You are a Republican.\u00a0 You consider yourself a \u201cconservative,\u201d maybe even a \u201cTea Partier.\u201d\u00a0 But whatever you prefer to call yourself, the truth of the matter is that there are some basic facts of contemporary American political life that you detest.<\/p>\n
First, the federal government has grown well beyond anything that our Founding Fathers could have envisioned.\u00a0 Today, it has come to assume authority over virtually every aspect of your life.<\/p>\n
Inseparable from this first fact is another: you have far less liberty as an American than you should have under the United States Constitution.\u00a0 The exponential expansion of the federal government over the decades has been inevitably attended by an equally exponential diminution of liberty.<\/p>\n
Third, both <\/em>major national parties, Republicans and Democrats, \u201cconservatives\u201d and \u201cliberals\u201d alike, in spite of their assurances to the contrary, have continued to feed the Leviathan that is our federal government.<\/p>\n You want change.\u00a0 <\/em>You want real <\/em>change.\u00a0<\/p>\n More specifically, you want for your elected representatives to finally\u2014finally<\/em>!\u2014walk in accordance with their talk.\u00a0 You want, in other words, for Republicans to proceed to revoke the Big Government agenda that has dominated American politics for most of the twentieth century to the present.\u00a0 You ache for politicians who will fight to restore the Constitutional Republic that our Founders bequeathed to us, politicians who will supplement their rhetoric of \u201climited government\u201d with real action.<\/p>\n As a self-avowed \u201cconservative\u201d or Tea Partier, you have had it with establishment Republicans.\u00a0 You have had it with those prominent figures in your own party who live to convince \u201cindependents\u201d and \u201cmoderates\u201d that it is \u201can open tent,\u201d so to speak, a party able and willing to accommodate a rich, even staggering, diversity of viewpoints.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t that you have a problem with intellectual diversity in itself; it is just that you know all too well that the only viewpoints that establishment Republicans are eager to embrace when they speak thus are those that entail an ever larger role for the federal government in our daily activities.\u00a0<\/p>\n Establishment Republicans have proven time and time again that they are most certainly not <\/em>in favor of the \u201climited\u201d or \u201cconstitutional\u201d government to which they routinely pay lip service.\u00a0 With this you are exasperated.\u00a0 But you are just as exhausted with those establishment Republican politicians who never tire of trying to convince you that they are not establishment Republicans.\u00a0<\/p>\n Since their crushing losses in \u201906 and \u201908, Republicans have expressed regret over having \u201clost their way.\u201d\u00a0 While you are relieved that they have conceded their betrayal of the very principles for which they have claimed to stand, you are no less frustrated now than you were while they were in power, for you still <\/em>don\u2019t know what in the Republican Party agenda has changed.<\/p>\n Now there is another Republican Party presidential primary race.\u00a0 Let\u2019s say that you don\u2019t know the names of any of the contestants.\u00a0 All that you know is the following.<\/p>\n Of the seven candidates, all of them, save one, adamantly supports \u201cthe War on Terror.\u201d\u00a0 More specifically, they support President George W. Bush\u2019s \u201cFreedom Agenda,\u201d an enterprise that requires the United States government to deploy the time, treasure, and blood of its citizens toward the end of \u201cspreading Democracy\u201d throughout the world.\u00a0 <\/em>It was for the sake of this mission that we have spent the last decade attempting to \u201cfundamentally transform\u201dIraq and Afghanistan. \u00a0<\/p>\n It is also for the purpose of waging \u201cthe War on Terror\u201d that all of the candidates, save one, enthusiastically endorse \u201cthe Patriot Act;\u201d the nationalization of airport security; and every liberty-imperiling measure ostensibly intended to provide ever greater security for Americans.<\/p>\n In other words, the very same policies that drove legions of American voters into the arms of Democrats in 2006 and 2008 all of the GOP\u2019s presidential candidates, save one, continue to embrace just as ardently now as they did back then.<\/p>\n Although most of the base of the Republican Party, and, truth be told, most Americans, oppose \u201cforeign aid,\u201d all of the candidates, save one, supports it.\u00a0 This lone candidate deems it unconstitutional and immoral that American citizens should be made to part with their time, energy, and money to subsidize any <\/em>foreign governments.<\/p>\n All of the candidates claim <\/em>to oppose the exorbitant spending in which our federal government engages.\u00a0 Yet none of them, save one, has proposed a substantive plan to address it.\u00a0 That is, none of the candidates, save one, has specified a single program, much less an agency, that he or she is unequivocally committed to eliminating.\u00a0 The exceptional candidate, in stark contrast, has explicitly and unequivocally identified one trillion dollars <\/em>worth of programs<\/em> and agencies<\/em> that he or she would abolish within one year <\/em>of being elected President. \u00a0<\/p>\n Here is the proverbial $64,000 question: as a conservative or Tea Partier who seeks to reduce the federal government to a size and a scope that our Constitution would recognize, who among the seven GOP presidential candidates sounds most inviting?<\/p>\n Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.<\/p>\n originally published at The New American<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You are a Republican.\u00a0 You consider yourself a \u201cconservative,\u201d maybe even a \u201cTea Partier.\u201d\u00a0 But whatever you prefer to call yourself, the truth of the matter is that there are some basic facts of contemporary American political life that you detest. First, the federal government has grown well beyond anything that our Founding Fathers could…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n