Leo Tolstoy wrote a book by that name in 1887. The question remains timeless.
What must we do?
Or more to the point, what must we conservatives do? Time is no longer our friend. For decades, the forces of the hard left have worked to undermine liberty and to bring socialism to our shores. Now, they are close to succeeding in their dream of a Socialist America.
What then must we do if we are going to stop socialism?
Michael Filozof in the American Thinker on July 1, called for a new militant conservative movement. Why? Because there isn’t one.
43% of Americans self identify as conservatives. Another 32% self identify as moderates. That is going to include everything from center right to center left. Only 23% self identify as liberals. Unfortunately for America, the liberals are militant and for decades now, liberalism has been advancing and conservatism has been in retreat.
For the last few decades, conservatives have been at best, passive. We have waited for the next great hero to come along. Where would America be today had Ronald Reagan not decided to run for President? From Goldwater, we waited for Reagan to come along. From Reagan we waited and hoped George W. Bush was the next conservative hero. Now we wait for Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann or Herman Cain or the as yet undefined conservative hero to come in and rescue us.
We don’t need a hero. We need to rescue ourselves. We need to become militant.
What then must we do?
A call to become militant is not a call to raise arms, but a call to raise our commitment. As committed as the far left has been to socialize this nation, we must be more committed to American exceptionalism and liberty.
Conservatives are defined by a couple of characteristics. Work and family. We work hard and then all we want to do is go home and spend time with our families. Those are noble traits, but if we are going to prevail in this struggle, those days are over.
For three generations of Americans, the concept of sacrifice is almost totally unknown. No more. What now must we do? We are going to have to make sacrifices of our time and our energy.
For those who are not active in your local Tea Party groups, that time is now over. You must get active. You must become involved.
Unless we are going to make the Tea Party a political party, which is something most people in this movement do not want to do and something I do not want, you must also become involved in your local Republican Party. In America, we have a socialist party, the Democrats and then we have a non-denominational party, the Republicans. You are not going to go anywhere in the Democratic Party if you are not pretty far to the left. In the GOP, you can be almost anywhere and if you are willing to work in the party, it almost does not matter what your beliefs are. Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jon Huntsman or Gary Johnson.
We need to make the Republican Party a true conservative party.
At the local level we need conservative/Tea Party activists to plot how we are going to take the localities back. There are some good local areas where you have good local government. Those are fairly rare. We need Tea Party activists running for office. We need Tea Party activists running for City Council or County Commission. We need Tea Party activists on the school board.
Sarah Palin started her rise in government as a leader in the PTA. Where could you start?
The School Board is probably the government branch that the Tea Party most needs to control and needs to do quickly. We have lost three generations or maybe more to liberal teachers. In Wisconsin, the Teachers’ Union was busily turning another generation of kids into liberal activists when they took the kids, who should have been in school studying, to the capitol to protest for the Teachers’ Union.
We have far too many instances of our schools and our colleges being used for little more than political indoctrination and conversion centers. We can no longer afford to sit around and complain. Voting is not enough. We have to get involved.
Any conservative revolution we have must start at the local level. We must control the school boards because they control the education of children and that is the future.
We must get Tea Party activists into the city councils, particularly in some larger cities. We conservatives have abandoned the big cities to the liberals. Conservatives typically just flee to the suburbs. Look at the big cities. They are disasters. They are also almost universally controlled by liberals. Name a single large city that has a conservative mayor? The ten poorest cities in America all have something in common. None of them have a Republican Mayor. Not only do they not have a Republican Mayor, none of them have elected Republican leadership in decades.
Detroit, which is the basket case of all American cities, has not elected a Republican mayor in 50 years! In the last fifty years, Detroit has gone from being a model American city to being a failed city. One of Detroit’s biggest attractions now is what is called “Urban exploration.” People go to the old abandoned buildings in Detroit, much as tourists visit the ruins in Rome or Greece.
We have seen liberal activism for the last fifty years. They have been militant and a minority and look what they have done. Now, they are on the verge of doing what socialists have dreamed about for decades. They want to destroy the capital of the free market system. They want to destroy the greatest, freest nation that has ever existed.
What then must we do?
We are going to have to make sacrifices. Instead of just working and going home to spend the evenings and weekends with our families, we are going to have to give of that time to help save the country.
2012 will be the greatest battle of our lives. Do not think the left will go quietly into oblivion, accepting the will of the American people that we do not want to be socialist.
