On October 25, 2008 I gave a speech in Snohomish, Washington based on the outcome of the National Election that was held ten days later. Earlier today (6/24/2010) the commenter “Issues Count” posed, in a long and scholarly fashion, the question that speech was meant to answer.
“Issues” asked:
What should the Tea Party become? Should they try and form a third party from disenfranchised Republicans, conservatives, and people turned off by “business as usual”? Should they try to apply their muscle to races of their choosing, getting candidates with their beliefs through primaries? Or should they try and gain control of the Republican Party from the left’elist establishment?
And “Issues Count” went on to recite some very valuable history, HERE
As it happens, that question, his question, the one the speech addresses, goes directly to the passion of my heart, the focus of my waking hours for the last six years and the original purpose of the Reagan Wing. So, for what it’s worth, here are the pertinent excerpts (beginning somewhere in the middle) from the speech I gave almost two years ago about the efforts we were, at that time, initiating in establishing the GOP Liberty Assembly:
We are the Republican wing of the Liberty Movement, not non-partisan, and our first goal is to clean up the corruption and breathe new life into the Washington State Republican Party.
The Freedom/Conservative/Constitutionalist Movement in Washington State has failed, for 50 years, politically, because we have never had a political party. We need a political party, that works for our goals, to succeed. No single-issue movement can generate the strength necessary to change the course of government.
Not the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, not the Right to Life, not the desire for lower taxes, saving education, stopping illegal immigration, not the demand for adherence to the Constitution.
Only a political party, that can combine whole coalitions of movements, can achieve what is necessary to save America. Only a political party can pass a whole legislative agenda. And that is precisely what is needed. We need to alter vast panoramas of political idiocy. We need to break chains. We need the complex synergism of multiple operations on a multiplicity of issues, united by common ideals.
For various reasons, political reality, right now, is that this has to be the Republican Party. But the Republican Party has to change. How difficult is that?
One of my readers on TheReaganWing.Com recently said:
“Nothing but a total collapse and reconstruction of the republican party will return it to it’s true conservative roots.”
But that collapse has already happened. It just isn’t visible yet. The bottom has dropped out of the GOP, ethically and ideologically. The Washington State Party is so morally bankrupt they operate in continual violation of their own rules, and State law and their primary objective is to PREVENT grassroots activism in the cause of freedom.
In King County and Thurston and Pacific and Lewis and Wahkiakum and Cowlitz and Skamania and Clark County they’ve begun to work to keep Democrats elected. State by State in 2008, the RNC engineered a calculated implosion of its own convention process so egregious that only a complete Watergate-style cover-up in the National Credentials Committee, and police state tactics on the Convention Floor, aided and facilitated by the Mainstream Media, avoided a public meltdown. All this was to assure us the worst Republican Nominee since Gerald Ford.
The GOP is already ruined. It is a Dead Man Walking. The Party is zombie-like, ruled by gangsters attempting to impersonate Christians. They are cadaver-like in the attempt, ghastly, a horror.
It cannot be long before the body politic of the GOP, in free-fall, hits pavement. The crisis in under way, it is, by its current path, by the kinetic momentum, predetermined. The only question is how we will find the posture of the corpse, how widely spattered its blood. Did anyone notice the election results of 2006?
It remains for patriots, cognizant of our extremity, to begin to rebuild. Not in six months or two years but NOW. We must be ready with the answers.
We must build a political Party in anticipation of the general public’s panic and cry to save them from the administration they elected on November 4th: Their cry in 1980, their cry in 1994.
We build it here, within the perimeter of Washington and Jefferson and Sam Adams, within this hollowed-out shell of a political party. It is, after all, ours. We are not the ones who seized control by lies. We are not the ones who ruled by despotism or held power by fraud. We are not the ones who steered the Party to it own destruction. We were called here, to build, by Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan and Pope John Paul II and Wm. F. Buckley and Ron Paul and the Father of Lights.
The world awaits a generation that is undeterred by social convention, that is not psychologically disarmed, that’s willing to ignore immobile leadership.
The World awaits a Generation that will stand in the gap, that will build the waste places: and raise up the age-old foundations, to restore our lost liberties.
Will you be that generation? Is this the beginning of the Revolution? Will you restore our once-great nation? Will you set aside some of your time, a couple days a year, on an ongoing basis, to multiply the Revolution? Will you restore the Constitution? Will you be that generation? Is this the beginning of the Revolution?
