwart history, not to tickle the teats of the belly of the beast Leviathan as it strides over us.
... then, what will be the future of American civilization as far as we conservatives are concerned?
The very first thing is to dissociate from the Republican Party, which has become an albatross around the neck of integrity.
Go read the whole thing. Then read it again.
When you're done, think about what I said about those "freaks from the lunatic fringe" ... and the "kernel of legitimate concern." It's time to broaden our horizons.
