Thread by @PH32375

This raises a good point I’d like to address with a hypothetical situation to illustrate the difference between Football and Principle versions of politics.

Let’s look at the grassroots. Meaning your neighborhood.

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Say you’re an average working American in a suburban neighborhood. Generally you vote Republican but the party seems to be representing your values less and less and you’re starting to feel uncomfortable. But the other party is much worse on your positions. What do you do?

One thing to do is go to your precinct convention with your neighbors on voting day, pass some resolutions that align with your values, and get elected as a delegate to your county convention. Repeat at county and go to state. Shape your party.

This is how parties change, by the way. It isn’t magic. Parties adopt platforms based on conventions of party members. Precinct, County, State, National. These folks choose whom they run to represent them as candidates for office, but also what the party stands for.

The grassroots effort is a boring process. It’s slow-moving and arduous. Changes take years. But it’s how parties work.

(Another option for change is to run for office yourself, if you think you have something to offer, but we’re talking Party right now.)

Now suppose that you win over time. Your hard work flushes out the radicals, yours is the Party or Reason and Principle, and you’re filling seats in Congress and state legislatures. This is how we govern ourselves. This is how change works.

Can you set-it-and-forget it? No. Defending liberty requires vigilance, not apathy. You have to stick with it and keep the radicals at bay.

Americans in BOTH parties have been too long apathetic. They’ve both been commandeered by radicals. Now we have a problem.

The problem can ONLY be fixed from the grassroots. It doesn’t matter which party you clean up—just start cleaning. If you think the Rs have gone too far, go work on your neighborhood, county, state with the Ds. Make a difference. If you can make headway with the Rs, do that.

This view is VERY different from the-other-team-is-Satan-and-we-could-never-vote-for-Satan thinking. The other team is your next door neighbor, you’re both having school district problems, you both approach solutions differently.

Democrats are not evil. Republicans are not evil. Those parties have each flipped 180° on some foundational issues in their histories. How do you think that happened?

Grassroots movements changing party platforms.

What IS evil is good people standing by bellyaching while their parties get taken over by ideologue radicals who drive us all to the collective Hell we’re in now.

How do you think we got Trump? Magic? How do you think we got Hillary?

There’s an old idea that says “you can’t win if you don’t play”.

Those who sit at home and grouse about how the world is going to Hell are a large part of the problem. Apathy is what gets us here.

It’s difficult to find good people of principle who will run for office and serve in a representative capacity. The competent among us are founding businesses, inventing, creating wealth, raising families. That’s much more alluring to a competent person than public service.

So what were left with running for office are the sniveling dregs of society—the ideologues, the ambitious, the authoritarians, the totalitarians, the feckless, the do-gooders, the grossly incompetent.

Then you say, “Well it’s lesser of two evils! Voting is my civic duty.”

That’s a false choice. The real choice is to do more than just vote. Don’t sleep at night thinking you’re a great American because you voted. Shape your world rather than grousing in a Hell of your own making.

If not from the grassroots, run if you’re competent and principled.

So, yeah. Maybe Schmidt sees his efforts as an R going nowhere. Maybe he thinks he can make a difference with the Ds.

Either way, he’s still in the fight and that’s more than I can say for most Americans.

By the way, before I end this, let me just say something about this silly notion of starting a third party:

Grassroots movements take years. Winning seats with a new party generally takes generations. If you’re a visionary with that desire, go for it. Otherwise …

… it’s much easier to fix the infrastructure we have. All this rhetoric about the party name being sullied is ridiculous and easily overcome. People have short memories. Who thinks of Democrats as the KKK anymore? (That wasn’t so long ago.)

Go fix your party of choice.

There are two parties to work on. Get cracking.

If you still like the third party of always-running-but-never-winning-seats-but-at-least-I’m-virtue-signaling-real-good option, consider this:

Mature markets (as opposed to emerging) settle into an interesting pattern that signals their maturity—they feature two main players. The big boys (combined) control at least 80% of the market share, while any other competitors squabble over the bottom 20%.

Then, the Big Two do two things to maintain their position:

One, they fight each other for market share. Always vying to outdo the other. Coke vs. Pepsi. The battles are public and fun to watch like Godzilla and King Kong. “Have you taken the Pepsi Challenge?”

Two, whenever a smaller competitor starts gaining any visible market share, one of the Big Two will buy them out. The other will immediately come up with a counter-product, and the battle rages on.

How does this relate to politics?

Republicans are Coke and Democrats are Pepsi, that’s how. They’re going to take 80% of the vote between them. If you’re battling them over market share (voters), you’re losing. A third party can only ever hope to get big enough to be absorbed by the Big Two. Examples:

Libertarians and Greens. Neither can win seats. If they do, it’s dog-catcher or whatever. Big whoop. What’s a party for except to win seats? (Or virtue-signal.) So LP and G either struggles for generations or their voters go to the Big Two after the primaries.

This is kind of sad because third-party people are active voters. They show up at the polls. They go to party conventions. A coalition of principled voters from any third party could’ve decided 2016. Instead, they took a stand of #NeverEither and let the chips fall.

The kind of energy it takes to be active in a third party is much better spent commandeering the Big Two than it is reinventing the wheel in one of the scrabbling 20% marketplace.

But nobody ever listens to me. And now we have Trump. God help us.

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