The most modestest proposal: so long, GOP, and thanks for all the fish.

In Richard Brautigan’s Sombrero Fallout, the titular Mexican hat appears inexplicably in the center of a small town, having recently descended from the Heavens like some physical, woven-straw signifier. To those inclined to map teleological import to such an event, the hat is much like a Jesus-faced pancake, a Central-American statue of the Virgin Mary weeping blood; or maybe it’s the mark of alien visitation, a gift from some far-flung taco-loving race of oversized hat-sharers; or else it’s part of some sinister government psyop to gauge how a town, confronted by such a conveniently fraught occurrence, will react to a sudden epistemological crisis. It is, in short, to them a sign rather than a signifier — and as such, it must be reacted to, made to mean, and the reaction of the town’s establishment political class is to try to control the framing, to own the narrative it must first create and then defend. It seeks to unify meaning and browbeat recalcitrant apostates into joining in a united front — the hope being that to define the event is to control it.

— Which may just be the perfect metaphor for the Trump “movement” and the current RNC campaign to validate it — from Reince to Newt to whatever program it is that runs the Hannity talking points generator — save the nagging regret that Trump’s YUGE Skull Island Kong Wall, had it just been built sooner, would have probably kept the filthy, rapey Mexican hat out of the American street to begin with.

But that’s all just me spitballing.

In an important column this morning, radio host Steve Deace spoke to the longer-term aims of what is now known as the #NeverTrump movement, and in it he all but spells out the relevant undercurrent: #NeverTrump — for conservatives, at least — isn’t some short-term political strategy to replace Trump with someone less repulsive. Instead, it’s a long-term political goal, one that recognizes that there is very little left the GOP has to offer actual conservatives, and that the GOPe’s prior ploys to water-down to an Oliver Twistian-gruel the conservative label have allowed progressive populists to declare conservatism’s failures in the absence of a real conservative referent, and to tether — to the ill-informed and intellectually incurious — Constitutionalists like Ted Cruz to the institutional rot at the heart of GOP establishment he has demonstrably and vigorously fought against, be it for religious liberty, the 2A in his Heller amicus, or for US sovereignty in Medellin.

So the question becomes, what are Republicans to do with a Republican party that would allow a progressive populist boasting Mondale’s trade policy and McGovern foreign policy — that is, a leftist Democrat that looks for all the world like an angry and retouched Circus Peanut — to carry its flag? And the answer is simple: get the hell out and don’t look back.

Half a decade ago I wrote about the American revolutionary impulse as an atmosphere of sorts, something that could disappear and reappear under a variety of labels as establishment elites in both parties sought to destroy each new uprising. At the time, the TEA Party was working within the GOP to try to regain our Constitutional moorings, and true to its self-interested insularity, the GOP establishment, having first pretended to embrace this movement, was getting to work infiltrating it, undermining it, and — as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell famously vowed, buoyed by Trump money, hoping to “crush” it.

If this primary season taught movement conservatives any one thing, it’s this: there is little to be gained working within the GOP for conservative and classical liberal ends. The Party stands for nothing; it is the playground for opportunists and hucksters, for influence peddlers and those who feed off of that particular locust swarm, be they media parasites or recently unearthed Republican relics looking to resurrect their political fortunes. And so it follows — for me, at least — that the time is now finally right to break free. We needed first to try the controlled demolition of a TEA Party insurgency. That having been rebuffed, we can in good conscience — and with a sense of righteous resolve — move on to more aggressive ground clearing.

Towards a new party

I am not a political scientist. But I am someone who understands the power of principles — a word that, along with “purity,” is these days often used pejoratively to shame those who resist the putatively nuanced pragmatism that establishmentarians use to defend their own supposed intellectual superiority and depth of thought.

And it should be a principle (ahem) goal of a new party to beat back such anti-intellectualist nonsense. I’ve discussed elsewhere how appealing to principle is itself the most effective pragmatic weapon in the classical liberal arsenal. I’ll now add that “purity” in the name of Constitutional fidelity is not remotely untoward, vapid, or regressively rigid, but is rather the imperative of a propositional compact like the one that is the basis for American Exceptionalism properly understood.

Many of Trump’s populist-nationalist-progressivist-agragrian-racial-realist-tribalist adepts and cultists have declared the death of both conservatism and Constitutionalism — even as they simultaneously acknowledge that Constitutionalism’s failure, as they see it, arises from the various political removes from Constitutional fidelity that (ironically!) progressivism and populism have wrought, and that conservatism has sought to staunch. That is, they’ve determined that the problem with Constitutionalism is that Constitutionalism hasn’t been practiced — an observation closely akin to arguing that dieting fails because people break their diets, or that a steak fails at being a carrot because the steak comes from a butchered cow and existentially resists growing under ground.

My answer to them is this: are you people for real?

And unfortunately, they are — though to me they appear less as thinking agents than a base coagulation of political half-thoughts and old ideologies made prominently manifest in an old Orange bore whose garish and phony alpha-male shtick is undercut by his whiny threats at lawfare and his string of blustery Mean Girl Tweets.

The rest of us want no place in such a populist phlegm ball. And for those willing to stare down the Blob, I seek to outline the simple and clear platform for a new party, one that rejects the barren wasteland of today’s GOP, whose sole remaining virtue — save its institutionalized advantage in getting on ballots — is a cluster of House Dems and less than a handful of Senators.

