Posted on 01/28/2021 4:07:38 AM PST by Kaslin
Ditching the GOP is a bad idea born of justifiable frustration, and we need to stop being emotional and start being ruthless in our campaign to retake this country from these liberal establishment aspiring fascists. A third party is not the way. It is a bad idea, one that is technically impractical and which is strategically inept. It will lead to disaster. And the Democrats know it, which is why they love this third party palaver. The only thing that makes the tooting likes of Eric Swalwell coo in delight harder than some mediocre Chi Com honeypot is the thought of us conservatives committing ritual suicide by splitting our half of the country in two because some of the 50 percent of Americans in our camp are insufferable sissies.
News flash, folks. We’re going to have to suffer the sissies forever. The question is whether they run the party apparatus, or whether they are consigned to the fringes, scribbling in their blogs about how True Conservatism™ requires that we go to war everywhere, that we allow giant corporations to limit our speech, and that we all wear vinyl gimp suits with ball gags and address Nancy Pelosi as “Mistress P.”
Just kidding.
The part about “we” going to war is a joke. You and your kids get to go to war while they, with very few exceptions, who never shut up about it, get to stay home and fight their endless war against push-ups and testosterone. The rest is pretty dead-on.
Let’s look at the big picture. The design of the Constitution essentially mandates a two-party system. A third party has never won the presidency, and one rarely wins legislative seats. Usually, such candidates call themselves “independents,” but Democrats know they are really Democrats and understand this is just a ploy to appeal to the suckers.
There is always going to be a party of the left, and a party of the right, with the battle over the middle. A party getting 55 percent of the vote is considered to have won in a landslide. America is that closely divided. For our sins, the party of the right is the Republican Party. And math says we are stuck with it.
You cannot divide the 50 percent of America on the right up and hope to beat the 50 percent on the left. It does not work, and all the hopes, dreams, and krakens of a million outraged conservatives on Twitter will not make it so. Politics must be about addition, and that implies we need to add people who are not as conservative as we are. If you want purity, date a nun. This is politics, and if you don’t win, you lose.
I propose we win.
Third parties do have a track record of disrupting elections. The Left blamed the Greens for Bush in 2000, and some blame the Libertarians, among other factors, for President * in 2020. Clinton won in 1992 because Perot split the vote for George H.W. Bush. But these events all have one thing in common – the third party never wins. Nor will one.
Trump himself seems to understand, walking back the “Patriot Party” stuff in order to settle in as a GOP kingmaker. He knows he loses in 2024 running as a third party candidate – 50 percent of people already hate him and some percentage of the GOP will stay GOP out of habit if nothing else. You can’t expect to win if you start off, best case, losing 50 percent + 1. But by remaining in the GOP – as its most popular figure by far – he has real power to influence events.
The third party talk also ignores the practical reality of the GOP’s irreplaceable infrastructure. A competitive national political party is a Broadway play, not a show some kids put on in a barn. While some imagine a sort of spontaneous, math-defying movement materializing out of the political ether, the reality is that a party structure performs essential tasks and there is no substitute for it. Who has the donor lists, the volunteer lists, the organization to drive get out the vote efforts? The party. You can’t patch one together overnight out of fervor and contempt for the squishes.
There are many things that are critical that go into a campaign and go on behind the scenes that most of us never even imagined. For example, who are the lawyers who worked for the GOP who know election law who will be leaving their GOP contracts to come and keep the “MAGA Party” candidates out of jail? You think the Establishment will give the “Constitutionalist Party” a pass for not understanding the campaign finance laws? And who pays these lawyers, assuming any really good ones want to flush their career in electoral law down the toilet to go all-in on a losing one-shot cause?
That’s just one example of many of the things a party infrastructure does, and no one is going to build another national structure (not to mention a structure in each of the 50 states) in the next four years. It is appealing to leave the jerks in the GOP behind, but if you do, you are choosing irrelevance.
But hey, you’re angry so you gotta cater to those feelz.
That’s stupid and weak. Tighten up. Yeah, the GOP establishment sucks – and no, you’re not the only one who has noticed. We are always going to have people near the center who frustrate us. That’s the reality, and being angry about it is like yelling at clouds. But what we can do – and have done – is slowly force the party to conform more closely to our vision. It’s like turning the Titanic, an apt metaphor if there ever was one, but it is happening already.
Look at the GOP just five years ago and look at it today. Yeah, we have the rump Renfield contingent with tiresome goofs like Mitt (R?-Miracle Whip). We have others who alternate between establishment-curious moderate wimpiness and coming through for us at many key junctures – Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham. But look at what we don’t have – Jeff Flake is gone. Jeb! is a flabby footnote. And as hard as Nikki! is trying to make herself happen, she’s not happening. The GOP has shifted our way – on wars, on culture, on tech, on playing to win. We have earned the support of Americans of all races in unprecedented numbers because we have focused on people who – remember this? – work hard and play by the rules. That’s progress. Not enough, not nearly, but to deny the progress because you are angry only empowers the people you are angry at. We can’t throw out what we have already achieved simply because we have much more work to do. Take the W, people.
