George Rebane

[This article, sans update, was published here in the 25oct23 issue of The Union.]

Recently I attended a luncheon sponsored by a local Republican club that featured as speaker one of the party’s eight candidates for US Senate.  She gave a barnburner talk outlining all the familiar iniquities of the Democrats both in Sacramento and Washington.  Specifically, she reprised the Democrats’ work in

• Always raising taxes;
• Issuing more stifling regulations;
• Mismanaging the economy;
• Indoctrinating Neo-Marxism in the media, education, and entertainment;
• Watering down critical curricula in our schools – dumbing down students;
• Rewarding criminals and punishing victims;
• Promoting trans-gendering in schools, denying parental rights to raise their children;
• Maintaining wide open borders for illegal alien entry;
• Projecting foreign policy weakness, inviting bad actors to make war;
• Etc, etc.

The problem with her enthusiastic rhetoric was that her Republican audience knew all that stuff, and most could have given that speech themselves.  What was sorely missing, and has been missing for years at such gatherings, is recognition of the dire straits the party is in, and what would be required for its resurgence in California.

Recounting the above list yet one more time is nothing but imitating a long-playing echo chamber which might be of interest to those conservatives who don’t pay attention to what is going on in the country and the world.  The problem is that most of those folks don’t show up at such luncheons and meetings.

So, the Republican Party, irrelevant statewide and nationally chaotic, continues to ignore the fact that it can right none of the liberal and woke wrongs without first regaining its stature as a recognized can-do political force in the country.  Endlessly repeating and pointing out the passing signposts to socialism has done nothing to change the direction of the country, and doing the same thing over and over again only confirms the definition of ignorance.

If Republicans are not putting their energies into planning and making progress on the party’s road to resurgence, then the rest of it will only be an ongoing stream of empty rhetoric growing weaker with the passing years.

[27oct23 update]  An added thought.  Given how other states are adopting our public policy insanities, California’s cancer has been aggressively metastasizing across the land.  The reason is clear and hangs on ‘other people’s money’ that can best be understood in light of what Garrett Hardin (q.v.) taught us about the behavior of commons (more here and here).  California has been very successful in taxing ‘the rich’, regulating the bejeezus out of everyone, and getting the feds to pony up every time we get our tit in a wringer, that it seems like a good idea for the folks in Ohio and Nebraska to copy.  As our snowballing national debt attests, with everyone piling on, this commons awaits its inevitable fate.