I am reading your original post and am intrigued. This deserves for me to mark and come back to. It is too promising for me to write out the first thing to pop into my mind.
Hmmm, sounds like a plan to me!!!
I don’t want to throw water on your idea. I’m just blowing off steam. I am so tired of the Republican Party ignoring folks like me that I honestly don’t care to mess with them any longer. I and others have pleaded with them for decades to get their act together and the response is to arrive at a time when a guy like McCain actually wins the nomination.
The party will tell you the voters are to blame, but they know darn well they have set up the rules so more liberal republicans rule the roost.
Any effort from within the party to get it fixed, will meet with a lot of smiling nodding heads, just thrilled to hear what the folks have to say. And for a while it will look like progress is being made. Then a couple of years later it will dawn on the folks who are trying to get things fixed, that they are right where they started.
The Republican Party is broken. I don’t have the slightest inclination to bail out the pricks who devised this strategy and drove the bus off the road where we find ourselves.
Perhaps you idea has merit and everyone else will want to jump on board. Tonight, I don’t even want to entertain a plan that includes the words ‘Republican Party’. I’ve given 36 years to it, and I’ve had enough.
The Republican Party can go straight to —— for all I care.
once you start adding or not adding social issues is when people get their undies tied in a knot.
bump for later
Sounds great to me.
We do need a way to know other conservative members and work with them.
I remember working with so many here for years thinking we were the same then Terry Schiavo came along and split us into two camps - those being totally shocked at the first time the government killed a non-dying person and those who saw only husband’s rights ignoring the “put to death when undying” part.
Such a shock to see that co-patriots actually were across an important line from me.
So, think your idea has great merit. We have to be able to know who others are of like mind and then coordinate efforts.
they would only take us seriously if we did have a third party apparatus in place in much of the nation
Something I'll simply call "the right way". Good post.
I’d strongly support such a concept. The biggest enemy of conservatism is a lack of a truly unified voice within the Republican OR Democrat Parties.
The old largely conservative Southern Democrats are still out there, but much like us conservatives in the GOP, their voice is either muted or drowned out by the valueless moderates and and diehard socialist/liberals.
Conservatism needs to that that three-legged stool and unify those legs in to one strong-willed, solidly anchored, and unshakably confident force within BOTH parties. Conservatism should not be merely a Repubican goal, it should be a Democrat goal as well. If we conservatives are going to set our sights on a goal, if we are going to stand tall, lets set our sights on both parties - not just one. I knind of look at this as the Bush Doctrine for domestic policy - we need to be looking at developing policies that have a view of 10 to 20 years down the road - just as many successful companies do...long range planning and working towards specific result-oriented goals is going the be the only way we can return consrvatism as THE dominant force in political and policy development. This is not a immediate fix to our problems, but it is a framework on which a real victory against liberalism can be achieved.
The Republican party needs to throw us conservatives a bone for since Ronald Reagan left office they have done nothing but taken our votes and treated us like the Dems treat blacks.
Kiss our butts around election time and then shove us to the back of the bus.
"....movement......to form a new alliance"
The movement is Cultural Elitism and it is made up educators, lawyers, media, entertainers, counter-culture, etc.
Sometimes the cultural elitists are called cultural marxists. Agnew called them effete snobs. Bork described them as those who make their living off of words and language.
"In 1968-9"
The 1968 democratic convention in Chicago when they rioted in the streets and on the floor of the convention.
Not a bad idea. I just think the fragmentation of conservatives into different interest groups would result in another bickering, back-stabbing party like the rat party, which is currently destroying itself. Then again, we have that now.
Been there, done that..... Newt did it and did it well.
It needs to be done again, but alas there is no leader with the vision and stature to implement the plan.
We can only hope that out of the shambles of the present congress a conservative leader will rise up and take the AEGIS mantle to do battle.
It’s called CPAC.
No.
Small 'l' libertarians can't be excluded. Various polls put them between 9 - 15 percent of the electorate. A fair number of them voted and two Senate seats, in Virginia and Montana, IIRC, were lost in 2006 due to their reaction to the ban on online gambling passed by the Congress in the early fall of that year. Thank you social conservatives. Could we limit it to opposition to abortion/embryonic stem cells and opposition against unnatural lifestyles. Human nature does have its way. That's why the war on drugs will never be won. Small 'l' libertarians are a natural part of the GOP "big tent," especially in the west.
Smackdown! By Independents & Moderates(2006)
Why? Because exit polls show there's a large chunk of the electorate that is moderate, independent-minded and turned off by partisanship. In exit polls, 47 percent of voters described their views as moderate, 21 percent liberal and 32 percent conservative. And 61 percent of the moderates voted Democratic this year.
On party identification, 26 percent said they're Independent, which is in line with recent elections. But this year, Independents went Democratic by a 57-39 margin. That's what gave the day to Democrats. In the 2002 midterm, by contrast, Independents went Republican in a 48-45 split.
Only 32 percent described themselves as conservative. No doubt that included some blue and yellow dog donkeys. Conservatives by themselves can't cut it. Somehow the GOP has to keep the religious right and the small 'l' libertarians as well as appeal to the moderates and independents because the left will bankrupt our economy, get us killed and surrender our sovereignty.
It looks like we're stuck with RINO McCain mainly for three reasons. Independent voters are allowed to vote in the early primaries. States with relatively early, closed GOP primaries like NY and NJ have at lot of RINOs. Too many folks were claiming to be conservative as well as conservatives were competing in the GOP primaries. Conservatives somehow need to settle on one candidate before the primaries and caucuses start.
I hate to say it, but social conservatives did it again. Those who voted for Huckabee, who is only a social conservative, also knocked out Thompson and conservative convert Romney. Now it looks we got the booby prize, McCain.