The GOP and the Tea Parties

June 10, 2010

The establishment media is at it again, calling the winners of yesterday’s primaries “Tea Party candidates.”

As Fox News more correctly described Sharon Angle, though, “she’s a staunch conservative Republican state assemblywoman.” Much as the media is trying to paint the Tea Party movement as a political party, it remains a movement and a movement that does not even agree on whether they should endorse candidates or not. Yet the results of Tuesday’s elections show that Tea Party support has been very helpful for conservative candidates.

And by the way: as I’ve been saying to friends for a while now, aren’t our conservative women just awesome? I don’t mean just the candidates who won last night, but also the ones who have worked tirelessly behind the scenes in the liberty movement. Brava! You are an inspiration to me.

So is there a real distinction between a “Republican” candidate and a “Tea Party” candidate? I think the answer is both yes and no: the real distinction that liberty activists are making is in the values of the candidates. They support political novices like Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina in California and Dan Maes in Colorado who are businesspeople and Rand Paul in Kentucky who is a doctor. This is the kind of diversity we need in Congress where the vast majority of both parties are lawyers and professional politicians.

They also support experienced politicians with conservative track records like Ken Buck in Colorado and Marco Rubio in Florida. Party affiliation and experience are less important to liberty activists than conservative, constitutional values. I expect we’d support a conservative Democrat if there was one; SEIU is busy purging even moderates from the party in places like North Carolina. It is values that count, not parties.

What seems to be taking shape in American politics is that the two existing parties are becoming ideological parties, something they’ve never been before. They used to be “big tent” parties, but now the Democrats at 34% (a historic low) and Republicans at 31% are balanced by the third of the voters who are independent. The Democrats are left with their Marxist-socialist base, and the GOP is becoming more conservative-libertarian.

This realignment, if it holds, will be historic. It is almost complete on the Democrat side. On the GOP side, the party faithful and the Tea party activists seem to me to be in an uneasy alliance. Many of the Old Guard don’t quite know what to make of the newcomers; some conservative activists welcome the reinforcements and have, in fact, been the newcomers’ best allies. For our part, the Young Guard (to continue the Napoleonic reference) are wary of establishment Republicans. This is just my observation in Colorado; as each state party is independent, it may well be different elsewhere.

Perhaps that wariness is wise. Neither the Tea parties nor the independents nor even disaffected Democrats want to associate with the failed progressive policies of either party. This year, progressivism is leaving the Republican party. Don’t tell the RNC, but a new Grand Old Party is being formed.

3 responses

donincolorado

June 10, 2010

Right on Al.

Reply
Snaggle-Tooth Jones

June 11, 2010

“Don’t tell the RNC, but a new Grand Old Party is being formed.”

Well, one can only hope. But I for one am awaiting the day this new conservative party jettisons the name “Republican” altogether and adopts a new name (something that I believe has happened before in the history of American political parties). For it was the Republican Party that destroyed the old federalist balance between the States and the Federal government back in the 1860s and 1870s, radically moving the nation toward centralization. That only paved the way for future consolidations of power by the District of Corruption. As fusioninst political philosopher Frank Meyer correctly put it:

“Were it not for the wounds that Lincoln inflicted upon the Constitution, it would have been infinitely more difficult for Franklin Roosevelt to carry through his revolution, for the coercive welfare state to come into being and bring about the conditions against which we are fighting today.”

I therefore don’t know why being the “Party of Lincoln” should be any claim to fame. Oh, because the GOP “ended slavery”? Slavery would have been ended in any case, without war, just as it was virtually every other place it existed in the world. And the original federalist balance would have likely remained intact.

So, let’s boot the “Grand Old Party”, just like we booted the Federalists and the Whigs, and get down to the business of just how we restore the original American vision of smaller-scale republicanism, constitutionalism and individual rights.

Snaggle-Tooth Jones, The Colorado Confederatarian

Reply
acmaurerco

June 11, 2010

I hear you. The most important thing this year is to plug the hole in the dike. I don’t much care what the party is called, but since we aim to restore a constitutional Republic, the name “Republican” seems fitting.

Maybe we replace the elephant with something quintessentially American, like the buffalo.

Reply

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