The platform

Six items. Listed. Cleanly, clearly, in a form even those reared on PowerPoint can readily digest. And as yet unnamed. That’s all that’s necessary to lay out the makings of a new movement — one that isn’t really new at all but rather has been bracketed by the “progress” of the Gramscian long march the left has deployed to devalue American Exceptionalism, and that too many of the right have either adopted or surrendered to. Here are those six items, in no particular order:

1) Individual liberty
2) Federalism and representative republicanism
3) Constitutionalism
4) Judicial originalism
5) National sovereignty
6) Free-market capitalism

These are the foundations of a new and potentially revolutionary party, one that does not react defensively to being principled nor considers “purity” in defense of its core beliefs anything but solid earth upon which to pitch its tent. Anyone can join this party; but to do so they must accept as inviolable the 6 foundational platform items. The price of admission, in other words, is a belief in the social compact upon which this country was founded. Nothing more.

1) Individual liberty: the Constitution exists to constrain government and delineate its proper function. It is a physical realization of the ideas found in the Declaration of Independence, principle among which are the concept of natural rights that government protects but can never remove. These are individual rights. And as such, the perversity of nationalism — which attempts to homogenize the state around a federal government standing in for a collective will — is rejected. We are a nation of individuals. Not individuals subject to a nation state.

2) Federalism and representative republicanism: Those powers not enumerated as belonging to the federal government belong to the several states. Period. No longer will the states be satellite clients of a federal government whose prime lawmaking function now flows from the Executive branch through an unelected and untouchable bureaucratic apparatus. States and the citizens of those states will choose representatives to speak to their interests. Direct democracy was considered a danger by our Founders and Framers. Our party will hold caucuses, not primaries. We will work to choose those we believe will reflect our interests most rigorously. We won’t be held hostage by open primaries or preference polls open to those swayed solely by name recognition, incumbency, or temporary emotional pique. One goal of the party will be the repeal of the 17th Amendment — a result of a prior populist push that rendered the current Senate redundant. Too, we will use the power of recall to thwart those who wish to run under our brand but then refuse to govern as it demands.

3) Constitutionalism: We are a nation of laws. Equality before the law is a central conceit of Constitutionalism and to the very idea of equality as we understand it. Equality of outcome is anathema to individual liberty as a social project. We are born of the American Revolution, not the French Revolution. We are a propositional nation, not a tribal one. Those beliefs that prove incompatible with the Constitution are to be rejected and never willingly imported: Fabian socialism, Marxism, communism, Maoism, Sharia — these are alien and destructive parasitic political philosophies seeking a host in our body politic, with the long-term hope of hollowing out the host to make of it a puppet disguised in Constitutional garb. Religious freedom is not freedom from religion; tolerance is not a right never to be offended; a well-regulated militia is not a delimiting descriptor but rather an all-encompassing one.

4) Judicial originalism: long-time readers of protein wisdom will know instantly how this plank is perhaps the most crucial in the platform. In the absence of some metaphysical force that can arbitrate all disagreements in textual interpretation, the best we can do is embrace the very model that performs our Constitutionally prescribed lawmaking function: law is written and ratified by a legislature made up of corporate agency that intends; law is therefore to be conceived of as a fixed product of that intention — albeit within the conventional constructs we abide by when it comes to judicial interpretation. To that end, the role of the judiciary is to as closely as possible determine that intended meaning and appeal to it as the fixed meaning of any law. Laws are made by a specific collection of individuals in a specific spatio-temporal context. They mean what they mean, not what they can later be made to imply.

5) National sovereignty: We are a nation state. We can and must determine our own parameters for national autonomy. And that determination belongs to the people through their representatives, not a unitary Executive. Thus, we are entitled to control immigration, provide whatever obstacles to it we think in our best national interests, and remove those who have broken our laws — including secreting themselves into the country illegally, whether through border jumping or visa overstays. Our foreign policy will be designed to reflect our national interests. The Reagan model of Kirkpatrick/Weinberg will hold in check the impulse toward Wilsonian democracy projects and neoconservative nation building exercises. But it will also recognize the importance of allies and of American presence in international relations.

6) Free-market capitalism: Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. Ted Cruz at the FTC. This is to be vigorously juxtaposed against the destructive forces of corporatism and crony capitalism preferred by the two major parties, their lobbyists and donors, and influence buyers like Donald Trump. Such “capitalism” is the foundation of liberal fascism, which is the political stage nearly all proto-socialist countries eventually settle into, choosing winners and losers, rewarding friends, punishing foes, and using mere caprice to determine policy.

This is a relatively simple and I hope easily understandable umbrella platform. And importantly, from the perspective of our Founding and Framing, it is a centrist party. Through it, we can work as a coalition to take the stink off of “principle” and embrace the liberating “purity” of accepting the terms of the social compact that joined the civil society to limited government with the belief that a free people can and will make the best choices for themselves.

And it sure as hell beats the incomprehensible and always-fluid nostrums of an orange septuagenarian and those Republicans insisting we find a way not only to support them but to then spend the next 4 years defending them as representative of our political philosophy.

Because screw all that.

And of course, outlaw.