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Here are some of the lies we love to tell one another at conferences, on social media haunts, and at conventions to make ourselves feel better about the state of things:
– This is still a right-of-center country. That’s true to some extent, but the problem is the center has moved decidedly to the left. Today’s Republicans are mostly yesterday’s Democrats…..
– We can rally the “silent majority.” We rightfully mock liberals for not moving on from bygone Watergate references, yet this phrase we toss around to comfort ourselves ironically comes from the same era — originally credited to Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s vice president. There is no silent majority in America anymore. There apparently is an angry, populist, nationalist “silent plurality,” which Donald Trump tapped into to win the nomination. But other than love of country and a high regard for national sovereignty, there is little to nothing conservative about that movement.
– We have a promising bench of emerging, principled conservatives. Anyone still believing this paid no attention to the recent presidential primary or never looked at the Liberty scorecard here at CR. We have the largest Republican majority on Capitol Hill since before the Great Depression; however, of the 301 Republicans currently in office, only 40 of them have A or B Liberty scores. And that’s with a Democrat in the White House. That means only 13 percent of the Republicans elected in 2014 have voted the right way more often than not when it was easy to build a principled resume…..
The inconvenient truth is we have lost everything. We have an established beachhead exactly nowhere. We are not advancing on any front anywhere. Our best “victories” are stopping the Left from going places that even a decade ago would’ve been unthinkable in the political mainstream (e.g., North Carolina bathroom fight, Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case).
It’s time — past time — we on the Right have a serious and adult conversation among ourselves about where the country is headed and our place in that.
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But our problems are far more systemic than Trump. His sham candidacy is a symptom of our problems, not the source of them.
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It is time to stop lying to ourselves. To stop convincing ourselves that it doesn’t matter how terrible the GOP nominee is, because we can actually win elections on how bad the Democrats are. And all the other sweet nothings we say to each other — the actual data and election results have been telling us for quite some time — are simply not true. We are ineffective. We move almost no public policy. And now even corporate America, a key ally in the Reagan era, no longer funds our causes but is the man-at-arms for the progressive Left.
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This is not a happy tale, for sure. But we can’t fix what’s wrong unless we’re willing to be truly honest about where we are. Hence, this series I’m writing over this next seven weeks. If you’d like to win the war as well, I invite you to join me for a long, overdue, and sober assessment of our movement in the hopes of learning the tough, but necessary, lessons.
You don’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been.
- Discussion
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The beginning of my new series for @CR examining why we lost the country so we can learn from those mistakes.https://t.co/sZhEPsicib
— Steve Deace (@SteveDeaceShow) August 4, 2016
Steve’s podcast was good. He had a pastor who will do a once a week short lesson on why voting for the lesser of two evils is morally wrong and what to do about it.We have to stop making the wrong choices because we really are making no gains, and losing bigger each time. We are fooling only ourselves, making fools of ourselves in the meanwhile. It’s time to be the adult in the room and start making decisions that take a stand and give others permission to do the right thing, as well.
Pray for righteousness to be restored and for the peace of Jerusalem
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