Where Do Republicans Really Go From Here?

It becomes clearer and clearer every day that the Republican Party is locked in an internal conflict whose resolution, if that can ever really happen, will determine, not only the future success of the party, but also its impact on safeguarding what is left of the principles on which we have been governed and the rules of decency affecting how we relate to each other as Americans.  Our democracy is a republic, with checks and balances and constitutional limits on federal intrusion into our lives.  Our forefathers were well aware that democracy begins to fail when the foxes gain entry to the henhouse; that is, when a mass of uneducated voters, who take, but do not give, begin to control the public treasury.

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When this same mass of uneducated and ignorant people also determine the social standards by which we live, through their support of ever more salacious and violent television programs and movies, something our forefathers could not have foreseen, a decent society begins to crumble.  (Liberals who continue to maintain that the entertainment media have no impact on children, and any restrictions interfere with their ‘rights’, are now loudly complaining about the children who hung themselves after watching the Saddam videos.)

 

In the Republican Party we have people who are traditional and conservative and want the party to defend these values, and we have people who believe that they cannot win election unless they at least pretend to be liberals.  We tend to call them ‘moderates’ if their approach seems pragmatic, rather than principled or even partisan.  We also have people who are clearly liberals, even though they are declared Republicans.  We use the term, RINO, to describe them (Republicans in Name Only).  The loss of Congress in November, 2006 has exacerbated the conflict between those who say that we lost because we abandoned our conservative roots and those who say that the country is moving left, and we must move left with them.  In my view, when you take into account the unpopularity of the Iraq War, the ineffectiveness and perceived corruption of Congressional Republicans, and combine it with the fact that this was an election in the off-year in the sixth year of Bush’s term, the number of seats lost seems quite low compared to historical averages.  Another important point is the large number of Democrats who won seats by running on conservative platforms.

 

On illegal immigration, on McCain-Feingold and on education policy, our president has clearly shown that he governs as a moderate conservative – either by choice or by perceived necessity.  These positions have angered and turned off many conservatives without gaining, in my view, a single liberal convert, and when you consider the poll numbers indicating large-scale opposition to abortion-on-demand and to same sex marriage, it is clear to me that Republicans should move right and stay right.  Since conservatives are also much more disposed to safeguarding traditional values than are liberals, going right is not only the smart thing to do, it is the ‘right’ thing to do.

 Let’s not have any more of the kind of nonsense we saw in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Rhode Island last year, with the Republican National Committee supporting that extreme liberal twit, Lincoln Chaffee, with ads and money, against a popular conservative mayor (Steve Laffey) in the Republican senatorial primary.  It succeeded in destroying Laffey, but it didn’t save the Republican seat.  If you are going to go down, go down fighting.