Republicans Have To Fight

Both political parties are in disarray.  Don’t kid yourself, the Democrats are in disarray too.  Winning the White House papers it over.  When you lose elections the tide has gone out and you see who is naked.

We can’t look to institutions for guidance, because almost all of them are shells of themselves.  They are warped.

Karl Rove wrote about the Republicans.  He makes some good points.  However, in redefining itself, the Republican Party must not cave to the establishment Republicans.  They are like the Washington Generals.  They are patsies for the Harlem Globetrotters.

Establishment Republicans do not know how to win.  They do not know how to hold and consolidate power.  They don’t know how to use power effectively.  They are talkers, not doers.

Democrats have their own problems.  If you are a centrist Democrat you are out of power.  I know career centrist Democrats that cannot get jobs within the party.  Too white, too old, too centrist.  The hard left-wing genie is out of the bottle and it won’t be going back in.  If you think Biden will govern as a moderate, don’t fool yourself.  This is the party of AOC and Bernie now.  They have 18 months of total power and they will use it.  Centrist Democrats rode the white tiger of socialism to power and it will be untamed and eat them alive.

Back to the Republicans.

I recently read a book about Winston Churchill.  It was excellent.  Churchill said, there was a time to be a statesman, and there was a time to stop being a statesman and fight the war.  The two were incompatible.  You cannot be a statesman and fight a war at the same time.

If we learned anything over the past four years it was that we are in a total war.  There is no unity.  Obama laid the seeds of it in a December 2015 Oval office meeting.  Adam Schiff and his partners carried it out for four years in Congress enabled by a compliant press and social media.

There is no compromise.  If Democrats won’t compromise to clean up dead people and nonresidents from voter rolls, it shows their true navigational heading.

When you are in a war, you do things differently than when you are trying to keep the peace.

Here is what I would do.

1. 1.  Refocus the party.  It’s now the party of doers.  Small businesspeople.  Risk takers. All colors etc.  People that work to earn a living.  It’s not the party of lobbyists.  It’s not the Lincoln Project or Jonah Goldberg.  It’s not the Bush’s, Rockefellers, or eastern elite bluebloods.  It’s a middle-class, upper-middle-class party of people trying to create opportunities for their offspring and themselves.  The corporations can be bought and sold by any party so don’t worry about them.
   2. Leadership in Washington must change.  People are sick and tired of career politicians.  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell should step aside for someone new.  He needs to assume a mentorship position.  Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton might be a good new face.  He’s smart and knows how to fight.  He was early on coronavirus, and he handled himself well post-election.  He also is a military veteran, so he knows the mentality it takes to win.
   3. Introduce term limit bills in both the House and Senate and talk about them incessantly.  6 terms for the House, 3 for the Senate.
   4. They can’t control the narrative in Big Media or Social media, so they will have to go to alternative social media companies and embrace them.  No more Twitter, Parler or Gab.  No more Facebook, MeWe.  No more Fox News, Newsmax.  You must communicate to a focused core to get your message out.
   5. There is no time to lament the elections.  Take stock that the party made a lot of gains where it did even though it lost the Presidency and the state of Georgia which is now a blue state.  GOPe controlled states aren’t red states. They are blue.

The most important thing that has to happen is at the state level. Any state that has a Republican governor and a Republican-controlled legislature must do this post haste:

1.  Republicans have talked a great game about certain policies.  Now is the time to put them into place in states they control.  Low taxes, 0% corporate taxes, school choice, health care choice.  Every single Republican controlled state must do it.  Talk is cheap.  It’s time for action.
2. Clean up the voter rolls in your state and institute voter ID.  Institute anti-fraud rules.  Signature matching must be mandatory.  Eliminate mail-in ballots, but have absentee ballots.  Eliminate the month or two of early voting and condense it to a couple of weeks.  No more machines with algorithms that can be manipulated; use paper ballots.
3. It is time to crush public-sector unions in your state.  Change all government pensions from defined benefit to defined contribution.  Especially crush teacher’s unions by embracing full-on school choice giving money to the student and having it travel with the student rather than to the district or bureaucracy.
4. I am against gerrymandering but we are in a war.  Gerrymander the crap out of the opposition and marginalize them so badly they cannot possibly get a foothold in your state.  Machiavelli was right, no mercy for your enemy.  No prisoners.  By the way, the Democrats have been doing the same thing in states they control.  See California and Illinois.  Republican states did well in the 2020 census, so crush them.
5. As new people move to your state, have a welcome wagon program that explains in plain terms the culture of your state.  Why your state does what it does and remind them why they moved from their state.  The flood of refugees from blue states isn’t going to stop.  It’s not Covid.  It’s the taxes and policies.  Retail in person politics wins.  They are customers, not just numbers.  Delight your customers.
6. When federal mandates come down like socialized medicine etc, ignore them.  Don’t execute on them.  Fight them in court aggressively.
7. Create competition in your state for things like insurance and medicine by removing all restrictions.  Embrace innovation.
8. Appoint a small task-focused force to solicit companies from blue states to move to your state.  Be consistent.  Sell.  Bring in the businesses and bankrupt the blue states.  They are going to be raising taxes and fees along with the new taxes being raised by Washington DC.  Now is the time to seize the opportunity to create clusters and networks of businesses in your larger cities.
9. Reform all your social programs to be incentivized to get people off of them.  Recognize that people are assets and not liabilities to be warehoused.
10. Cap property tax increases.
11. Eliminate income taxes if you can or reduce them
12. Privatize as much of your state government as you can
13. Take on the trial bar in your state and make sure that they are limited.  People need the opportunity to be represented in court, but the trial attorneys in states like Illinois and Nevada ruin the business climate and increase the costs dramatically.
14. If you are a Libertarian, recognize you are on an island and fighting a lost cause.  You need to join the Republican Party and take over like the Socialists/Communists did with the Democrats.  Riding the Libertarian Tiger is different than the Communist Tiger.
15. In states that are split, you must fight super hard to win.  I am thinking of states like Montana and North Carolina.  Georgia showed how to be complacent and lose.  If you engage with the doers in point one, you will win.  If you engage with GOPe, you will lose.
16. If you have RINO’s in your state, do not be afraid to primary them, cut off their support, and cut off their money.  People like Mitt Romney need to go. Run people that will embrace small-government principles and are doers.

Above all, recognize that it’s a war.  There is no “can’t”.  Temper your rhetoric and don’t be Trump-like.  But, get your message out in a strong way.  Trump had some good qualities for sure, and did a lot of very good things.  But, he had bad qualities as well and in the end, the bad overwhelmed the good.

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