Today,
Red State diarist Nikitas3 has posted a lengthy entry on the site calling for the formation of a Conservative Party of America to act as a countervailing force to the Republicans and Democrats. Excerpt:
It is time to establish a Conservative Party of America that will bring together all conservatives under one umbrella – Tea Party, 2nd Amendment, Constitutionalists, pro-life, pro-family, Christian, anti-terrorist, traditional marriage, private-property rights, secure borders, pro-military, pro-nuclear etc.
This would not be just another political advocacy group. It would be a whole new party to add to Democrats and Republicans. It could run candidates for everything from town council to president of the United States.
Today there is no such party. The Tea Party movement indeed represents conservatives, but it is not an official party and its focus is strictly fiscal. Even still, in its short history, the Tea Party helped to sweep hundreds of candidates into office in 2010. And we need to build on that success and that momentum. . . .
Like the Tea Party, CPA will work with the Republican party when the GOP fields good candidates. No problem. Otherwise CPA can put up candidates and run them in Republican primaries or run them as Conservatives in general elections.
CPA candidates may be Tea Party or pro-life or pro-nuclear or whatever. But right now, many conservatives - in the pro-life movement, for instance - may not feel they really have a political home except in their own separate sphere of political influence. They may be well-spoken, but they see no way to expand their ideas to a bigger audience as a Conservative Party would allow them to, even to the national candidate level. CPA could begin showcasing intelligent conservatives of all stripes from all over the country, and bring out a whole new generation of activists just as the Tea Party did in less than two years. . . .
The article then goes on to list nearly twenty reasons to support the idea. Perhaps Nikitas3 is unaware, but Red State diarists are literally not allowed to advocate for any political party other than the GOP. The site's rules dictate that all posts must be ideologically conservative and politically Republican, as
reported here on a Red State post from last year advocating third party activism. As I wrote at the time:
The two-party state and duopoly system of government is (re)produced and maintained, first and foremost, by a set of ideological fabrications and mystifications which aim to create the illusion that all resistance to the dictatorship of the Democratic-Republican Party is futile. However, the rules of our duopolized discourse are not laws of nature, they are artifices actively enforced by the ideological prison guards of the two-party state . . .
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2 comments:
An interesting call at a moment when the movement seems to have a harder time than ever holding itself together. Post-CPAC, I suspect that anyone calling for a new conservative party also has a purge of the larger movement in mind. There are, arguably, more people calling themselves "conservative" than any movement can coherently accommodate. The very meaning of the word may soon be in play.
I'd also add that the appropriate response to such proposals from an independent or third party perspective is that there already are a number of national conservative parties! Including the Conservative Party USA and the Constitution party. The same goes for progressives and liberals who call for the formation of a progressive/liberal alternative to the Democrats. I often wonder if people are just unaware of already existing third parties when they make such proposals, or if they reject them for some reason. In many cases, I suspect it is the former.
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