Isn’t It Time for Grassroots Democrats to Field Tea Party Candidates?
Charles Krauthammer once pointed out that the “big political story of the year” was the success of the Tea Party in American politics. He described the new political force in revolutionary terms that might even have make a leftist proud: “a spontaneous and quite anarchic movement with no recognized leadership or discernible organization has been merged with such relative ease into the Republican Party.”
The emphasis was always on conservative values that neither mainstream Democrats or Republicans, now largely seen as liberals, were willing to champion: reduced government spending, too many taxes, a frightening national debt, a callous disregard of the budget deficit, and too little respect for the US Constitution.
Conservatives began to take up the fight for civilizational values as well, with America’s Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman heritage now being undermined at every turn elsewhere. Western Civilization was no longer part of America’s academic offerings, except when misrepresented or ridiculed as an evil-bent identity that needed to be overcome. Cal Thomas pointed out that “Conservatives have long believed that most universities are part of an ‘iron triangle’ (along with big media and government) that keep liberals and secularists in power.”
The Tea Party, however, is more than a Republican splinter group, isn’t it? Isn’t it synonymous with the highest ideals of conservatives in general? If so, then its mission is clearly restorative and wholesome.
But instead of both Democrats and Republicans being carriers of politician liberalism, why not work to bring both parties into the conservative orbit? Some argue today that our two-party system should be allowed to fall naturally into a right-left polarity, but historically both parties have had conservatives and liberals in each. With fewer and fewer conservatives now among the Democrats, isn’t it in the Tea Party’s best interests to field and promote candidates on the grassroots level in Democratic primaries?
After all, it’s not the parties as such that are important, but the hope that America will awaken from the “progressive” nightmare that it finds itself in.
