Teaching Them A Lesson

I don’t quote Glen Reynolds much – everyone reads him anyway – but on reading and hearing from all the Republicans who want to “teach the party a lesson” if the nominate the wrong guy, this bit struck home:

Some people think it’s time to teach the party a lesson. Fine, but I thought 2006 was supposed to do that. Did they learn anything? Seems to me that things are about what they were when I put up my pre-mortem post that had Limbaugh exercised. (For that matter, did losing in 2000 and 2004 improve the Democrats? What, exactly, have they learned that led to the Hillary/Edwards/Obama offering? Are political parties capable of really learning?)

A couple of points here:

  1. Parties don’t learn “lessons”.  Minnesota’s GOP should be a great lesson for all of you who think that abstaining from voting is going to do you, the party or the country any good at all; the reverses in ’04 and ’06 caused the MNGOP to panic and revert (in many quarters) to the “moderate”, Sturdevant-approved  party of the bad old days.  Remember – parties have long memories, as long as those of the people who show up and do all the work.  And conservatism is still, in many ways, an insurgency in the GOP, especially in Minnesota.  Staying home from the election because, say, Mark Kennedy voted for ethanol subsidies, or because Mitt Romney flip-flopped (even in the right direction!) on abortion, teaches one lesson; conservatives are flighty and unreliable when it comes to election time.
  2. And don’t get started about third parties.  I say this as someone who left the GOP in 1994, outraged at the party’s sellout on the ’94 Crime Bill.  I joined the big-L Libertarians for four years.  It was great.  I got to hang out with a lot of people who believed all the right things!  Of course, they – we – had the luxury of ideological purity precisely because we never had to govern anything; we never had to put our ideas into the scrum of actually having to run anything or represent a district that had elected us via a plurality.  Just a convention that had endorsed us unanimously.  You think starting a third party “sends a message?”  Remember Pat Buchanan?  Remember the effect he had in 2000?  Me either.

So is the lesson “fall in line behind the party?”  Hell no.  Get pissed.  Get angry as hell.  Do something radical, and show up at the Caucuses, two weeks from tonight.  Find your precinct – here or here – and stand up for your guy or gal.  I’ll be there, and I’ll fighting like hell to do a bunch of things:

  • get my guy endorsed.  (I’m close to deciding, but I ain’t saying yet).
  • try to do my little bit to get some sort of grass-roots GOP movement going in the city
  • try to show certain parties at various levels in the GOP that some of us in the city aren’t satisfied with the way things are.

The catch, of course, is that you have to show up at caucuses.  And, if it works that way, your BPOU, District and State conventions.  And try to find the time to help out in between, phone-banking and lit-dropping and getting the vote out.  Because changing anything is way, way more than just writing a resolution and making a speech.  It takes work, and tons of it.

One of the most instructive lessons of my political life was watching (and, in an infinitesimal way, participating in) the movement to reform Minnesota’s concealed carry laws.  When all was said and done, Concealed Carry Reform Now of Minnesota spent nine years and thousands of hours…:

  • building a mailing list
  • getting people to show up at gun shows to pass out literature and make people aware of the issues
  • buttonholing legislators, one at a time, to state the case
  • doing the same for voters, until eventually – by 2000 and 2002 – outstate voters were removing DFLers (and a few recalcitrant Republicans) who opposed carry reform from office.  That got the legislature’s attention; after 2002, the DFL legislators, motivated by political self-preservation, allied themselves with the good guys.

It took good people getting involved.  Some of them got very involved; a few of CCRN’s majordomos made it nearly a full-time job, on top of their real jobs and families and lives – but the real triumph was that they got tens of thousands of Minnesotans to care about reforming a sexist, racist, paternalistic law – one voter at a time.  And eventually one lawmaker at a time.  And finally one state at a time.

That’s how you change parties.  A voter at a time.  A precinct at a time.  A ward, a legislative district, a congressional district, a state at a time.

Notice that “staying home and teaching the bastards a lesson” doesn’t pop up in there at all?

52 thoughts on “Teaching Them A Lesson

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