Is It Time To Take Back The GOP?

Is It Time To Take Back The GOP?

Ronald Reagan once said, “I didn’t leave the Democrat Party, the Democrat Party left me.”  These days, millions of conservatives around the country feel the same way about a Republican Party who is obviously hell-bent on not only abandoning their own platform, but every founding principle of what use to be our Constitutional Republic.

 Opinion

By de Andréa

July 10, 2013

Recently on Fox News, conservative rock star and vice presidential candidate, Governor Sarah Palin channeled that same frustration when she said:

“I love the name of that party – ‘The Freedom Party.’  And if the GOP continues to back away from the planks in our platform, from the principles that built this party of Lincoln and Reagan, then yeah, more and more of us are going to start saying, ‘You know… what’s wrong with being independent,’ kind of with that libertarian streak that much of us have.  In other words, we want government to back off and not infringe upon our rights.  I think there will be a lot of us who start saying ‘GOP, if you abandon us, we have nowhere else to go except to become more independent and not enlisted in a one or the other private majority parties that rule in our nation, either a Democrat or a Republican.’  Remember these are private parties, and you know, no one forces us to be enlisted in either party”.

Whenever I’m asked about this, and I’m asked about this a lot, I usually say, “I’d like to try to restore the GOP before thinking about creating a third one.”  After all before Lincoln it was called the Wig Party.

Venting frustration is one thing.  Acting upon it is entirely another problem.  When we’re frustrated, there are plenty of things we can justify as a response, but many of those things aren’t necessarily prudent or productive.  That’s why we have the saying “cooler heads prevail.”  On the other hand, there is certainly a time and place to fashion a whip of cords or grab the jawbone of an ass and give ‘em hell!

This month we commemorated the anniversary of our Founding Fathers declaring their independence from the British Crown, and they did this without exactly knowing what would happen next.

There are obvious problems with starting a third party such as time money and then the simple fact that it would, at first anyway, siphon off votes from the GOP and give them to the Democrats.  This was tried by Ross Parot in 1992 and we got Clinton.  His independent party affiliation developed into the Reform Party in 1996

With the light of liberty now barely a flicker and the darkness of communism and Islam breaking down our door, it may be the absolute worst use of time for conservatives to start a new party.  It would be essentially starting over to form a 3rd Party movement that may take decades to realize.  Given how much freedom, liberty, and morality we’ve lost already, our Constitutional Republic doesn’t have decades, we may not even have 5 more years.  We need to do as much good as we can, and we need to do it right now.

Loyalty to the Republican Party has done nothing to squelch our slouch towards Gomorrah or statism.  We’ve wasted years as it propped up neo-statists and gutless RINOs, with little to nothing to show for it.  Instead of wasting more time on the rotting corpse that is the GOP, better to get to work now on what will inevitably take its place.  Short-term thinking is what got us here in the first place.

The Republican Party’s ruling class is already conspiring with the Democrats to grow government, despite our presence.  Just this year they passed the largest tax increase in 20 years, for example.  At least if we’re no longer covering for these sellouts we can recover some integrity lost by associating with the tarnished GOP brand and perhaps have an honest conversation with the American people about where we’re headed for once.  By forming a 3rd Party, we would become de facto independents, and instead of being taken for granted we become a crucial swing vote, but still it would be a crap shoot.

There are days when the idea of bolting from the GOP sounds great, but it may not be feasible in many ways.  The two most viable right-of-center 3rd Parties — the Libertarian and Constitution Parties still don’t have consistent ballot access in all 50 states.  Good luck recruiting candidates without ballot access, good luck raising money without candidates, and good luck moving ones agenda without money.  The reality is the two dominant parties have made this kind of effort almost impossible without an unprecedented fundraising/legal effort to build up to it.  I don’t like it.  I wish that weren’t the case, but it is what it is.

One must however realize that this was the same argument used against our Founding Fathers when they wanted to declare their independence.  If there’s anything American history has taught us, it’s that when we step out on faith and principle, providence handles the rest.  One great way to ignite such an effort is to recruit leaders with charisma, vision, and integrity to lead the way in inspiring others to act on the courage of their convictions.  Maybe some of those leaders will emerge if we step out on faith.  Founding Fathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson became the men we know them as today because they rose fearlessly to the occasion when history needed them. 

THE BOTTOM LINE:  Most of us would agree that the party is broken, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water here.  The brokenness of the GOP reflects the cultural brokenness of the times in which we live.  All private organizations are only as good as the people inhabiting them.  Any new organization will eventually develop the same problems that the GOP has now.  You can’t expect a political party to have more moral purity than the culture it comes from. 

Still, something needs to be done.  But instead of reinventing the wheel, why not encourage members of the Constitution and Libertarian Parties to infiltrate the GOP?  Many local and state Republican Party organizations across the country are in dire need of people.  Who says those people can’t be people of principle?  Let’s redo the GOP by infiltration; it’s what the so-called progressives already did to the Democratic Party.  It is what the Muslims are doing to America, changing it from within.  There’s no reason we can’t overrun the party’s infrastructure and put our own people in there.

As I said, you can’t expect a private organization to be more righteous than the culture, but that actually proves my point.  We are aligned with people who don’t share our moral value system and have proven they will do things to beat us that they would never do to Democrats.  And they’ll even use Fox News and other “conservative media” to do it. 

The time, talent, and treasure wasted on just trying to reform the GOP is like trying to funnel foreign aid for the hungry through a corrupt local warlord, it just ends up in his pocket.  It must be infiltrated from the bottom and changed from the top.  If we could convince and enlist the members of the Tea Party, the Constitutional Party the Independent Party and the Libertarian Parties to join the GOP It would be overwhelmed with some of the principals and philosophies of freedom and liberty it once had. 

Let’s face it, if we fail to act and do nothing, this whole debate will soon be moot, because the party bosses are in the process of betraying us.  Thus the longer we wait, the harder it will be to do what we’ll eventually have to go ahead and do anyway. 

Thanks for listening – de Andréa

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