Guest Writer Daniel Greenfield: A Revolutionary Elephant
The Democratic Party acts like it’s in power even when it’s out of power, while the Republican Party acts like it’s out of power even when it’s in power.
Even though America has been governed by Republicans more than by Democrats, the second half of the 20th century was one long string of cultural and legal victories for liberalism.
The Republican Party not only failed to roll back liberal cultural and political victories, but was complicit in perpetuating them. If history is any predictor of the future, even after Obama a Republican successor will accept his policies and incorporate them into a bipartisan consensus.
It has happened before and it will happen again.
A complacent Republican Party always willing to compromise to show its good faith is the secret behind the liberal takeover of America.
Conservatism is naturally focused on conserving and preserving, fighting in defense of the way things are. But the situation has degraded too far for the status quo to be worth defending. The status quo being conserved is the one that was crafted as part of a liberal culture war against America.
To actually make a difference, the Republican Party needs to leave behind that old Roman named Status Quo and become a revolutionary party once again.
The birth of the Republican Party took place against the background of a corrupt Democratic Party that bound together international businessmen, urban political machines and plantation owners into an oligarchy meant to crush individual freedom.
In contrast to the urban sweatshops and rural plantations, the corrupt political machines and their gangs of thugs, the Republican Party embraced a message that was both conservative, echoing back to the American Revolution, and revolutionary in concept; Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men.
The Republican Party not only opposed slavery because it was morally wrong and a violation of the new nation’s founding documents, but because it understood that only a nation of free people could rule a Republic; not slaves, serfs, slavemasters and community organizers.
Only a nation of free people could keep the Republic free.
When Lincoln stated that the United States could not endure as half-slave and half-free, it was not only a denunciation of the existing state of affairs, but a statement that the United States of America could not survive if it became a nation of slaves because a nation of slaves is bound to be ruled over by slavemasters.
A slave does not have to toil away in the cotton fields. He can be a professional with a college degree who has as little real freedom and property rights as the slave. The chains around his ankles and the collar around his neck are all the more binding if he does not even know that they are there.
There are many different kinds of cages and many different kinds of slavery, but they all have one thing in common. They are based on denying the slave the fruits of his labor by slavemasters who harvest the work of his hands for themselves.
It is not the politics of the status quo that the people want today, but a party that will stand up and fight for a free America.
It is not enough to hang on to the legacy of FDR, LBJ, Carter and even Clinton… while arguing that Obama has finally gone too far or before long we’ll find ourselves in 2018 clinging to Obamacare while insisting that Hillarycare is the one that really goes too far.
We have had enough of sensible Republican leaders carefully maintaining the prison walls that the Democrats build around us.
What we need are leaders who will tear them down.
We need men and women willing to tear them down as decisively as the Berlin Wall was torn down, to give away the power that led to the building of those regulatory walls back to the American people in the name of American freedom.
