A Speech Fragment

Rick Wilson
Jul 20, 2017 · 3 min read

An except from a speech I gave yesterday…The rest was specific to the group, but this portion might be of some interest. It’s a speech, not an essay, so the pacing, asides and paragraphs should be read that way.

For Republicans, the growing choice will be between being the Party we claimed to be on paper for generations, or whether we adopt the Trump version of the GOP.

Looking at this Administration, it’s a noted contrast to the lessons I learned coming up in my Party.

I had the honor to work as a very young, very junior appointee (with hair!) in the Administration of George Herbert Walker Bush, and he led by example; expecting all of his appointees, from Cabinet secretaries down to the lowest-level staffer to reflect the values of modesty, judgment, humanity, and service that shaped his career.

If my party replaces those values with anger, corruption, venality and an itchy Twitter finger, it’s not the Republican Party we’ve known since its founding in a tiny one-room schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin in 1854.

I don’t think the Republican leaders like Abraham Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, and would recognize Trump’s Party.

Those leaders who who believed in principles, philosophies and ideas, not simply men and their mobs.

And if they were here I can imagine Lincoln reaching for an ax handle, Reagan for a bullwhip, and Buckley for his most poison pen.

Now, much of the current flavor of nationalist populism is all about thinly-veiled racial animus, border walls, trade wars, and a cruel, weaponized nostalgia for an economy that’s gone and isn’t coming back. It sold in 2016, but it’s a vision of a smaller, meaner America that’s so much less than we can and should be.

We’re seeing the strains on the left and the right of two parties that are good at some things, and terrible at most everything else. Both parties, and their voters are increasingly drawn into dangerously isolated silos, where even basic concepts like the truth are hotly debated and fiercely contested.

Democrats seem to be on a collision course between the older, traditional wing of the party that elected Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — liberal to be sure, but still operating in that great center of America’s political homeostasis — and an emergent progressive wing of Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren style left-wing economic populism. The Sanders/Warren wing of the Democratic party plays wonderfully in around 8 states, and disastrously almost everywhere else.

They’re a party with every opportunity to score a touchdown, but can’t seem to get the right players on the field. With both sides so deeply sunk in their own current political pathologies and dilemmas, we may finally see a nation with three, or four, or five political parties all vying for attention and power. If the GOP slits into a Trumpish national populist party, center-right conservatives may take command of smaller, but saner GOP.

What if the Democrats hive into a Clintonish practical wing, and a Bernie-style progressive wing?

The possibilities are growing for independent movements, candidates and parties to fundamentally alter the old model.

Near and dear to the heart of many in the middle space of both parties is some kind of new, centrist party structure; modern, practical, and smart. The tidal forces of two long-dominant parties prevented this for generations, but even today, the number of Trump fanatics on the right and Hillary fanatics on the left are wildly outnumbered by a millions of Americans who want leadership that respects their intelligence, keeps its word, and honors the best values of our nation.

Imagine a party trying to work the real problems we face instead of trying to reshape the nation along some political fantasy of either the far left or the far right. Imagine a party that doesn’t treat government either as a perfect savior or a perfect enemy, but rather a tool to accomplish limited, realistic goals.

Imagine a party that calls on all Americans to be stronger, better, and bolder in actively working to make their communities and our nation what it can be.

We’re not there yet, but I can assure you, people are imagining that party and working to build it.

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Rick Wilson

Written by

Apostate GOP Media Guy, Dad, Pilot, Hunter, Amateur Epistemologist, Cognitive Engineer. Writer.

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