Government workers and those on poverty assistance have the Dems. Wall Street and Hollywood support the Dems. The corporatist wing of the GOP looks after corporate interests at the expense of the interests of the middle class (ammnesty, H-1B visas, lack of regulation of financial markets and commodities exchanges). Both sides don't give a fig about our interests because we don't scare them, because most of the middle class doesn't pay attention to politics - and the hard-core liberals would like nothing better than our economic destruction so we have to move from the suburbs back to cities. So we have tolerated policies that are against our interests - and we now have been set up for the kill.
Two entities may well go extinct over the next 10 years - the GOP, or the middle class. If the middle class doesn't get its act together and function cohesively as a political entity, inflation from spending and printing money will kill it off, along with job losses. If the middle class DOES get its act together and the GOP ignores the middle class interests and instead continues to promote those of the corporatists, the GOP will die and be replaced with something else. But the GOP will continue to be beholden to the corporatist wing until the middle class rises up.
It's beyond the annoyance factor of the last 20 years of Clinton corruption and GOP spending that motivated us activists. It's now about the very survival of the middle class in America, because we are getting set up for an Argentian-style destruction of such due to past apathy. We have at most four years to halt it. And we have to start by articulating ideas that learn from the failings of the last few years - such as the fact that we do need some level of regulation of the financial sector - and show how growth in government has created a huge, voracious monster in government employees who expect to be paid better than the private sector that supports them. That IMO is the only limited government message that resonates.
So tell the Tea Party types to get onto school boards. Cut the bloated administrator layers that consume massive amounts of property taxes. Fight to get the state legislatures to cut state employees and overhead. And then turn on the federal behemoth by supporting candidates who adhere to shrinking the fedgov, not out of abstract principles, but in confronting the bugetary abyss that faces us.
And yet, for the movement to succeed, it will require a larger and more coherent organization that will attract a greater number of citizens, and act both as a magnet and as a clearing house for ideas, strategies and tactics.
In the past, the Republican Party would have served this role, but has presently abdicated its former influence in pursuit of a disastrous, rootless, value-free centrism. And in this respect, what the GOP requires is not "rebranding" - as though it were a commodity to be marketed like washing machines and cell phone providers.
What the party does need is a renewal. The GOP's rebirth will herald itself only by a conscious decision to once again promote a coherent set of core ideas, and - this is equally crucial - to declaim others. This means deciding that some things are right and some are wrong, that some things work and others do not, and choosing to accept the consequences of that decision. It means no longer trying to be all things to all people and winding up being nothing to no one.
A large segment of the American people are crying out for such leadership today, and finding none. The world of our childhoods and own dreams is slipping from our grasp, sinking beneath a sea of taxes, red ink, regulation, and government-approved social decay.
In this hour, a New Traditionalism waits to be born. Who among us will lead the charge?