Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Amidst the truly glorious news from this Republican Primary season, where MAGA Conservatives trounced RINO Moderates, there is one discordant note. It rings very close to home for those of us living in the Coeur d’Alene region of North Idaho.
On Primary Day Tuesday, the Conservative Kootenai County Republican Central Committee (KCRCC) majority headed by Brent Regan won the largest share of seats on a new KCRCC. However, its 37 seats won are not the 38 seats needed to assume majority control.
Instead, the North Idaho Republican Political Action Committee (NIR) won 33 seats, and the remaining four victors seem to have a strong connection to the Candlelight Christian Fellowship. Together, if these blocs hold, this apparent deadlock will produce a very different KCRCC.
The North Idaho Republicans exist because traditional elite “Country Club” and Chamber of Commerce Republicans disdain the aggressive populism of MAGA Conservatives exhibited by the KCRCC faction led by Brent Regan. For the better part of half-a-decade, the NIR message has been for good people of all parties to resist the unseemly extremism of Regan’s KCRCC.
I have never understood why many self-described Republican Conservatives are so afraid to bring real Conservative change to the status quo. They seem to be more comfortable as a loyal opposition, attempting to stand against further Progressive encroachment into our lives and livelihoods.
There is certainly a place for this when we are in the minority. However, it is a fundamentally defensive approach which produces a mere slowing of the anti-Constitutional acquisition of tyrannical power by our would-be Leftist overlords.
Such complacency assumes that, win or lose, a balance within our two party system will be perpetual. It assumes that today’s Democrats, who are evermore stridently Socialist and Communist, are not interested in bringing about the end of our Republic and its replacement by their One Party Utopian State.
Tragically, today’s Leftists are not interested in balance. They cannot be trusted to abide within Constitutional limits. They crave an unlimited power to permanently subjugate the rest of us to the fruits of their “good intentions”. Democrat Governor Abigail Spanberger of Virginia is a perfect example of this. Elected as a moderate, she governs as a Commissar.
Faced with such an existential threat, Conservatives, Libertarians, and Constitutionalists can no longer afford to operate under peacetime rules. We are in the midst of nothing less than a war for the soul of our Republic. Our foes do not wish to live in harmony beside us. They wish to rule over us.
Our local NIR represents that part of the Republican establishment which simply refuses to accept that the nature of American politics has devolved. They are rooted in a worldview that sees compromise and collaboration as cardinal virtues.
In Britain, after the defeat of Nazism, Winston Churchill’s Conservative government was voted out of office in a landslide for Britain’s Labor (Socialist) Party. The new Atlee government established a permanent National Health Service. It nationalized whole sectors of the economy. It rationed food and regulated most every form of human activity. The United Kingdom became a Welfare State.
When Churchill was returned to power in 1951, neither he nor his Conservative successors Antony Eden, Harold Macmillan, nor Alec Douglas-Home through 1964 made any move to roll back these womb-to-the-tomb social welfare programs. They slowed the growth of government, but did nothing significant to reverse it.
America’s Moderate Republicans have the same tendencies to limit government’s growth but not to radically reduce it. They are not Conservative revolutionaries like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, or Donald Trump. Only such revolutionaries have the will and commitment to fundamentally restructure the relationship between free citizens and their government.
If the NIR is able to parlay the inconclusive election results into dominance over our local KCRCC, they will have a chance to prove every one of my contentions wrong. I suspect that they will not even wish to do so.
The NIR would be wise to remember that Tuesday did not confer anything like an electoral mandate for their moderate policies. They would do well to see Tuesday’s results as a product of inattention more than any alteration of the shared convictions of local Republican voters.
Now we shall see if the NIR reorients from fighting Conservative revolutionaries to supporting them. We, the Conservative voters, will be watching.