This is the second American Revolution. We will restore the Constitution. We will be that generation.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken
A light from the shadows shall spring
Renewed shall be blade that was broken
The crownless again shall be King.
And this post is, I believe, to the same point, but with a different focus and detail:
Where to join the New Political Party
UPDATE: At the behest of another Reagan Winger I’ll point out that significant portions of this speech replicate remarks from the earlier speech on May, 30 of that year to the evening rally in Riverside Park of Ron Paul delegates after the first day of the two day State Convention. That speech is on youtube, by various videographers, here: http://www.google.com/search?q=Youtube+%22That+generation%22+doug+parris&hl=en&safe=off&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&rlz=1I7ADSA_en&prmd=v&source=univ&tbs=vid:1&tbo=u&ei=wRUkTJHLJcn6nAfepqCSDQ&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CBsQqwQwAA
Doug you are so right. Morton Blackwell, one of the greatest minds and best strategist of the conservative movement agrees with you. Single issue groups can not win at alone. A great read is by Richard Viguire, “The New Right, We’re Ready to Lead” spells out what you just said. The single issue causes need to be united in an organization with a common cause and that organization has to be the Republican Party. Viguire was a strong Reaganite. One thing Viguire said is is that in the new Republican Party our candidates and office holders need to shake their dependence from business money. He called big business “whores” who only want to buy access and have no interest in conservative values. During the Reagan years the GOP walloped the Democrats in small donations and it was the Democrats who depended on big donations. This new GOP will need to build a fund raising base from patriots, not from establishment types.
Our history shows us that what you say is correct, We need a vehicle to rain control and that vehicle is an established political party. The only viable party is the GOP. The GOP is dead as you said. The current GOP National Chairman blamed Republican losses in 2008 because the GOP was “too close” to Christian fundamentalists and gun owners. Steele is the worst establishment guy there is. He grew up in the Beltway area and lived as a Beltway insider. He is anti-gun as a Democrat.
Thank you for the article and kind words.
Government only has two powers, the sword and the purse, it has always used them together, first the sword to plunder the people of their property (taxes & regulation) once they have the booty/ taxes they buy more swords and steal more taxes and so on and so forth again and again, even starting unjust wars of aggression to aid in collecting more taxes.
We established however some, although not all its [self-government] important principles. The constitutions of most of our States assert, that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves, in all cases to which they think themselves competent, (as in electing their functionaries executive and legislative, and deciding by a jury of themselves, in all judiciary cases in which any fact is involved,) or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed. — Thomas Jefferson to John Cartwright, 1824. Memorial Edition 16:45, Lipscomb and Bergh, editors. For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well organized and armed militia is their best security. — Thomas Jefferson, Eighth Annual Message, November 8, 1808
“I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man by which a government can be held to the principles of it’s Constitution.” Thomas Jefferson
Individuals have abdicated their sovereignty, they must regain their own throne!
Dear Doug,
As a generation x’er and someone who has loosely
followed the party my whole life, closer the last 20yrs.
I have to say I think we agree on nearly every issue,
maybe like 99.9998%. With no small thanks to you and
others like you those of us in the Republican wing
of the conservative liberty movement are now fully awake
to what is and has happened to the republicrat party, our
party, and particularily in our state. Your website is waking
up and giving direction to the base Young and old alike. I
particularily love and I mean love to see those in the base
that Have been blidly loyal for forty years or more read
your site and slap there forhead because they can’t
believe what they’ve been unknowingly loyal too all this
time. Your exposure of the corrupt power hungry control
freeks has got to be the most fun. Even in my county the
leadership is making noises about liberty, Although they
still fit the previous description. There is now tremendous
hope.
While I have not your eloquence I have to say that
you and the other leaders
like you in our state and country are doing the most
noteworthy political work I’ve experienced. This website is
now one of the most important sites in the state if not the
country. Someday I predict you and those with you and
like you will be in the history books as the most noble and
patriotic Americans of this era. Personally I give you my
highest award and honor. You sir are actually
an “American”. A very rare thing to be one and to know it.
I am so proud to be associated with you my friend. I wish
I had more words to more eloquently convey my deep
respect and appreciation for you and those like you.
Hammer Down,
Sledge