How the Republicans Can Win the Next Election

Let’s face it, the Republicans lost the mid-term election. This wasn’t a complete wipeout, but the damage was significant.  Despite a roaring economy and an illegal immigrant invasion, the Democrats were able to capture a majority in the House of Representatives.

The question is why?  It is not enough to blame this defeat on the pattern of mid-term wins by the party out of power.  Nor can fraud or media bias explain how Nancy Pelosi’s troops swung nearly forty seats over to their side.  The lack of an attractive legislative platform should have doomed their chances, but didn’t.

What saved them was Donald Trump.  He may have rallied reds states to his cause, but he was anathema to well-educated women living in the suburbs.  They regarded him as immoral.  So far as they were concerned, he was racist, sexist and uncouth.

Herein, however, lay the seeds of turning the electoral results around. Americans are idealistic.  They want to be moral.  Young women especially hope to support candidates who elevate the standards we live by.  This is why attacks on Trump’s character succeeded.

The answer to this approach is to turn the tables on liberals.  Fire must be fought with fire.  Their campaign of making conservatives look immoral must be answered by a campaign of painting progressives as immoral.  Given that they are unprincipled, this is absolutely possible.

Those of us who have been paying attention know that liberals are world-class hypocrites.  What is sauce for the goose is never sauce for their gander.  Hence they can lie with impunity, but catch a conservative is a fib and he or she is the devil incarnate.

Those on the left also reveal their anti-American bias with regularity.  They have no difficulty with tolerating electoral fraud or portraying law enforcement agents as villains.  Nor do they care one whit about maintaining the integrity of our borders.

This anti-patriotic bias ought to have condemned them to the political wilderness, but has not.  They openly protect law-breakers in sanctuary cities; yet get away with this by claiming to be compassionate.  A means of exposing this moral turpitude is obviously needed.

For some time now, I have been arguing that a mass society, such as our own, can only be held together by widely endorsed principles.  I have further maintained that these values should be: honesty, personal responsibility, fairness (defined as the same rules for all), liberty, and family stability.

As it happens, Democrats spurn all of these.  They are incredibly dishonest.  They encourage irresponsibility by advocating dependence on the federal government.  They reject fairness and replace it with affirmative action.  As for liberty, they shackle us with regulations for everything.

Radical liberals even hate the family.  They intend to supplant it with diversity.  So far as they are concerned, individuals should be allowed to do whatever they please.  Ergo, promiscuity is no problem.  Neither is asking the government, as opposed to committed parents, to raise our children. Remember Hillary’s village.

In any event, the liberal agenda is totally immoral.  It is not compassionate.  It is not intellectually consistent.  Were we to adopt it in toto, the social fragmentation that is well under way would reduce us to a literal war of all against all.

This message needs to get out into the larger society.  Good people who want to be good must distinguish what is right from what is wrong.  The socialist promises of the left are horribly wrong-headed.  Ordinary folks, especially the young, must understand that talk of radical equality eventuates in slavery.

Hence Republicans, who hope to win at the polls, must drive home the message that their opponents—irrespective of what they say—are immoral.  Time and again, they must make it clear that Democrats are dishonest, irresponsible, unfair, anti-freedom and anti-family.  

The difficulty in doing this, of course, is that Republicans do not control the media.  Because repetition is often the key to legitimizing a message, they have fewer opportunities to hammer home the iniquities of their opponents.

Nonetheless, this must not prevent conservatives from plowing ahead. They need to include the complaint that liberals are unprincipled in their communications the way that leftists accuse those on the right of lacking compassion.  Only this can locate the immorality allegation on the feet where it belongs.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus

Kennesaw State University