It began with Richard Nixon. He showed Republicans how to win elections and lose their soul, how to capitulate to statism and call it a “new kind of freedom.” Consequently the GOP is now a carbon copy of the Democrat Party.
Throughout the seventies and eighties, neoconservative intellectuals eagerly fostered this “new kind of freedom” which gave Republicans an excuse to blank out on the reality of what they were doing. Led by the late Irving Kristol and big government luminaries like Harvard sociologist Patrick Moynihan and Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, these influential former socialists infiltrated the Republican Party like termites invading the support beams of one’s home. Their adoption of the name “neoconservatives” was merely a cover for wider acceptance. By the early 1990s they had eroded the sacred canons of conservatism with an amoral pragmatism devoid of respect for individual rights and freedom domestically, while fomenting a ruinous global hegemony internationally.
In the November 1977 issue of The American Spectator, Irving Kristol told us that the laissez-faire vision of the Founders was a “doctrinaire fantasy.” Its ideals “make it inadequate...for a political community.” To adhere today to what Jefferson and Madison advocated is anachronistic foolishness, he felt. It must be phased out of our collective conscience. Capitalism and individual rights are dangerous institutions and must be constantly modified by a powerful state that redistributes wealth whenever necessary. In the eyes of Kristol and his followers, freedom, while desirable, is not a primary political value. Machiavelli had the better idea; expediency is the best way to rule. These intellectuals now lead the GOP.
Despicable that the party of Taft and Goldwater would tolerate such open collectivism, but by the advent of the senior Bush regime in 1989, most Republicans were willing to look the other way. They had convinced themselves that freedom and the mega-state are somehow compatible if we wish them to be so. Kristol’s Machiavellians were established in high places and offered the GOP keys to entrenched power in Washington with their support. This, Republicans wanted badly – enough so that they were willing to ignore the founding principles of the nation and tolerate government usurpations that have enslaved millions throughout history. Consequently the GOP now promotes statism, inflation, wealth redistribution, open borders, and a police-the-world foreign policy.
Can Freedom Be Saved?
Can the conservative “freedom movement” be rescued from this tragedy of default? Can neoconservatives be exposed for their stealth and ideological treason to the American vision? Can the true freedom movement eventually restore the Republic? Yes, but it cannot be done with the Republican Party.
The GOP is too tightly controled by the neoconservative elites. What this means is that runaway government cannot be stopped by voting conservatives into Congress and “taking over the GOP” because those that we manage to elect ultimately cave in to the party’s neocon ideology. They may start out as Jimmy Stewart characters in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, full of idealism and fervor to reform, but they don’t stay that way.
Here’s why. Newly elected Republicans to Congress soon see who has the power in the party and realize that going against the neoconservative elites would jeopardize their path to re-election. To run on substantive reforms designed to restore the Founders’ vision would ostracize them from the major donors of the Republican welfare-state establishment and bring criticism instead of praise from the neocon intellectuals. So they choose to appease the corporate donors, to support amnesty for illegals, to play ball with hegemonic foreign policy mavens, and to join with government expansionists. This is how they assure their re-election.
Ideology and money control politics, and the neocons control both in the Republican Party via organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Hudson Institute, the Foreign Policy Initiative, and other highly influential institutions that have been built to dominance in Washington and New York over many decades.
Thus ninety percent of incoming conservative congressmen eventually capitulate to the neocon agenda in order to attract the ideological and funding support that come from its promotional network of scholars, institute heads, and corporate/banking moguls. If not, such newcomers to Congress are abandoned by the party elites.
Republican Rank and File Misguided
So it is very naïve to think the Republican Party can be taken over merely by voting to send conservative candidates to Washington. To get control of the GOP, we will have to root out the powerful neocon intellectuals who promote the party’s vision. We will have to create a whole new array of banking moguls on Wall Street who respect Jefferson and Smith instead of Marx and Keynes. In short, we will have to create a whole new array of intellectual elites to lead the GOP. Such a scholarly take-over will require 40-50 years to accomplish. America doesn’t have this kind of time. We need to challenge the tyrannical control that liberals and neocons have over America now!
In other words it is impossible to change the structure of an institution without changing the source of its power – i.e., its intellectuals. Neocon intellectuals control the GOP by controlling Washington’s think tanks and Wall Street’s banks ideologically. Expecting incoming conservative legislators to seriously challenge these scholars is like expecting school girls to go up against Mafia lords. This is the major flaw of the Tea Party groups that wish to work “within the GOP.”
Thus trying to take over the Republican Party by voting in more “conservative legislators” is a tragic waste of time. It will never stop America’s dictatorial drift. We have been attempting to do this for over four decades, and the freedom advocates we send to Washington continue to be bought off by the GOP’s neoconservative corruption as fast as we send them.
Divorce from the Republicans Needed
How then do we defeat this neocon corruption? Only by leaving the GOP and forming an alternative independent party with an independent candidate (as Ross Perot did in 1992). When a marriage becomes unworkable, wise spouses seek divorce. We in the political arena must do likewise. Our strength lies in the fact that our independent candidate will not be beholden to neocon intellectual and financial power. He will be beholden to the American people. Thus he can run on a campaign of substantive reform. He can tell the truth to the voters. America is now ready for the truth; it will find millions of takers.
Americans for a Free Republic in Dallas, Texas
afr.org has designed a strategy to bring about such a National Independent Party movement for 2016. It’s platform is comprised of Four Pillars of Reform for our tax, monetary, immigration, and foreign policy systems. These are crucial, substantive changes that must be implemented if the country is to survive and return to freedom. The leaders of both the Democrats and Republicans will oppose these reforms, but 50 percent of the American people will embrace them. That leaves 50 percent of American voters for the Democrats and Republicans to split between them, which spells victory for our National Independent Party.
AFR has published a Special Report, “
How Tea Party Patriots Can Break the Demopublican Monopoly and Win in 2016,” that explains the reforms in detail. It is a blueprint for the salvation of America and the permanent establishment of a free-market, conservative, patriot political party, which will replace the Republican Party by drawing four major voting blocks together - the true conservatives of the GOP, the vast body of patriotic independents, the libertarians, and the blue-collar Democrats.
