A Grand New Party, Social Conservatism, & Ways to Build a Pragmatic Coalition to Ensure America’s Future for Modern Conservatives:
With the Trumpian populist style of Republican Conservatism that has become popular on the American right, the time has come for American Conservatives to think pragmatically about the soon-coming political realignment that we Conservatives must face and the new coalition that we wish to construct going forward for the future. While there are many troubles that have come from this new age of politics for social conservatives and the Republican party in general, I believe that we have been gifted a special opportunity to forge a better, stronger coalition that will help bring our great nation out of our present insanity and put us back on the right track. With the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the reemergence of naturally American populist economic sentiment and conservative cultural warriors at the helm of Trumpian-style Republicanism, there may be a way forward that can take advantage of the current mass dissatisfaction within both parties to make a new governing majority of the future. A Grand New Party!
For the last 50 years or so, the Republican Party has been defined as the party mainly representing the political interests of the following groups: Traditional Cultural Conservatives, Conservative Christians, Evangelical Christians, Capitalists, Big Business & Small Business Owners, the needs of the Majority Population (Mostly White), & the Older Generations (Mostly Baby Boomers). The Party has paid lip service to other political factions at various times in a generally half-hearted attempt to broaden its base of support by running a few candidates who happen to be from certain key demographics and ethnicities. However, the party’s pre-2024 Trump program rarely promoted policies that sought to include them fully in our Conservative vision of the American Dream. Thus, efforts in this regard rarely borne fruit in the past, especially among Black and Hispanic voters who generally share our socially conservative worldview and yet feel their interests are better presented as a group by the Democratic Party.
At the same time, many of the groups that many establishment Conservatives currently pander to (especially the big business technocrats) are actively helping remake America into a culturally progressive tyranny that threatens our core Judeo-Christian beliefs and the historical roots of the GOP’s political heritage. Under current trajectories, the Republican Coalition will be a political dinosaur in 20 to 30 years if our leadership continues to promote the outdated RINO (Neo-Conservative) style Republicanism of the Bush Sr., Bush Jr., and Mit Romey eras, or if it misguidedly turns to the Ethno-Nationalism and ideological fanaticism that some minority segments of the Party are trying to push us into accepting as mainstream. If nothing changes, the Republican Party, and more generally, American Conservatism, stand at the edge of political suicide.
By contrast, the Democratic Party, coming out of its New Deal and Great Society heritage of the 1930s and 1960s, has consolidated a much broader base of support that has the potential to overgrow and snuff out the Judeo-Christian beliefs and American values we have sworn to uphold and protect. Through generations of political maneuvering and guile, the Democratic Party has been able to maintain a seemingly unwieldy coalition of multiple factions with a variety of beliefs and interests: Academia, the Young and College-Educated, Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Jewish Americans, Muslim Americans, Urban and Blue Collier Laborers, Cultural Liberals and Progressives, and Board Socialists. This vast political machine that holds these factions in its current lineup will have little trouble running ‘roughshod’ over the current Republican coalition in the next few election cycles and will turn this nation into an effective one-party state. A one-party state where Conservatives will be forced to comply, convert, and eventually become irrelevant, as our beliefs and our way of life fade into the past
and are misrepresented to our future children and grandchildren as textbook examples of “Fascist tendencies”.
What is to be done? What we do to prevent this horrendous future from coming to pass? The solution is quite simple in effect. The miracle pill to our present predicament is to build a broad mass coalition that can be constructed simply by returning to the true ideological roots on which the GOP was originally founded. The Republican Party of today has been corrupted by the interests of the privileged and undeserving few who have managed to maneuver themselves into the leadership positions of the party. These elites have their own
personal agendas or the love of money, nothing more. They simultaneously promote cuts to their rich friends’ and donors' businesses (in which they usually hold more than a few shares) while passing large budgets that overburden the middle and working classes yearly. They speak of their ‘Christian conservative upbringings’ while they capitulate again and again on Capitol Hill. They
have continued the erosion of Traditional American values for vague promises of more tax cuts and increased military budgets that are used not to defend their constituents here at home but to rain death and destruction in foreign lands where most Americans have no desire to be. In short, the old ‘ruling class’ of the Republican Party has been corrupted by the dark side of Crony Capitalism (‘i.e., Fascist type Corporatism’) and has used its positions to serve the personal
greed and the exploitative nature of the business lobbyists who patronize their elite club.
For many years, most Republicans have been willing to accept this arrangement without posing these vital questions: Do these big corporatist businesses serve America’s interests? Do they serve to protect our culture, traditions, or future? The answer is no! They push the same culturally progressive agenda in their HR "commissar" departments as they do in their board rooms and with their private donations that the Progressives and Socialists do in their think tanks and opinion columns. We have forgotten that, historically, big business has never been the ally of the true Republican Party and has only served to corrupt our leaders, while using us as pawns in their attempts to gain monetary wealth and power.
The Republican movement, started by Radical Republicans in the 1850s, was not a party dominated by big businessmen and enslaved to serve their interests. It was built on moral, traditional, and mainly Christian principles that men (and later women), regardless of race, were made in the image of God and should be treated as equals with a decent standard of living. The Radical Republicans of the 1860s were economically centered (if not outright left-wing in some
cases) and were progressive in the traditional sense of the word. They want to make the world a better place through a practical application of Christian Social Principles. This meant they originally stood with the enslaved blacks against the economic and amoral exploitation by the rich and powerful (exemplified in the Southern Slave owners in the 1850s-60s). Their original slogan was that of "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men," which stood for their support of education, of equality, and relative equity for all men, and the use of yes, big (yet balanced) federal government to implement their Christian ideals and enshrine their ideology into the fabric of America.
Later, as the country became more industrialized, the Republican Party, under the leadership of President Theodore Roosevelt, continued the trend of conserving traditional American culture while advocating for the progress of human advancement and its own version of the future. This included rights for the working man with the means of protecting himself from corporate exploitation, while also promoting non-crony true ‘free market’ enterprise. This brief but bright 50-year glimpse of the Party’s early history generally included a coalition that was mainly comprised of Working Laborers, Economic and Moral Progressives, recently freed Black Americans, Traditional Conservatives, and Christians. Politically, it was a balance of ‘true’ free market capitalism with government and moral, and cultural restraint, of imagined equality and equity for white or black laborers or owners, and of human progress within the ethical constraints of traditional Christian principles. It was not a perfect coalition and it had some problematic beliefs, but it combined the best of both sides and what we would consider today both right and left. It was betrayed twice in 1876 and 1912 when the pro-monopoly wing of the party chose to sabotage the original beliefs of the party for the vain pursuit of political power (in the case of 1876) and corporate creed (in the case of 1912), which lead to the effective death of the Lincoln-Roosevelt populist Republican coalition.
As we enter a new age of American politics in the 21st Century, a modern iteration of this coalition could save not only the Republican Party but the America we knew, loved, and were promised since childhood. Large elements of this old coalition have resurfaced with the rise of Trump and the Populist wing of the party. If we have the will and the courage to seize the moment, we can end the political polarization in America and put our country on the right track. If Republicans could let go of the lies that we have been led to believe about American Conservatism by the establishment, we could lead America into a new Golden Age of Liberty, Peace, and Prosperity. We must look back to the roots of our Party, the Lincoln-Roosevelt Populist Republican Coalition, and with that new lens applied, we must work to pragmatically form a new coalition for a better party and a better future for America as a whole!
