Go Galt, or go to #WAR?
We can tell there is a lot of disappointment out there with the current state of the GOP and its leadership. Yesterday’s vote to give the weepy orange one another two years put the cherry on top of that manure sundae. (“There’s no crying in capitulation!” — h/t Dennis Miller)
There are two schools of thought out there about how to go forward from here. One faction likes the idea of Going Galt — dropping out of the GOP altogether. Stop giving them your money and your time and your vote. Let them wither on the vine.
I spoke recently with some activists who are working statewide — and trying to go nationwide — with the concept of getting 20 percent of registered Republicans to go unaffiliated. Personally, I think the establishment would LOOOOOOOOOOVE that. They would no longer have to associate with *embarassing riff-raff* like you and me. They don’t need our money:
From a Dec. 6 speech by Ed Gillespie at the Republican Party of Virginia’s annual meeting in Chantilly, Va.; the former Republican National Committee chairman was the GOP’s 2014 U.S. Senate candidate from the state:
We can see an influence economy starting to take shape. CEOs are becoming less concerned about inventing the right products, targeting the right markets and hiring the right people in hopes of making a respectable profit for investors—and more concerned about getting the right lobbyists, retaining the right lawyers and attending the right fundraisers in hopes of getting a hefty subsidy from taxpayers.
Making the right campaign contributions are becoming as important to a company as its research and development budget, and federal-compliance lawyers will soon outnumber patent lawyers.
Fully implemented, Obama ’s influence economy will be one where ordinary Americans must get permission from a government agency or department before they can buy, build, invest or hire. It’s an economy rooted in mandates and waivers, tax credits and targeted subsidies, Federal grants and government loan guarantees.
Can you get the Department of Justice to file a suit against your competitor? Can you get the NLRB to compel workers to pay dues to your union? Can you get the Department of Energy to guarantee your loan? Can you get the HHS to mandate that consumers buy your product?
It’s an America where Washington limits our choices, constrains our decisions, controls our behavior and manages our lives. Where more and more regulations are vigorously enforced by an executive branch that recognizes fewer and fewer limits on its authority, because this president disdains the checks and balances of two branches of government our Founders created as equal but he sees as inconsequential.
Why would you worry about my $250 when you can get tens of thousands from movie studio execs and their families after you publicly promise to keep film subsidies alive? Just going away gives the establishment toadies exactly what they want.
There is th
e third party option. New Yorkers have had some success with The Conservative Party. They got their nominee elected to the US Senate in 1970. They’ve had candidates elected to lower-level offices as well, and have been able to greatly influence GOP campaigns across the state. To get on a statewide ballot in 2016, you would need to collect 89,366 signatures of registered North Carolina voters ( two percent of the last vote cast for governor). For a lower-level district wide race, you would need signatures of at least 4 percent of all registered voters in the district.
#WAR. One of my heroes and contemporaries — the late great Andrew Breitbart — described the situation as not simply a struggle between Rs and Ds, but a full-blown WAR between progressivism and freedom. We’ve got Republicans AND Democrats teaming up to give us bank and industry bailouts, ObamaCare, amnesty and a perpetually expanding welfare state.
Some people respond to this with hand-wringing, and a little noise. You might tick off a few folks on the other side. You might get a little publiclty. But, things die down after a while, and the leviathan keeps churning forward. 
Like Andrew, I believe we need to confront the things that frustrate us and jeopardize the future of our country and our culture a lot like military commanders approach war. Identify your specific targets. Start Small. If you want to save / change the Republican Party, you need to start at your precinct. Those meetings — in North Carolina — start in February. Find out when and where yours is. Organize a bunch of like-minded friends and take that sucker over (peacefully, by voting, of course). Once you nail down your precinct, turn your sights on the county organization. Once you’re successful there, go to the state,
Soften up your targets. Military leaders do this with artillery and aircraft. In this case, you do it with cold, hard facts. Most people out there don’t know who John Boehner is or why he needs to be fired. Do some research. Educate your friends and neighbors about how higher taxes and increased spending and perpetual borrowing are killing our economy and threatening our survival. Read this blog and others like it out there. Share the info with your friends. Start a blog. (You’re not going to get the truth from the so-called mainstream media (or what we refer to as “the drive-by media”.) Approach this like a prosecutor trying to convict a suspect in court. Your friends and neighbors are the jury you need to convince to come back with a decision that puts the fear of God in the political class.
Don’t get me wrong — THIS is hard work. But it has been done before. In the early 1960s, conservatives were saying the same things we are saying now about the GOP establishment. A that time, the two major parties were merely opposing teams competing over who got to control our lives and our money. It was like Duke vs. Carolina, or Boston vs. New York. Two different teams with no real differences other than geography and uniform colors. Conservatives organized and rallied behind Barry Goldwater. They took it directly to the RINOs and their champion Nelson Rockefeller. This led to a bloody presidential primary fight in 1964 with Goldwater upsetting Rockefeller in the primary but losing badly in the general to LBJ. (Of course, the RINOs — being the gracious losers they are — ran to the arms of LBJ after the primary.) That race saw the rise of former actor Ronald Reagan as a leader of the Republican right. 
