By John Hawkins
Monday, September 5, 2016
It’s very easy to point the finger at all the things that
are wrong with the Republican establishment. First and foremost, a Republican
party that continues to live to serve the Wall
Street Journal, the Chamber of Commerce, and rich donors at the expense of
the rest of its constituency does not have a bright future. Beyond that, the
GOP establishment rarely stands up to Obama in a meaningful way, makes a
significant effort to sell conservative values to the American people. Rarely
does it even seem to have the most fundamental understanding of problems
confronting America. We’re talking about the sort of people who pat themselves
on the back for obsessing over corporate-tax reform and giving away our
sovereignty via the Trans-Pacific Partnership while many of the people who
voted for them are going out of their minds over Syrian refugees, Obama’s
executive orders, and our government’s welcoming in every illegal alien the
Democrats can find.
Although Donald Trump is headed toward an inevitable
defeat against Hillary Clinton, he got as far as he did by talking about issues
people care about. Most conservative Republicans want a fence on the border.
They’re understandably worried about radical Muslims slipping into our country
via our lax immigration policies. They’re furious that Obama is willfully
ignoring the law on immigration, and they paid attention when the entire
leadership team of the House GOP swore to use the power of the purse to keep
Obamacare from ever being implemented. When is the last time Mitch McConnell
said something of consequence about those hot-button issues? And if he started
doing it tomorrow, would anyone notice, since the Democrats, the mainstream
media, and the GOP base wrote him off as a joke long ago?
Speaking of the mainstream media, Republican voters found
out in the primaries that many members of the conservative media were just as
unreliable as the MSM. Although there are certainly true-blue Trump believers
among them, I suspect that a lot of the outlets and media figures backing him
saw a wave of enthusiastic fans of “the Donald” and concluded that it would
spike their traffic numbers if they ran out in front of the parade. Many of
them benefited from doing exactly that. For example, Sean Hannity got good
ratings out of pushing Trump. Sarah Palin got back in the spotlight for five
minutes; Ann Coulter got a new book. The rest of us got Hillary. It doesn’t
seem like such a fair trade, but do you think any of them will pay a price for
promoting a candidate who never had a chance to win? It’s doubtful, because the
only place with less accountability than the federal government is the
Republican party.
Alex Jones has been a conspiracy theorist for years, and
WorldNetDaily spent Bush’s second term promoting the insane idea that W. was going
to merge the United States, Canada, and Mexico into one country. Did their
traffic drop after doing that? If anything, both Jones and WorldNetDaily are
more popular than ever. So do you really think the members of the conservative
media who misled their readers by hiding all the flaws of a hopeless candidate
will pay any price for doing that? They should, but it seems unlikely.
In a related matter, as the Left has gotten ever more
easily offended, conservatives have become ever more anxious to offend. There’s
a lot to be said for refusing to be hemmed in by political correctness, but
we’ve gotten to the point where many conservatives have embraced the idea that
if political correctness is bad, then anything that’s politically incorrect
must be good. This has created an environment where saying foolish and
inflammatory things can be a major career enhancer for conservatives. If you
can say something that makes liberals talk about how much they hate you, but
conservatives won’t walk away even if you make them cringe, that’s a recipe for
selling books and getting on TV. This may be great for the careers of a few
people, but it also gives the public at large a terrible impression of
conservatives. Even if they say some things you agree with, the last thing that
anyone who cares about the conservative movement should want is for the public
to base its opinion of it on people who are trying to offend as many people as
possible to get attention.
That’s particularly relevant, because of the past seven
presidential elections, this is going to be sixth in which the GOP lost the
popular vote. If the Democrats are wolves in sheep’s clothing who hide their
radical agenda, we’ve allowed the most obnoxious Republicans among us to make
us look like the sheepdogs who sleep on the job, urinate on the rug, and bark
all night long.
If the GOP decides to embrace the new-wave KKK of the
alt-right, that problem is only going to get worse. It doesn’t matter whether
you’re a wannabe Nazi or making obnoxious racist comments and Holocaust jokes
for the “lulz,” there’s something fundamentally wrong with you as a human
being. Online, the alt-right, like the conspiracy theorists, may be able to
drive a certain amount of traffic, but in the real world where elections are
decided, it’s the worst kind of political poison.
On one mildly positive note, all the articles about
conservative PACs — such as SarahPAC, the Madison Project, and the biggest
tea-party groups — that have wasted more than 90 percent of the money they
receive seem to have cut into their donations, but scam PACs are still a real
problem. If you’re getting e-mails asking you for money to help Trey Gowdy,
Allen West, Ben Carson, or any other big name in the conservative movement and
that person is not the one sending you the e-mail, you should assume that any
money you send in probably won’t do anything other than improve someone’s
lifestyle. It’s a shame when there are more sleazy PACS out there than good
ones, but that’s where we are today.
You can go on and on with these issues.
Even though we Republicans desperately needs to improve
our numbers with black and Hispanic Americans, we do very little outreach
because it’s difficult work that won’t pay off in a big way for years. We’ve
fallen back on pushing stale stock ideas instead of applying conservative
principles to the more-relevant issues that people care the most about. While
conservative donors pour money into political campaigns that accomplish nothing
if the candidate loses, liberal donors spend a much greater share of their
money building a movement to help them achieve long-term success. As a result,
we’ve seen liberals take over Hollywood, the music industry, and our schools
while we do very little of consequence to stop them or even to moderate their
influence.
Because the GOP establishment has ignored and
disappointed the base so many times, the grassroots have taken to demanding
unrealistic levels of purity from Republicans in Congress. That’s a
chicken-or-egg problem that will be difficult to fix without major behavior
changes from the GOP leadership. Our open primaries and slanted debate system
allow Democrats to play a major role in selecting our GOP nominee every four
years. Rewarding failed candidates, particularly failed presidential
candidates, with TV shows and fame encourages non-serious candidates to run in
order to build an e-mail list and a name for themselves. (See Mike Huckabee,
Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum, Lindsey Graham, Jim Gilmore, George Pataki, and
Ben Carson, among others this time around.)
How all of this is going to work out in the aftermath of
Trump’s disheartening loss to Hillary Clinton when #NeverTrump Republicans and
Trump diehards will be at each other’s throats over who’s to blame for the loss
to Hillary by one of the least popular major-party presidential nominees in
American history is anyone’s guess. However it plays out, let’s hope that we
start addressing all these issues instead of picking one group as a scapegoat
for the problems the conservative movement faces. The establishment Republicans
may deserve most of the criticism aimed at them, but if we pretend that they’re
the only ones who have to change anything, we’re doomed as a movement.
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