GOP Needs Reinvented Reaganism

The most jarring image of the past week appeared in The New York Times, alongside a surprisingly positive profile of 33-year-old conservative pundit Benjamin Shapiro.

It was a photograph of Mr. Shapiro’s supporters at the University of Utah. One of the students was wearing a "Reagan Bush ’84" T-shirt.

The next day, Matthew Continetti, the 30-something editor of the Washington Free Beacon, a website popular among young conservatives, devoted a substantial portion of his column to quotes from interviews and speeches by Reagan in 1947, 1952, and 1988.

As an historian and the author of books about Samuel Adams and John F. Kennedy, I can understand and endorse the search for a usable past. Countries and political movements need heroes, people whose successes and ideas can inspire and guide our own.

I grew up during the Reagan presidency and venerate him for winning the Cold War with a military buildup, unleashing economic growth with tax cuts and a strong dollar, and standing up to public-employee unions in the air traffic-controller strike.

But the resurgence of Reagan nostalgia is not without its own formidable risks. There’s a certain backward-looking element to it — the danger of ending up like some middle-aged guy who can’t get over his years as a high school athlete, or some contemporary liberal college student with a tie-died t-shirt and a guitar trying to re-live the antiwar protests of the late 1960s.

Reaganism, more than 30 years on, risks getting stale. Beyond that, the cult of Reagan risks airbrushing the reality that Reagan himself didn’t entirely live up to Reagan’s principles and standards.

The GOP is now a treasonous globalist party that is all in for open borders, fellating islam, homosexuality, and the war on Christianity.

Maybe true.

But mostly they are a bunch of self-interested people who want nothing more than to not rock the boat and stay in their jobs for as long as they can.

The people at the top are the same except that they enjoy power and wish to accumulate more of it. The path to more power in their mind is to first don’t rock the boat, second get re-elected, third espouse the latest popular issue that is making the rounds in conservative pundit circles and last lastly don’t piss off people that could make it harder to get re-elected. These people could be: donors, the press, pundits and other people in your party.

It is the donors that pay for the adds the get them re-elected. If they happen to be Rich Arabs well so what. The press can write mean things about you that lots of people will hear or read. Pundits are like the press but are smarter and can make really good arguments that people will hear or read and worse yet the press will read and then regurgitate it in the press. The other people in your party can make your job of getting re-elected hard by not helping you get re-elected. They can not send help when you have a tough opponent or not let your state party send money or campaign workers.

So, it is the same old thing; go along to get along. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t try to change things because people don’t like it when things change.

How many times have you read that ObamaCare is here to stay because it is here and too many people are in the system. Killing ObamaCare is politically hard and the people in power don’t do hard things because doing the hard things pisses people off.

We need people in power that willing to piss people off. We need people in power that don’t care if they get re-elected. Trump seems to be one of those people but he is fighting people that believe in ‘Go along to get along’.

We need a Speaker and a Majority Leader that are willing to do the hard things that need to be done. Unfortunately that kind of Leader rarely is going to be elected to that job by a bunch of office holders that want to hold on to office.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.