SENSIBLE CONSERVATIVE AMERICA

We need to recover sensible conservative America.

     The Founding Fathers created two political parties, based on the concept that one would reflect liberal views and the other would reflect conservative views. Their idea, partially based on the British parliamentary system and also influenced by Greek origins of democracy, was that the resulting governance would be balanced. They also built-in enough checks to make sure no one group could drastically upset that balance. The concept has worked quite well for a couple of hundred years, albeit not without hiccups.

     Unfortunately, the Founding Fathers didn’t anticipate a situation where one, or both, of those parties could be almost completely high-jacked by radicals.

     Over the last two hundred years, there have been several attempts to derail the original concept, but there have always been enough sensible voices to correct those aberrations. Sensible voices, that is, who were willing to stand up and be counted, despite the abuse they received. In recent times, the McCarthy era, after World War II, is an example. McCarthy came close to bringing down the system but, ultimately, did not prevail.

     A correction to the current Republican aberration may well eventually follow the same path…..but it may need a little help in the meantime.

     The U.S. Republican Party started to go off the rails with the rise of the “Tea Party”, its congressional instigator, Newt Gingrich, and the evangelical “Right”.

     No political party in its right mind invokes religion as part of its “platform”. The subject is just too divisive, and politics is all about appealing to as many voters as possible. There is, however, one exception to that rule. If the party concerned believes there are enough automatic votes out there to support religious input, the strategy might prove successful. The current Republican Party situation is a case-in-point. It was good enough to put Donald Trump in the White House, and his fanning of the evangelical and white supremacist flames has produced a result where very, very few of the sensible Republicans dare contradict his movement. The result is that the concept of a liberal/conservative balance has all but disappeared.

     Unfortunately, this disappearance of the balance has also raised the ugly spectre of demagoguery, which could easily lead to dictatorship. That path is far more slippery than we would like to think.

     Two examples: The United Kingdom avoided this path at the turn of the twentieth century by having a strong conservative base that was able to side-line the lunatic fringe. Germany was not so lucky in the 1930’s.

     If such a slippery slope is to be avoided in the United States today, how can we help to marginalize the current aberration? We have to recover sensible conservative America. That means we not only have to side-line the radical Republican groups, such as Qanon and the Proud Boys, we also have to side-line the opportunists like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Donald Trump, who seek to ride them to power. Donald Trump, for the second time!

     One possibility for a strategy to address this dangerous “slippery slope” problem, would be to encourage Donald Trump to form his own political party.

     The one thing we can be certain of with Trump is his enormous ego. Catering to that ego by encouraging him to form the Donald Trump Party would divert, and marginalize the radical “Right”. This would possibly allow the Republican Party to re-establish its traditional and historical role. The Founding Fathers’ concept of balance would return, and Donald Trump could be permanently banished to the leadership of the ultra-right conservative fringe.

     It’s worth a shot, and it might work.