The Neo-Reagan Era is Dead!

By Roger F. Gay

Ronald Reagan said this. Ronald Reagan said that. In the spirit of Ronald Reagan, how many times can a Republican politician repeat Ronald Reagan's name during a campaign? Anybody know the record? I've been trying to make the point for probably at least a decade now. Through two presidential election cycles, the major players seem to be the last to get the point. The Neo-Reagan Era is Dead! We need to bury its disciples to allow the Republican Party to get a life.

Reagan's political victories during the last century are non-transferable. He was a successful politician back then, not a saint that defined American politics for the next thousand years. Yet, the old guard in the Republican Party seems to want to kick Reagan around in his grave the same way the Communists pulverized Marx. And now we're also seeing the same kind of refusal to give up power, along with cheating, bullying, and violence when the strategy doesn't work.

The winning Reagan victory coalition has been white-washed in an effort to justify the increasingly ludicrous effort to use it as the definition of American political conservatism; and thus, define the Republican Party's core. John McCain's loss to Barack Obama in 2008 should have been sufficient negation. By 2012, the Reagan pretenders couldn't even get enough traction to survive the primaries. Romney's push into the nomination took so much cheating and fraud that there was no way to cover it up. By the end, the Party simply dismissed duly elected delegates en masse and substituted Romney delegates in their place.

For those who just don't get it yet, the unthinkable then happened, while for some of us, what happened was expected. The Reagan legacy strategy yielded a second term for the opposition, a guy who had already, through a first term, been judged the worst president in American history. How bad does a result have to be before the obvious is admitted? Is it sufficient to lose to a man whose opposition to Constitutional rule, the founding principles that define the country, are well known? To a man whose corrupt financial dealings with public money are apparent? Someone who has and continues to be openly accused of treason?

The Reagan coalition included social conservatives whose political sentiments run with the worst of the far left. They want nothing less than to see the federal government taking complete control of every aspect of personal life. It included the most fraudulent of “fiscal conservatives” who are only opposed to government spending to the extent that their opposition helps to realign government “investments” to provide advantage to their own. These two groups seem oblivious to the fact that the general political path they've supported was previously defined by the most destructive far-left psychopaths and dictators. It is a path that causes great suffering and always leads eventually to total meltdown.

The group most notably missing from this coalition is the American political right-wing, American political conservatives who are knowledgeable and principled enough to hold the value of limited government above other political goals. It is obvious to the rest of us that Americans yearn to be free just as others around the world. The candidates knew it and pretended to support the idea. The Ron Paul movement demonstrated that it, today, has a more powerful ground-swell of dedicated and enthusiastic supporters than any other cause. Yes, those were the people acting like thorns in the feet of the neo-Reaganites; the people who exposed the Party's corruption.

It is already obvious that the Republican Party cannot survive without real American conservatives. Just as it is obvious that they were dumped by the Party like unwanted ballast during this last election. Negotiation with this true Republican core is no longer possible for the old Party “establishment.” They have now gone beyond simply being wrong, beyond being idiots, and have earned their recognition as criminals who have engaged in the treasonous act of election fraud. The Neo-Reagan Era is Dead! We need to bury its disciples to allow the Republican Party to get a life.