Stop the Third Party Insanity
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.
