I’m going to admit you into my circle of trust here, by telling you a secret.  A Secret of the First Order, like the Unified Field Theory, the God Particle, or the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.  Ready?   Here it is:  both Republicans and Democrats are American.  Both of us.  Uniquely so.

No, really, we are.  All of us.  We’ve just got our plans and tools mixed up, really bad.  I’ll explain that a bit more later.  But first, this.

The local Democrat party is calling people in my neighborhood and telling them to get out and vote for Michelle Nunn and Jason Carter because “the Republicans are hungry and we’re on the menu.”  Their call down list is pathetically wrong, because they called at least one conservative household, who was more than glad to tell them what to do with the menu.

I love how the Democrats define what a Republican is.  They draw a circle with “GOP” in it, and declare that everyone in that circle is evil incarnate, and everyone not in the circle must therefore be a Democrat.

With scarcely a day until the last midterm election of President Obama’s last term in office, liberals are still (and always) trying to define what a Republican is.  Time magazine managed a 1,323-word screed in a two-page layout pegging Republicans “from Birchers to birthers,” with “Neocons and Pat Buchanan isolationists; Appalachian miners and emotionally bruised billionaires; Mother Angelica Catholics and Ayn Rand objectivists” thrown in for good measure.  My, my, what a witch’s-brew of dysfunction.  Never mind that the Democrats voted to remove God from their platform in 2012, only to boo His restoration—apparently that’s not dysfunctional at all.

In reality, the GOP can best be defined, at the grass-roots level, as the party of limited government.  That is, unless the Republican in question is in the government, especially in Congress, where [mc_name name=’Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’M000355′ ] has already conceded that beached, dead, bloated with rot whales like Obamacare will survive a GOP-controlled Senate.

Dan Holler, a spokesman for the political wing of the Heritage Foundation, Heritage Action, said Republicans have to explain to America what they’re for. “That is not going to happen if they sit there and make excuses about [Senate Democratic Leader] [mc_name name=’Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’R000146′ ] or Barack Obama. They need to be proactive about putting out an agenda,” he said.

The Washington Post published a chart from the Public Religion Research Institute showing the overlap and non-overlap of self-identified Republicans versus TEA partiers and the Christian Right.

While most TEA partiers identify with the GOP, a much larger sliver of the Christian Right does not.  If you drew a larger circle representing people in favor of limited government, I think you’d find it encompasses all three groups pretty well.  That circle never gets within a thousand light-years of a Democrat.

The Time article illuminated something glimpsed out of the corner of my eye…I turned to look but it was gone.  As Pink Floyd wrote, we’ve become comfortably numb.  We know the issues; we endlessly talk about the issues, and most of us are politically aligned that Massive Government = Tyranny, but we take our eyes off the target and “think tactically” every single time.  We ask if the candidate is electable or has any skeletons in their closet.  We pass over people who are willing to die for the cause simply because we don’t like their hair.  We allow the press and the liberals to define us, ridicule us, and we join in the laughter.  We are numb to our own hypocrisy.

Another Secret.

The Democrats are numb too (triple-entendre intended).  The Democrats have the tools the Republicans should have, while the Republicans have the plans the Democrats should want.  Put another way:  the GOP has the right formula to keep the country going, the way that the founding fathers wanted it to go; while the Democrats have all the tools to build that formula, but not a clue in the world what they are building with them.

Here’s another secret:  the founding fathers have more in common with today’s Democrats, in their methods and tools, than they do with today’s Republicans.  Exception:  that sliver of TEA partiers and the Christian Right who exist at the fringe of the GOP, and those who are well outside it.  Allow me to explain.  Time-travel please!

Back in 1767, the British passed a series of laws called the Townshend Acts, which were designed to keep the American colonies loyal (and in debt) to England.  It also helped England pay for the French and Indian War, and the European Seven Years War with—everybody-not-England.  This didn’t sit well with the average American, and people like George Washington, then in the Virginia Assembly, attempted to pass a bill to boycott all British goods in response.  After the Boston Tea Party, the Brits repealed the Townshend Acts, and replaced them with the Intolerable Acts in 1774.

The Intolerable Acts attempted to destroy District 13 Massachusetts as an example to the rest of the colonies (plot spoiler: ICYMI, The Hunger Games is sort-of about this).  This led to Washington pushing for the convening of a Continental Congress, and that led to battles in Lexington and Concord, and the rest is history.

What did the founding fathers have that the GOP of today doesn’t?  Community organizers.  They were willing to stir things up, rally people to the cause, defy the powers-that-be, and become rabid activists for the cause.  They never took their eye off the goal.  After setbacks, defeats, and facing a European superpower, they continued to organize and build coalitions.

Today, the GOP would be Tories.

We’d say, we’re American, but, you know, the Crown is the government, and the King has the legal authority to do whatever-the-heck he wants, and the law says he can put troops in our homes.  We should remain loyal to the government, because law-and-order and that kind of thing.  Today, we wait years for cases to wind their way through the courts to get to the Supreme Court; some we win, some we lose.  Then we regroup to find some electable candidates.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are Patriots in the sense that they are using the tools that the original Patriots used to fight tyranny.  They organize, they rally, they violate laws they feel are intolerable to them; they continue to fight even when everything is against them.  Poor souls, they’re fighting for the wrong side, but they do know how to fight.

The Democrats want to change the demographics of America, to implement their ill-conceived plan to turn America into some socialist wonderland.  So they allow millions of people to come into the country, and plan to give them citizenship, in the name of “amnesty”.  That’s fighting unfair, and for all the wrong ends, but George Washington didn’t fight fair either, by the British rules.

In fact, the Republican party has adopted some of the Democrats goals as their own:  it appears that the continuation of the party itself has become a larger goal than the promotion of our values.  The Democrats have been in that mode for at least three decades, redefining themselves by forgetting history—they were the party of slavery, Jim Crow, and fascist leanings.

Democrats define the GOP as the party of Senator Joe McCarthy, ignoring the fact that McCarthy never served on the House UnAmerican Activites Committee (the Senate had no corresponding committee).  They also ignore the fact that since 1918, the HUAC was chaired by Democrats for 52 of 57 years.  This includes Mississippi Democrat John E. Rankin who remarked “After all, the KKK is an old American institution.”  [mc_name name=’Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’L000550′ ] must have been referring to Rankin when she said that the South “has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans.”  Whose fault is that?

As a party, if Republicans want to make a difference, we need to return to the tools the founding fathers used, and stop letting the Democrats have exclusive use of those tools.  We need to forget about the “good of the party” line and work for the good of America.  We need to stop thinking about “optics” and “message” and tactics and think about principles.  Why is there only one [mc_name name=’Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’C001098′ ] in the Senate?  There should be 99 more like him running, without opposition from the NRSC.

We need to wake up from our comfortable numbness, and fight against the beast the our government has become, instead of feeding the beast and hoping it doesn’t eat us.  If we don’t kill the beast, it’s not the Democrats who will be on the menu, it’s us.

(crosspost)