It is arguable that t964 forced the Nixon campaign to the right in 1968 and 1972. Here in North Carolina, we elected a former TV commentator named Jesse Helms to the US Senate in 1972.
In 1976, Helms teamed up with Reagan to put quite a scare into Gerald Ford in the presidential primaries. (Reagan WON North Carolina.) Of course, we all know that 1980 finally brought us what we wanted.
If you truly want to save the GOP, you can’t hold your nose and hope things will get better. You have to go to war like conservatives did in 1964, 1976 and 1980. It’s hard, stressful work. You might lose some “friends,” some perks or committee assignments. But if you truly care about your party, your state, and your country, that should not matter.
1980 brought you what you wanted? The Reagan presidency which greatly increased the size of the Federal government and gave illegal immigrants amnesty. How about that.
The Simpson-Mazzoli bill in 1986 that gave amnesty was not a Reagan proposal. It came out of Congress. According to one of President Reagan’s closest advisers (who later reversed his statement under pressure from the amnesty special interests) revealed that Reagan considered signing Simpson-Mazzoli as one of the worst mistakes of his presidency.
Hmmm, sounds a lot like revisionist history to me.
Those who suggest getting conservatives to re-register as Unaffiliated are reacting emotionally instead of rationally. To change things, we need to get conservatives elected, and to do that, conservatives need to have a viable vehicle to recruit and support conservative candidates. Nothing like that exists for independent or unaffiliated conservatives even in beginning stages.
The only vehicle out there right now to support candidates are the established parties. The best way to use them for conservative candidates is to get solid people elected to the leadership positions. That makes winning primaries easier.
Creating a viable new party is not easy. A split in an existing party would be the best route, as a significant part of the existing infrastructure could move over, and the actions of Boehner and McConnell in their war on conservatives may push things to that point, but it may not. To create a viable national new party would take a coordinated effort by a lot of major conservative leaders to achieve the critical mass, and that does not seem to be on the horizon right now. Again, Boehner and McConnell, in their drive to buddy up to Obama and the special interests may push things to that point, but they may not.
If one were serious about the Unaffiliated route, the very first thing to do would be to organize a support structure for conservative candidates running as Unaffiliated. Without that critical piece, urging conservative voters to re-register as Unaffiliated is just foolishness and highly counterproductive. It may have a feel good factor, as Boehner and McConnell have hardly endeared the GOP to conservatives, but that is all it does. It offers no chances of winning.
Right now, trying to build more conservative influence within the Republican Party is the only game in town that offers any possibilities of success. It will take work but it is doable.
The problem is there is no real leadership among the Conservatives. The effort to unseat Obamas lapdog Boehner didn’t sputter to life until this past weekend.
And taking over the NCGOP? Good luck with that. The Progressives make the rules. In state after state they’ve done anything and everything to retain power. They turned out the lights and left when it was clear they would lose the 2012 Nevada state convention. When they lost in Alaska they took the money out of the state party account and left the new leadership with nothing.
If you take over the NCGOP then scorched Earth is what you’ll get because Conservatives are the enemy of the NCGOP.
As long as the GOP is the only game in town, get used to the results we have been getting. Folks, we’re dealing with a criminal establishment, not a debating society.
20% indepe ndent, we’re already at 27% and part of the plan is the development of a support structure.
Petition requirements can be lowered and individual races, based on grassroots public education does have a history of success. How can supposedly conservative, limited-government individualists have so little faith in the power and influence of the individual? Remember Dave Brat? You groupies are more interested in the social connections rather than a little hard work. I cringe every time a conservative tells me that my future is in belonging to a group like the GOP and playing games with Robert!s Rules of ORDER.
The Dave Brat race was a great victory IN A REPUBLICAN PRIMARY.
The support structure is really a first step if you are intending to build a conservative Unaffiliated / Independent political base. You also have to consider that the majority of those re-registering Unaffiliated are moderate liberal Democrats, not conservative Republicans.
In the last election, there were all sorts of tempting targets for independent conservatives. The top targets would be RINOs running unopposed like Congressman Pittenger, State Rep. Skip Stam and many others. How many of those had conservative independent opposition? None. Then there were the races where both candidates of the major parties really made you want to throw up like the 2nd Congressional district. How many of these had conservative independent opposition? Zero.
It seems like you and your cohorts have a lot of work to do, Marm, before you have a leg to stand on to ask conservatives to re-register as Unaffiliated.
Back in the 80’s, my county party was conservative and inclusive. Over time, people became comfortable, and complacent. This lead to fewer, and fewer people showing up for precinct meetings, and therefore , county conventions. While the conservatives were asleep, the RINOs took over. These were the dark years for the conservatives that continued to show up. It was maddening, frustrating, and enough to cause one to take their ball and go home. A few of us did, but a small , tireless , minority stayed and doubled down. It didn’t happen over night, but we took our county party back. Make no mistake, it was war. I’ve the scars to prove it. My point, decisions are made by those who show up. Whether a precinct meeting, a county, district, or state convention, or a primary, if you don’t show, you won’t be heard. We’re not just talking about one meeting, convention, or primary. We have to keep going back. Good, or bad, we have to stay the coarse. If you can’t do this, how the hell do you expect to start a whole new, viable party.
And Marm, Robert’s Rules of Order can’t vote.