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There has been a great deal of discussion over the last week concerning the remarks made by Governor Palin in answer to a question from Josh Pa..., regarding the possibility of a new party to supplant the GOP.
As Steve Deace covers in his own cost/benefit analysis of the idea, there are a few practical considerations to leaving the Republican Party that make for a gargantuan series of problems, including effectively surrendering the whole governance of the country to the Democrats in the short run.
As Deace also explains quite effectively, if we don't change the direction of the country, it won't matter much because with the current supine and tepid leadership of the GOP, we have arrived already in that effective condition. What opposition to the
Obama agenda do conservatives see from the GOP? There has been little evident among establishment Republicans, often behaving more like collaborators than opponents. This conflict has been a long time in coming, but I believe we must face it squarely or surrender to statism. If we are going to conquer our political foes, we must clean up our own house, refusing to abandon it to the slumlords of the GOP establishment.
For once, let us do the unexpected, turning tables on them: We must build a party within the Party as the means by which to take it over, but this time, for keeps.
Ever since the days of the progressive era, there has been a class of Republicans the members of which don’t hold republican ideals. Their manner of coming to dominate the GOP was a form of stealthy infiltration and guile. They looked like conservatives, and they used many of the appropriate conservative buzzwords in speeches and articles, so that it was somewhat harder to recognize them. They gained influence by building their own parallel mechanisms within the Republican Party, all aimed at supplanting
conservative ideology and philosophy with their own. Cronies were inserted all up and down the Republican totem pole, giving them vast power with which to override any conservative sentiments. Time after time, they managed to keep conservatives out, and the few times they failed, they almost always managed to sabotage them somehow.
When Barry Goldwater(R-AZ) sought the Republican nomination in 1964, they submarined him, the Rockefeller Republicans withdrawing virtually all support, barely managing to pretend they would support Barry Goldwater.
In 1980, the same crowd finally lost another round of the RNC nomination fight, having nearly lost it four years earlier. Ronald Reagan wasn't getting much establishment support early on, even immediately after the nominating convention, but when they saw that the train was going to leave the station without them, they hurried to climb aboard, pointing to moderate VP choice George HW Bush as the thing that made Reagan “tolerable.”
The truth is, they saw Reagan as a plausible vehicle to install their own people at the highest levels of government, for later use, but also as a way to confound and steer the Reagan administration. America would have its first conservative president in generations, but the establishment Republicans were going to use every bit of influence they could to turn it to their advantage. They did this as they always do, establishing their own chain of cooperation and control within the Reagan administration.
The amnesty bill of 1986 was probably the greatest evidence of their scheming, a bill that contributed to the loss of Republican control of the Senate that year by depressing conservative turnout, much as what happened in 2006 when Republicans lost the Congress after that year’s amnesty attempt.
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