I relate to the world mostly through internet message boards. Some people might say that this gives me a distorted view of the world, and they're probably right.
Still, you see trends in online conversations, and one of these trends I've noticed is that people who call themselves conservative or Republican often dismiss anyone who criticizes the GOP as either a liberal or a Democrat. There's no room in their pointy heads for any other options. If you don't like what the GOP has become, you must be a Democrat.
What these people don't realize is that since about 2007, the Republican Party has changed dramatically, and some of us who were involved with the party before that don't like the changes. We don't like the dumbing down of the party. We don't like corporation worship being portrayed as a conservative value. We don't like the anti-science agenda, which threatens America's security and prosperity. We don't like the paranoid conspiracy fantasies that are the main product of talk radio.
That doesn't mean we support the Democrats. It means that we oppose the corruption of the Republican Party, which is also a corruption of American conservatism.
At least some of the Tea Partiers should understand that distinction. After all, one of the things that led to the rise of the Tea Party movement was disgust with the way the Republican Party broke most of its promises to America during the George W. Bush administration. Yeah, we got tax cuts, which haven't panned out as well as we hoped, but ideas like limited government and fiscal responsibility were dropped without hesitation.
The Tea Party should have been a movement to restore a traditional Republican agenda, but it went off the rails. It became a joke.
Looking past the internet conversations, it becomes clear that one of the Republican Party's biggest problems is that it has abandoned honesty and principles. It's become more of a marketing campaign than a sincere political party. We saw this after the 2012 election when the big question for the GOP wasn't whether it truly has good ideas for America or not, but how best to market itself to America.
What the people running the party and many of those supporting it fail to realize is that America is a generally conservative nation. Although we have a strong progressive streak that goes back to the nation's founding, we like stability.
If the GOP, which is supposed to the organized political expression of American conservatism, can't sell itself to a conservative nation without marketing tricks, the problem isn't with the nation. The problem is with the party, with the corruption of basic principles in pursuit of money and votes.
That corruption won't be fixed until the party stops seeing America as a market that it wants to sell things to. It won't be fixed until the party realizes that you can't claim to support a principle, like respect for the Constitution, and at the same time support programs, like widespread drug testing, that disrespect the Constitution.
It won't be fixed until more Republicans quit frothing at the mouth about what they see as problems with the Democrats and start focusing on fixing the problems in their own party. That's going to take some tough honesty and self-examination that few Republicans today practice.
That's not because those Republicans lack personal integrity. It's because they've let themselves be led astray by twisted tongues and clever marketing. They've let themselves be convinced that pointing out problems within the party is a form of treason, when it's really an expression of loyalty to the underlying principles the party claims to represent.
It took me six years from when I first started having doubts in 2006 about where the party was headed to the point that I made the change from Republican to
ex-Republican. It took about two weeks after that for my disgust with the corruption of the GOP to change me from
ex-Republican to anti-Republican.
And being anti-Republican is not the same thing as being a Democrat.
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