The Democratic Party is riding the whirlwind of their own creation.
They are beholden to the tyrannical proclivities unleashed by the radical left that has now set up shop in the center of their party politics; the aggressive socialist movements that have captured the heart of academia and the corporate media-entertainment complex, the violent anarchists and the radical racist movements like the Black Panthers and Black Lives Matter (BLM), the vicious Antifia crowd, various organized communists movements (yes, there are a number), and finally, of course, the radical former President, Barack Obama, and his army of community organizers.
What they share is a distinct anti-Americanism and a rabid obsession with the destruction of free markets, Christianity and the very concept of individual liberty, as witnessed by the building frontal attack on free speech and the Bill of Rights generally.
The only problem with this political dynamic is that the country at large usually rejects the product unless hornswoggled by a smooth talking, convincing liar who camouflages their true beliefs and intentions. Americans in the main remain a hardworking, hard playing nation of citizens who want to work and take care of their families, and be left alone.
So, you’d think that this would be the political heyday for Republicans, right? They control a historic two thirds of the state governments and both ends of Congress, and there is a Republican President. What’s not to like?
Alas, the only complication is that the Republican Party is at war – with itself.
The election of President Trump moved the front of that war to the lawn of the White House, as he became the first outsider since Ronald Reagan to take control of the Party and thus the party’s message.
Today’s news brings reports of what most of us have already surmised; the President is under siege by his own party. The professional Republican politicians and swamp critters are in full attack – both their power and their privilege is under assault. From the New York Times, the Washington (Bezos) Post, the Wall Street Journal, among many, come reports and editorials suggesting that the “real” Republican Party consider themselves a “shadow government” to the Trump Administration and present the nation an alternative to “moral ugliness,” by presenting a “humane” vision, and “moral idealism” that has gone untried.
This thinking follows on the colossal failure of its premise demonstrated by presidential candidate Jeb Bush, who famously decided to run a campaign (that spent $100 million for a handful of delegates) that did not rely on those bothersome, cranky “conservative” voters.
It’s all a truckload of bat-craziness. It’s a brand of political childishness that pretends to be tony, sophisticated and relevant, when in actual practice it provides moral ambiguity and political irrelevance.
Many of us have written time and again that the Party gave up on the voters, not the other way around. The American people don’t need moralizing by the very people who have led the country into the mess that it is in currently (see my article Death Comes for the Party, 2016, read here).
That President Trump is a result, not a first cause, seems clear enough. He was the only person on a stage of sixteen others (including my first candidate), willing or able to fight – to stand his ground – verbalize and battle for things that Americans and most Republicans saw as clearly and unarguably going very wrong: a collapsing economic model that discouraged growth and opportunity and advanced government inbreeding and cronyism, the destruction caused by Obamacare, massive trade deals that blatantly went against American self-interest, and open borders and unlimited immigration that undermined national stability and the rule of law.
This party war goes straight to 1988 and the wake of the Reagan Revolution and its roaring success—demonstrating that constitutional conservatism and the so-called “professional” class of moderates and culturally effete Republicans could not really co-exist without the glue of a dynamic, charismatic leader.
One left power and the other moved into the cicada-like exoskeleton and pretended it was “conservatism.”
With a run of exceptionally weak presidential candidates (except for President Bush’s two razor-thin victories) the key indicator that the Republican Party had entered into open warfare with itself was evident after Newt Gingrich lost his grip on the Speakership of the House in 1999. The Party lurched from the activist model of the “Contract with America,” to the passive “Contract with the Chamber of Commerce” model that refocused attention away from ideas to maintaining the status quo, appeasing major donors, and attempting to placate the radicalized media, entertainment and Hollywood culture, itself anathema to so much of the voting public.
Finally, the eight years of the Obama Presidency – the most radical since Woodrow Wilson and which began an aggressive and unconstitutional transformation of the country – there could be no doubt that the party war had produced an enfeebled Republican Party that could not even mount a cogent verbal, much less legislative, counter attack.
By 2010, a terrified middle class revolted, followed by 2014 when the American public did everything they could to give Republicans the opportunity for stand tall for the besieged national interest. It didn’t work.
Now, as famed Professor Angelo Codevilla writes in Replacing the Republican Party (read here), we don’t need a third party, we already have a co-joined UniParty – we need a real second party.
“The Republican Party’s [recent] successes,” Professor Codevilla writes, [are] due to the American people’s desire not to be governed by a ruling class, headed by the Democratic Party.”
The elections of 2010 and 2014 were elections where hope overcame experience.
Over and over again, with limited exceptions, the Party at the national level (and too often at the state level) refuses to fight for the very ideas and the very causes that they were elected to champion. Even where there is a clear public consensus, more often than not, the Party professionals are more interested in being trendy, not right.
This, after all, is a Party that time and again cannot even manage to cut off federal funding of the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, eliminate the radical left’s taxpayer subsidized Public Broadcasting System, or stand up for allowing little girls and little boys to use separate bathrooms.
Why would we expect them to fight for anything larger, like the Presidency?