They will fight with everything they have. They will pull every dirty trick they can come up with.
If we are going to save freedom and liberty for ourselves, our children and our grand children, we are going to have to fight back. We must commit ourselves and our wealth and our sacred honor to one overwhelming goal.
We must commit ourselves to the destruction of liberalism in this country.
Tags: 2012, Conservatism, gop, liberalism, party, republicans, socialism, tea
Permalink Reply by Anne Bishop on Permalink Reply by tom dodd on
...they all need to be deported to the socialist country of their choice... they're of no use to us here.
What Then Must We do? ANSWER: We must first identify the root of the problems.
It would seem that everyone is focused on the symptoms rather than the cause.
Over spending is a symptom, intrusive government is a symptom, arrogant government officials is a symptom, expansive government is a symptom, corrupt government officials is a symptom.
So what's the root cause? MONEY! The real problem is no one seems to want admit this is the problem they just want to go on blabbing and complaining about the "symptoms". Like some one who has a spinter and constantly complains of the pain, but makes no attempt to remove the spinter, but keeps on taking asprin for the pain.
Control congress' access to our money and you solve all of the above problems. Okay, now what? Go take another asprin?
Permalink Reply by dave williams on Dave : That's is exactly my point. Congress has access to all our money and spends it like a drunken sailor on liberty. It's your money those Mexicans are getting and congress is giving it to them in order to get their votes. You don't have to be a U.S. citizen to register to vote, thanks to Bill Clinton's "motor voter law".
I know of two people who when renewing their driver's license were asked if they wanted to register to vote.
They said yes and were registered without any citizenship evidence. One is a German one is a Norwegian.
There is no citizenship check! Anybody can get registered to vote. I suppose even Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have no problem getting register to vote. http://teapartypatriots.ning.com/profiles/blogs/some-people-just-do...
Permalink Reply by tom dodd on
...sometimes you have to treat the symptoms before you can get to the root cause... in this case, a Balanced Budget Amendment.
Permalink Reply by dave williams on Tom: A balanced buget amendment is only effective if it incluses a cap on spending.
Senator Toomey, from Pennsylvania has introduced a proposal that does that.
His proposal limits spending to 18% of GDP.
Without the spending cap a balanced budget amendment is useless in curbing spending and only gives congress the freedom to raise taxes without accountability.
Permalink Reply by tom dodd on
...Joseph, I'm FOR anything that will balance the budget... to me, this means not spending any more than is taken in via taxes... BUT if capping spending will get the job done, then I'm for that, too!
Tom: As you may have heard some Republicans state, " we don't have a revenue problem we have a spending problem". Sooooo, it's the spending that must be the focus.
The balanced budget amendment sounds nice and appeals to the simple minded, but without the spending cap it's simply a shelter for the congress to hide behind when they raise taxes in order to balance the budget.
Permalink Reply by Roland C. Cartier Jr on Permalink Reply by tom dodd on
...Joseph, you and I have had this talk before... i understand your position and the point you're trying to make, however, a balanced budget requirement, via Amendment, does two things: FIRST, it imposes a restraint that at present isn't there, which, in the plainest of language, says you can't spend what you don't have... with only $2.1 trillion in present day tax revenues, the 2011 deemed passed budget would not only have to be trimmed by $1.5 trillion, it NEVER would have been "deemed" or even offered up, since it wouldn't have met the REQUIREMENT of a balanced budget...
...SECOND, a Balanced Budget Amendment, on the 2012 ballot, which it will be if passed through Congress [DeMint is working hard on this], would insure not only a record turnout for the 2012 elections, but also the biggest turnout of Conservatives, probably in the history of the country! THE more Conservatives that show up to vote, the greater the chance of a huge, landslide victory, but also sufficient numbers to overcome the liberal voter fraud we all know is going to occur.
A BALANCED budget requirement immediately cuts spending, and then becomes a Constitutional restriction against overspending. It doesn't automatically mean that taxes will be raised to meet present spending "needs"... it cuts are made across the board, if unneeded departments and agencies are eliminated, if the bloated federal workforce is cut and streamlined, if the welfare class shrinks, if those who don't meet the original mandate for social security and medicare are cut from the rolls, then taxes won't need to go up... ALSO, with fiscal conservatism back in place, and supporters of capitalism again at the helm, I fully expect our economy to BOOM, and to do so in short order!! THIS will mean added revenues that will ease the burden on those who suffer the most from the upcoming era of austerity.
© 2013 Created by Judson Phillips.
