The headline is funny — repeal and replace the GOP. And the notion is nice — but since conservatives don’t engage now in sufficient numbers, what makes us think they will with a new party? Here is Bruce Walker writing at American Thinker:
In an American Thinker article on October 19 of last year, I argued that conservatives ought to consider strongly creating a National Conservative Party. In that article, I asked the question: “Does anyone seriously doubt that the Republican Party, which unlike the Democrat Party is supposed to actually stand for certain principles and values, is grievously and probably terminally broken?”
What are the possible solutions? We could recruit and run conservatives as Democrat candidates for elective offices right up to the presidential candidate. Few conservatives seem interested in this approach, and because it would take a major effort, it would be doomed to fail.
Conservatives could try, as we have been doing since Reagan, to vote out in primaries those Republicans who do not really want to fix the problems in Washington and to put into leadership positions principled conservatives who will do what they promise. This has not worked – and that is stating it mildly.
Conservatives could boycott elections or run independent candidates who have no realistic chance of winning an election. While this might cost Republicans elections, the winner would be not conservatives, but Democrats, who are at least as bad as Republicans. The idea would be to punish Republicans into being better, but there is no reason at all to believe that it would work.
Why not, instead, do what I suggested last October and create a new National Conservative Party? Conservatives remain the largest ideological group in America, with the most recent Battleground Poll, taken after the 2016 election, showing that 52% of those who picked any ideological choice – conservative, moderate, or liberal – chose conservative. Virtually all other polls show conservatives significantly outnumbering liberals nationally.
Read more: American Thinker
Image credit: Saving Our Future.
