The Conservative Party — A Prospectus and Call for Action

Introduction

"A house divided against itself cannot stand." — Abraham Lincoln

"Stand for nothing, and you will fall for anything." — Anonymous

Among the many misgivings the American Founding Fathers voiced about their political innovation of popular government was their fear of "factions," James Madison's term for political parties.

"Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority," Madison wrote in the Federalist Paper No. 10.

However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence, of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true. It will be found, indeed, on a candid review of our situation, that some of the distresses under which we labor have been erroneously charged on the operation of our governments; but it will be found, at the same time, that other causes will not alone account for many of our heaviest misfortunes; and, particularly, for that prevailing and increasing distrust of public engagements, and alarm for private rights, which are echoed from one end of the continent to the other. These must be chiefly, if not wholly, effects of the unsteadiness and injustice with which a factious spirit has tainted our public administrations.

Madison argued that there are but two methods for eliminating the "violence of factions": removing the cause of factionalism or controlling its effects. He furthermore argued that there are but two methods for removing the cause of faction: destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence or giving every citizen the "same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests."

The first remedy would be worse than the disease, he said, because "liberty is to faction what air is to fire." The second "expedient" would be "as impracticable as the first would be unwise," he said, adding:

As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.

The latent cause of factionalism or party spirit can be found in the contentious nature of man, Madison observed.

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.

Madison said it would be vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests and render them all subservient to the public good. "Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm," he worried. "Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another or the good of the whole."

The inference to which we are brought, Madison said, is that the causes of factionalism cannot be removed and that relief is only to be sought by controlling its effects. And that relief can best be found in a truly republican form of government. A "pure democracy," by which a passionate majority may impose its will at will, is certain to lead to a tyranny in which there is "nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party," he said.

Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

A republic, by which Madison said he meant "a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking." By "scheme of representation," Madison meant the delegation of the government to a small number of citizens elected by the rest.

But his faith in this form of government depended entirely on the moral character of both the electors and the elected.

Representative government has the advantage "to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves."

On the other hand, he observed, there is always the danger of unjust and unscrupulous representatives working against the common good of the citizenry. "Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people."

Thus it is vital that even representative powers be diffused, checked and balanced, and the genius of the American federal system is that these powers are indeed so allocated. "The federal Constitution forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures."

In the American system, "it will be more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried; and the suffrages of the people being more free, will be more likely to centre in men who possess the most attractive merit and the most diffusive and established characters," Madison said, in terms which may seem naive in light of today's civil and political horrors, but which also seem to foresee the modern circumstance.

The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.

In the extent and proper structure of the Union, therefore, we behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government. And according to the degree of pleasure and pride we feel in being republicans, ought to be our zeal in cherishing the spirit and supporting the character of Federalists.

The Unthinkable Realized

We see from the words of this Federalist Paper No. 10, that there were an number of things which Madison and his fellow Founding Patriots thought impossible under the American system of diffused government, or, if not impossible, at least unthinkable. Among these were the notion that every citizen would someday come to have the "same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests," thus dissolving the need for any "factions" or parties advocating diverse political thoughts or systems. Similarly, it seemed inconceivable to them that some "wicked project" such as "a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property..." could someday pervade the "whole body of the Union."

What Madison considered unthinkable now seems, in our time, to be racing past the realm of possibility into the province of the probable. Our present parties, at least at their leadership levels, if not at the grass roots at one end of the shortening political spectrum, are rapidly becoming indistinguishable. Calls for political unity, bipartisanship, and "reaching across the aisle" are everywhere, and anyone who insists that taking principled positions against the grain but for the ultimate good of the country and our cherished freedoms is accused of standing in the way of progress (read: progressivism).

A demographically, philosophically and culturally homogeneous supermajority is rising to a height which gives it near unchecked courage to stifle and extinguish dissent. Political commentator Patrick Buchanan, who is one of the nation's most distinguished leaders to have elevated principle above today's style of unprincipled politics, suggests that a new political monolith is arising in America — one in which the politics of guilt and pity and class and race are rolling like a tsunami over the politics of self-governing freedom which so marvelously distinguished our nation at its birth.

This monolith is emerging naturally from the even more monolithic institution of American public education, he says. The dominant faction is "capturing a rising share of the young and college-educated, who are emerging from schools and colleges where the values of the counterculture ... have become the new orthodoxy," he writes.

Overwhelmed in this flood is Principled Conservatism, not because conservative principles have all but evaporated from American hearts but because, with the passing of their last world-class advocate, Ronald Reagan, no clarion voice remains to remind the electorate to their true best interests — those so astonishingly carried onto the human stage by our Founding Fathers and their spiritual ancestors. The modern Republican Party, which pretends to be the champion of these principles, has not only lost its understanding of their true breadth and depth but also its stomach for defending what vestiges remain. The power brokers of the GOP, the elitist blue-bloods who have failed to discern the times, continue their blind drive toward national political consensus in hopes of sounding broadminded and of maintaining their country-club prerogatives, even as the body politic plunges into the abyss. As presidential candidate Barack Obama was fond of saying of his 2008 GOP opponent John McCain, "He just doesn't get it." He was right. In short, the party, epitomized by McCain and his old-boy RINO network, has lost its vision and thus no longer knows where to look for the truths which could salvage this nation. And when vision is lost it rarely returns.

All this seems to suggest that these blind eyes need replacement — an organic transplant. We submit there is little or no hope of reviving a viable political vision within an institution which has lost its way, its wisdom and its understanding and sees virtue in pursuing power through watered-down mimicry of rivals who have passionately driven their own dark visions of progress away from our national roots and have already succeeded in implanting that vision into the mind of the nation.

The time has come replace the Republican Party. This is not a call for a new conservative third-party movement. It is a call for the wholesale abandonment of that now useless party and the genesis of a new party in its stead. To be sure, the hapless blue-bloods and appeasement-minded party elite will continue cluelessly to cling to their dying institution and its name. They may continue to speak for some time of "reform," which they naively believe will revitalize their tired out faction and recapture the loyalties of a nation which has already pledged its allegiance to the progressive banner. But these "reforms" are little more than the winds of syncretism, and they provide the drifting nation with no anchor in American values.

We call for the birth a Conservative Party of America. A replacement party for the GOP — not a third-party rival. A courageous challenger to the growing monolith. We call on the stalwarts of the conservative movement in Congress and the Senate, in statehouses across the land, in talk radio and other media, in think tanks and political institutions of all kinds to publicly embrace this new party, officially change their party designation and affiliation, and work boldly for a new birth of freedom under the banner of organized Conservatism.

We invite the conservative grassroots to join in dialogue and radical action toward a sea-change in the civic life of our beloved homeland.

Abraham Lincoln, in 1858, asked what constitutes the bulwark of this nation's liberty and independence. It is not our fortifications or might, since these very things could actually be turned against our liberties, he warned, offering instead: "Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, every where. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors."