We’re waiting for the next Reagan.
The Republican Party has spent half a lifetime waiting. The Catholics and Evangelicals have waited. The NRLC and the NRA and all the ancillary organizations with an “R” in their acronyms, and the think tanks and interest groups have waited. The aging Republican regulars who remember the 1980 election and the three-network-media-monopoly and the ride of the Gipper to save us all, have waited as their hair turns grey…
Waiting,
Waiting,
Waiting,
Waiting…
Will there never be a prince who rides along the sea and the mountains
Scattering the sand and foam into amethyst fountains
Riding up the hills from the beach in the long summer grass
Holding the sun in his hands and shattering the isinglass?†.
But instead of the aspirations of our ego, instead of the “prince,” the re-creation of the image of the Cowboy Actor and his Fourth of July fireworks, instead of the conquering king, making our ears tingle and flattering our greatness, God sent us…
a servant without sequins…
…lowly, and riding upon an ass.
…with no form nor comeliness that we should desire him.
And, of all the nerve, that choice demanded that we re-think our assumptions.
As surely as we reduced all His principles to the single precept of the power of preemptive war, He required, as a condition of national redemption, that Republicans accept a candidate committed to less grandiose foreign pretensions.
Just who does God think He’s dealing with?
We’re America.
We’re number one.
We’re number one!
We’re number one!
Good ol’ number one.
Lookin’ out for good ol’ number one.
We are fueled by the Power of Pride and our security is based in the power of our might.
We openly assert our right, without provocation except their contempt for us, to prevent weaker nations, violently, if necessary, from accumulating enough power to rival us. 
This element of our foreign policy duplicates that of Joseph Stalin.
It has nothing to do with Reagan. It is the opposite of Reagan. Reagan said, ““America seeks no new territory nor do we wish to dominate others.” John McCain said precisely the opposite: “We cannot repeat the lessons of the 1930s when the United States of America stood by while bad things happened in the world.”
So we now seek to dominate the world for whatever our current political class rules is “good things,” the Bush administration seeking to plant and grow democracies in stubborn Muslim soil at the expense of American dollars and blood and the Obama administration using the same power to give the same region to the Muslim brotherhood, the State Department under both spreading abortion throughout the world and both of them leveraging the same military-spending constituencies, that prospered under Reagan, for re-election.
The price of world domination is eternal vigilance… and gargantuan military budgets.
And this standing army is a source, not only of phenomenal expense, but of great pride. For many, that pride is impossible to swallow.
I have repeatedly heard sincere and otherwise sane Christians scoff at the notion that there could be any moral limits to our international violence if we discern evil intent in our “enemies.” Any war that kills Muslims is “good,” (They’ve “declared war on us,” after all). Anyone who rejects that premise is “naïve” and “doesn’t understand that they are our enemies.” Biblical injunctions with regard to our enemies are glaringly missing from the equation.
And so, by the providence of God, by the operation of entirely separate mechanisms, there came to stand before America a Goliath to threaten the nation with slavery.
An Economic Goliath.
And a national election of unfathomable significance decided on that single issue:
The Economy.
And up from the camp came this little man.
And he told us that he could defeat Goliath…
But he steadfastly refused to wear the vestments in which we wanted to dress him, the armor of our host.
And he carried nothing but a sling…
And he stood head and shoulders beneath the physical stature, not only of the giant, but of that older king, our last revolutionary.
And those of us who do not repeat the philosophy of economic conservatism as clever rhetoric, like “sound effects” to fool the electorate, but because we believe it, because we understand it, because its principles are the foundation of the Republic, because we are servants of the Living God, knew that this little man was telling the truth…. that freedom under the rule of law is the touchstone of our prosperity, our “old” exceptionalism, and that our troubles resulted because we abandoned it. We knew he COULD HAVE defeated our economic Goliath.
And the GOP Establishment couldn’t swallow its pride to save its life.
It chose, instead… the new “American Exceptionalism,” the power of pride.
Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?
And so the specter of the full dismemberment of the Republican Party now lies palpably before us. Not the breakup of the Reagan coalition – Bush effected that already. Not the Party’s moral disintegration – McCain and his RNC enablers advanced that in 2008, beyond what one might have thought possible. No. It was that no Republican in the Image of Bush and Dole and Bush and McCain and Romney could offer the nation an explanation for our problems or a solution to avert this disaster. That Image could not prosper.
And your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken… that your idols may be broken and cease, and your images may be cut down, and your works may be abolished.
Our options, as of December, 2008:
I. FUSION
The fusion option was entirely in the hands of, but rejected by, Ron Paul’s national leaders.
II. FISSION
The fission option, by the simple operation of GOP inertia, its dictatorial violation of rule and law, its death-march Hegelian pragmatism, has left the Republican Party, void of any central uniting principles, splitting into its factions, waiting to turn on each other unless some uniting force intervenes. Without that future force this is a party incapable of defending American Freedom from the Socialist Democrats. But, perhaps there is hope.
The NEW MEN
A new generation inside a generation has grown up while Republicans waited and Democrats seized the schools. They yearn, strangely enough, in defiance of their government programming, for much of what was embodied in the American Revolution. But that the Republican Party has lost sight of. Coming of age in the 20-plus years since we had a government that even pretended to the Constitution’s limits of government power, they believe the word “conservative” refers to what the GOP has coughed up… and it isn’t pretty.
They tell us “There is only ONE political party” because they have watched both parties grow government and diminish freedom.
Consistently.
Their outlook, their vision of the Republican political landscape, is the result of our Compromises, our indolent waiting for the “next” Reagan to ride out into the arena.
Their view of the GOP is the result of our running Bush and Dole and Bush and Bush and McCain and Romney… and of our infernal toleration of a corrupt, ingrown Machiavellian establishment for whom the quest for power trumps all else.
Mitt Romney was promoted to the “anointed one” for his accomplishment in “fooling” the voters of Massachusetts and, with the full cooperation of a morally bankrupt RNC, defrauded Republican Party voters to seize the nomination by embezzlement.
But the GOP leadership’s proclivity to fool its own base has led us directly to four more years of descent into Communism, and the economic consequences we face are largely their legacy.
The Liberty Generation will not join such a party.
Joe Six-Pack would not (knowingly) vote for such a Party, but has been frequently fooled.
They won’t be fooled again.
†Judy Collins, Albatross, 1967