We need to do more. We need to infiltrate the infrastructure and remake the Republican Party from the inside into a party for working Americans of every demographic who love their country and demand their rights, as opposed to the 2015 party that shafted working Americans so Democrat-donor big corporations can rig the system and let SJW twerps endlessly hassle us for the crime of being normal.
But Kurt, we do vote and sometimes we lose!
Yes. You will lose much of the time. This is called reality. People who compete often lose. The ones who don’t compete never lose, but they never win either.
Here’s your action plan. If you are a registered Republican, stay that way. If not, register Republican. Then vote in the primaries to rid ourselves of squishes. Then take the next step. Find your local GOP organization and join, then run for local party and then government offices. We need to build our farm team, and that means traveling along the American cursus honorum from GOP precinct captain to county GOP committee member to city council to state assembly to Congress and beyond.
Gee Kurt, that sounds like hard work.
It is. It’s a lot easier to declare you are never ever voting GOP again on Twitter. But I was under the impression that we are the faction that is not averse to hard work, especially when it is our country at stake. So, this is a test – if you’re serious about winning, you stay GOP.
A third party hands total control over to the left, and if you want to see what that scenario looks like, check out my newest novel Crisis, as well as my other four novels of America splitting into red and blue nations, People's Republic, Indian Country, Wildfire, and Collapse!
It was probably me.
By you, I know that, but you posted it yesterday. I posted it per today’s date from Townhall.com. Perhaps you should have waited.
We don’t have a SECOND party.
That said, to my mind it makes more sense to use the existing infrastructures against Deep State by finding and running MAGA candidates in BOTH R and D primaries.
Why fight half a battle?
Did you read the entire article?
If you did, and this is what you come away with, then endless Bidens is what you will get.
I don't have to be in love with the reality to accept it.
We CAN turn the GOP around - look at the four years we had of Trump. Sure, the RINO'S fought him tooth and nail, but he scored some YUGE hits against them.
This is not the time to let up.
It’s not my fault if he can’t spell his name right.
“This is a repost of Kurt Schlichter’s poo poo on third party panicking.”
*********************************************************
I think Schlichter is wearying of the USEFUL IDIOTS and LowIQ’ers running around hysterically shrieking “3rd Party, 3rd Party, Don’t Vote, Don’t Vote”. They’re as dumb as those gullible enough to be herded like SHEEP by ANTIFA into the Capital Building on January 6th.
You are correct, it's time to move from that malarkey
“I have heard ZERO from the GOP and fixing themselves. They don’t even admit they have a problem.”
You’re implying the GOP doesn’t care? On Jan. 6 the vote to certify the election was held to determine the future of America. At that moment the RNC was having a glitzy retreat for top donors at the Ritz on Amelia Island. And you think they don’t realize they need to be fixed? (/s/ of course.)
The arrogance of this article. It is incumbent upon The Stupid Party to detail what it intends to do to fix itself.
We do not have to endure the sissies forever. Those sissies are actually Democrats, not Republicans. This is the entire issue.
This is man is every bit as arrogant as the Democrats.
The GOP doesn’t have a problem, YOU have a problem. Your standards are too high.
Trump set the bar. He was actually effective at representing conservatives and upholding the rule of law. That’s not actually a very high bar, and the GOP couldn’t get over it.
What’s the GOP’s plan, given there is never going to be a legitimate election every again as long as the D’s have the magic box?
First Rule of Holes, GOP: Stop digging!
I didn’t post that article, but you replied to the exact same article app 15 mins before you posted this, which is exact same thing. Is it because you object to a 3rd party and enjoy the argument, or did you forget?
In principle, I agree with him in regards to the formation of third parties. The problem is that right now, I'm not certain there is second party.
And almost exactly this has happened twice before...successfully resulting in a "third party" replacing a current "dominant party". First...the Democrats displace the Federalists. Second...the Republicans displace the Whigs.
Kurt needs to read deeper into history!
Why do you state “3rd party”?
Surely using evidenced based logic, there really is only one party at present.
There are a lot of democrats who aren’t thrilled with the demon party. I was a democrat years ago and left them for the republicans. But I’m not happy with the republicans either. So a third party might actually gut both parties if it advocates the position DJT advocated, that is, more local control and less federal control.
After all, there were a lot of democrats who voted for DJT too.
Without a way to fix vote counting, neither option works.
So we should stay with a bloated corpse, because any day now it could grow a pair, get up, and walk?!?
Can you name a third party candidate that was elected to office? No you can’t. It’s a ridiculous idea,
How many Americans only vote GOP because of the 2A? Plenty and the GOP has all but blackmailed them into voting for them by keeping this issue on the table. What will those voters do when the issue is permanently removed from the table? Are they going to appeal to our desire to give millionaires bigger tax cuts? It’s a bold strategy Cotton.
Rand Paul’s impeachment proxy vote the other day was a litmus test of how many fakes must be purged from the GOP - about 10%. That seems very doable.
Hardly. That was a fake CYA vote. A classic beltway theater performance. Don’t be duped. The real vote was 93-7 to certify the stolen election.
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.