Spend any time with the Republican Party and one realizes fairly quickly that the main thing holding it together is its opposition to the lunacy of the Democratic Left, and that we need some sort of political realignment to save the country.
Born amidst the collapse of the economic protectionist Whig Party in pre-Civil War America, the Republican Party tasked itself with saving the Union and destroying the secessionist South. The Republican forbearers were the original Federalists, such as John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, who believed in a strong national government to unite the States.
By waging the Civil War, Republican President Abraham Lincoln, who happened to be a reluctant abolitionist, concurrently freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation. It is little remembered that ending slavery was a consequence of the Civil War, and not originally its cause. Strikingly, the Republican Party in 1865, therefore, succeeded in ending America’s “original sin,” the institution of slavery. Fast forward 100 years, the GOP righted a second wrong by providing the necessary votes and moral clarity to extend Civil Rights to blacks in the Segregationist South after the Second World War. It is a cruel irony that Black America, which votes about 90 percent Democrat, mostly loathes and distrusts the Republican Party and shows little gratitude for its two overarching achievements.
Today, the Republican Party resembles the old Soviet Union: seemingly powerful with an arsenal of nuclear weapons, but eventually toppled without a shot fired, by a man, Boris Yeltsin, standing atop a tank and sending out faxes. The Republican Party today holds positions of leadership and influence, but underneath it is a seething cauldron of intrigue that diminishes its effectiveness.
The personification of the GOP’s distress was and is the presidency of George W. Bush, who ran as a conservative, but then governed as an establishment Republican. Bush promulgated something called compassionate conservatism, which we all thought was some sort of campaign slogan. Instead of getting government out of our lives, he and the late Ted Kennedy passed, for example, the onerous “No Child Left Behind” education law. Bush’s Medicare prescription drug benefit was a solution looking for a problem. Let’s also remember that out-of-control federal spending that has skyrocketed under President Obama, began under George W. Bush, who never vetoed one fiscal bill while in office.
Not to completely bash Bush, but it was his eight years in office that paved the way for the massive assault on the American Way of Life under President Obama. Bush’s presidency produced the ruinous 2006 and 2008 Democratic landslides as disillusioned conservatives stayed home on Election Day. Only the Tea Party Resistance Movement has saved the United States from utter extinction under President Obama.
Into this morass and pit of fear stand the “business-as-usual” (socially Liberal) Republicans who long for the halcyon days of yore when they ran the GOP. Those wonderful years include the Republicans being the minority party in Congress for 40 years from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan. Those were the good old days to them, before the great unwashed stormed the gates during the 1980s and took the party away from them. These Republican Elites are truly very comfortable losing elections rather than have the conservative movement triumph.
That’s part of the reason that Peggy Noonan’s column in the Wall Street Journal every Saturday morning is a must read. A former speech writer to George H.W. Bush, Noonan is an oracle into the GOP Establishment mindset. She regularly “quotes” “unnamed” “veteran Republican hands,” those bearers of everything wise, when she wants to make a point about today’s intra-party battles. These wonderful “swells” don’t like Romney, they don’t like Gingrich, they don’t like this one, they don’t like that one, they don’t like, they don’t like, they don’t like. My favorite recent unnamed source “reported” that “everyone’s waiting for Jeb.” That’s right, according to Noonan, the Republican Establishment wants King George III, this time though his name is Jeb Bush, the former Governor of Florida.
The Republican Party owns two wings: one accommodating to President Obama’s progressive agenda, and the other, the majority wing, conservative, which venerates liberty, limited government, and the rule of law and not the rule of men. An example of this difference can be found on Obama’s inauguration day, when Peggy Noonan, wrote how it was such a marvelous day for America to see the fruits of racial reconciliation among other blather. While on the same day, conservatives gasped in horror that someone who could call for the transformation of the United States into a socialist utopia could actually get elected.
The only rational conclusion that one can draw from the last six years is that the Republican Party is not up to the challenge of rolling back the Entitlement Society, and stopping the disastrous overreach of the federal government, which has about a 150-year head start. Watch Greece, because it is the canary in the coal mine for seeing what will happen to a country whose debt is out of control, has high unemployment, and a contracting economy.
The issue for the 21st Century for the United States is stopping the Statist agenda and restoring the vision of the Founders. The vision of the Founders is that an informed, divine-providence fearing people, can govern itself, and finds abhorrent a comment from President Obama that “only government” can bring to bear the resources to fix the economy, much less anything.
What type of country will America be in the 21st Century? That’s the question. Yes, there are legitimate concerns about the spending, moral decline, national defense, and health care, and education, and a host of other things, but those all fall under the rubric of what kind of country are we going to have in the 21st Century, and so far, the Republican Party seems incapable of finding a presidential candidate who can articulate that vision well enough to win a national election against President Obama. That may be the reason, interestingly, that the participation levels in the Republican Party primaries have been so low. While the country growingly ignores Obama, with his State of the Union message garnering fewer viewers each year that he has been in office, the Republicans produce no compelling message of their own and generate little trust from a skeptical electorate.
Without going as far as saying that the wrong side won the Civil War, the unfortunate side effect of the North’s victory was the establishment of unlimited federal power that subdued the South, but eventually led to the federal government interfering into nearly every aspect of the life of the American people, from commerce to health care.
A central precept of the American Experiment remains that the government that governs least governs best and that government should be as close as local as possible to the people governed. This was a central tenet of the American Revolution that the laws affecting the Colonies should be made by the colonists, and not the English Parliament across the Atlantic Ocean.
Now we have the same tyranny from Washington, whether from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the National Labor Relations Board or even the federal courts. Washington’s will to rule and desire to exclude itself from the laws it passes, stems from the federal power unleashed in the Civil War.
While everyone keeps focusing on November 2012, the real challenge is to create a party that can defeat the Obama, Statist agenda. When I next write on this topic, I’ll present a party agenda that can actually win elections and succeed in saving the country.
