The Tea Party and the GOP: a marriage that isn’t working

PING!

I can’t PING this one enough!

“We can’t continue wait another 24 years hoping for that uphill battle to have positive effects.”

You can start a major political party from scratch and have it compete with the two existing parties in less than 24 years — something that hasn’t happened since before the Civil War? If so, please go right ahead.

Conservatives have been able to get a few of their own elected within the GOP (West, Rand Paul and Rubio come to mind). It’s not much of a start, true, but is a start. Conservatives lack any kind of organization as it is. It would be easier if conservatives could organize to simply take over an existing party.

If some other conservative party pops up I will be glad to support it but they seem to be in short supply at the moment.

No politician will succeed by telling the truth - that socialism in America has to stop. They know they won’t get elected.

What marriage? There never was any marriage?

David Frum??? feh. If anything, the GOP is dead. Going back to doing things the way they’ve always been done IS the problem. The author is dense as a stone. After these primaries, I’m switching to Independent.

You’re right. Barron is no friend of ours. The Tea Party is great on cutting government. But libertines like Barron go out of their way to alienate the socially conservative wing of the party.

Libertarians fail to recognize that social conservatives like Catholic bishops are fighting in the trenches against ObamaCare. Although squishy on ObamaCare when it first passed, the bishops are now fiercely against the birth control mandate. But libertarians (crazed by promiscuous sex) are nowhere to be seen.

I agree. The death of the GOP has been coming on for some time, but the future fiscal problems of the US will make it clear that the GOP has no clue and no solutions.... and mark my word, people will be demanding solutions, not talk.

Because we’ve seen in Europe what happens when people try to talk fiscal problems to death. The fiscal problems refuse to die.

Numbers are like that. They can’t be nuanced away by erudition and limp-wristed prose. They have to be dealt with.

The GOP has only one chance to pull their head out of their nether regions now, and that’s to come up with credible plans for cutting spending - and these plans have to include cutting defense spending too. A trillion dollars per year of spending needs to be cut immediately in the first year of any credible plan. A half-trillion dollars needs to be cut from government spending the year after that, again, for the plan to be credible.

The Catholic Church is a large part of the reason why there is so much government spending in the first place. They’ve tried to have their cake and eat it too: they want welfare and poverty programs, but they don’t want to be told what to do.

The broke bread with socialists, now they get to do their bidding.

The bishops’ protests will go nowhere and do nothing, because the Church will continue to try to have their cake and eat it too. The only way the Church can exhibit any power is to preach a message of independence of government to their congregations and make the votes on which the Democratic Party have been able to county... go away. The Catholics don’t need to go out and vote Republican, but they need to stop voting Democratic.

That’s not about to happen. Ever.

So the Democratic Party will do whatever is necessary to get the bishops off their back for now, and they’ll come back with another bribe to the Church that makes the mandate go down more smoothly.

There is no such thing as a “social conservative” without fiscal conservatism. You can’t be in favor of the government respecting conservative social institutions and beliefs if you’re in favor of the government taking someone else’s property by force and spreading it around in the name of “social justice.”

FerociousRabbit said:

“Of the two choices, at least the uphill battle is one that can be won.”

Here, I think FR errs. It is possible to win an uphill battle.... if your enemy is only on the top of the hill.

Once you’re trying to fight both uphill and downhill... you don’t even have the option of falling back. And that’s where conservatives are now within the GOP: The opposition on the top of the hill are the liberals and free-spenders, and the GOP is stabbing us in the back.

There’s no way to take over the GOP from the inside. None. I think this election and the last one show that quite well. The way Bush was elected in 2000 wasn’t that he took over the GOP, it was that Bush brought in a whole organization from Texas with him. Bush effectively moved around the GOP hacks in DC by having such a large team in place before he started that the GOP couldn’t stop him.

Come 2008, however, we saw the first act of the GOP insiders vs. conservatives. The GOP insiders won.

This time, we’re seeing it again. And again, the GOP insiders are winning.

The only way to win now is to not play their game, on even on their turf. That’s what setting up a new party would do. The other thing that setting up a new party would do is what the marketing people call “branding.” There’s lots of idiots and hacks who can call themselves “Republican” and as long as conservatives persist in staying within the GOP, they have to put up with being lumped in with these idiots (like Romney and other RINO squishies) who call themselves Republicans as well.

Ah, but a new party could set up a whole new “brand” and insure that it stands for a small, tightly focused list of positions to which all candidates under the new party label MUST adhere. The party platform should allow no diversion on this small list of issues, so there is no “brand” dilution. The list could be as small as three issues:

1. Reduce federal spending.
2. Simplify taxation, everyone has to pay *something*.
3. Reduce regulations and intrusion of the federal government.

If a new party were formed that enforced discipline upon it’s members on those three issues (eg, any member of the party in congress who sponsors or votes for legislation that violates these principles is kicked out of the party, has to return campaign funds, etc), it would have more success than “conventional wisdom” predicts.

Well said. I hope the bishops have seen the light with the birth control issue. You break bread with socialists and you lose your soul.

Fortunately, weekly church-going Catholics tend to vote more conservative (McCain and Bush). We need a revitalization of the church itself, increasing church participation and enthusiasm. As you say, bishops should preach independence from the modern empire of big government. Just as early Christians sought freedom from the Roman Empire.