My gentle (and not so gentle) readers are all urged to join the Constitution Party, the Christmas celebration of which for Lancaster County I had the pleasure of attending last night. Among the speakers and celebrants were Jim Clymer, who ran for the US Senate, Dan Frank, who was the recent congressional candidate from our district, and Gary Odom, the Party Field Director for Pennsylvania. Yours truly was one of the speakers, and I”€™ll be giving the keynote address at the CP’s state conference in Carlisle in early February. Those who wish to attend will be welcome, providing they”€™re not drunk or foul-mouthed. (The contact person is Danielle Warren at dwarren@constitutionparty.com.)  

Although I would prefer to believe that he was kidding, Jim Clymer might have been serious when he asked me if I would like to run for the senate seat currently held by Arlen Specter. Unfortunately I am too old and too war-battered to take on such a task, one that would undoubtedly end in defeat, against the well-heeled two party oligarchy that organizes our elections and which usually offers a choice of two equally unappetizing candidates. The CP should be recruiting young people nationwide, to build up a credible right-of-center alternative to the DemReps.

The CP is the alternative party that I have chosen in preference to the Libertarians. Despite having a decent presidential candidate in Ron Paul, the Libertarians abound in eccentric types who are hung up on resisting authority figures. Its members have argued in my presence and with utmost gravity such propositions as whether a woman should be able to sell fetal membrane after having dispatched for profit her unborn child. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is hard for me to abide the discourse of many libertarians, who can”€™t get off the topics of individual autonomy and of doing your own thing. But this does not seem at all characteristic of members of the Constitution Party, who combine respect for constitutional limits on our gargantuan managerial state and its war-making powers with bourgeois Christian social traditions. (I use the latter term respectfully to refer to the way Americans used to live before their reconstruction by public educators, the media and our abhorrent welfare regime.)

In the remarks that I intend to deliver in Carlisle, two points will be paramount. One, a party on the right, that is, one trying to regain the place once held by Taft Republicans and other traditional Americans, seems necessary for our national well-being. The US has gone too long without having such an alternative. A party of the Right, once it takes off, could have international repercussions and possibly signal to Europeans that we in the US are building a credible alternative to the generic Left. Let me note something here that I”€™ve tried to document in my books. Europeans have allowed themselves to be poisoned by a leftist multicultural ideology produced partly in the US in the 1960s, and it may be useful to show the rest of the world that Americans are moving back to where we used to before we and the Europeans plunged into a no-man’s-land of diversity and public administration tyranny. . And the Right that we need to build would involve something more than the GOP rotating with the Democrats as occupants of the White House. It would have critical meaning as a counterforce to the Left.

Two, we must work to weaken the Republican Party, a looming presence that may be an even worse curse for the American Right than the Democrats. The Republicans by virtue of the support they enlist among traditional Americans do more harm than mislead the gullible. They suck the energy out of the Right; and they turn what could be a grim opposition to the Left into mere partisanship. Once in office, the Reps act like a second leftist party, expanding the public sector as a source of party favors. They provide what is mostly a toothless opposition, except when they”€™re unleashing neoconservative-inspired wars.

I for one shared McCain’s relief that Obama won; and I would be delighted even more if a right-of-center party could supplant the Republicans. The GOP has become silly to the point of being offensive. I still recall with a shudder how McCain ran around in the South last spring telling white voters to get rid of Confederate flags as hate symbols, before apologizing in Memphis for not having sufficiently supported the Martin Luther King national holiday. To the extent they were not merely expressing knee-jerk PC, these speeches exemplified GOP “€œstratergery”€ (if I may avail myself of the term attributed to W on Saturday Night Live), gratuitously offending one’s core constituency while trying to appeal to a left Democratic voting bloc that one has no chance of picking up.  

One might claim that I expect too much of a party that has trouble getting onto state ballots and which, as one of its presidential candidates Howard Phillips once noted, considers it a victory “€œto break into single-digit figures.”€ But the strength of the CP is that it stands for what old-fashioned, normal Americans used to desire”€”and providing they”€™re still around, would endorse in a national party. Unlike the GOP, which is an entrenched and state-subsidized fixture, it not a vampire sucking the lifeblood out of the Right. The CP may be the eventual answer to what the Republicans have been unable to furnish.