by Spyridon Andrews
Staying home on the basis of principle may make a disaffected Republican feel virtuous, but it accomplishes nothing.
There are plenty of reasons for Republican voters to be pissed off about the upcoming election. The Iran War, the economic consequences of another Middle Eastern adventure, the unfinished DOGE business, the Epstein debacle, and the seemingly endless supply of Republican congressmen who arrive in Washington promising to clean up the swamp and immediately begin looking for waterfront property. Then there are the allegations of congressional misconduct and taxpayer-funded settlements, which ought to make everybody furious regardless of party. It’s quite a spectacle, and we haven’t even gotten to the Democrats yet.
A substantial portion of the Republican base believes that Washington is back to business as usual, only worse. They have a point. We were promised an assault on waste, corruption, government incompetence, and the permanent ruling class. Instead, we’re still waiting for the indictments we were promised after the 2008 housing crisis. Apparently, accountability in Washington is a concept with an exceptionally long gestation period.
There are, however, a few things we have to keep in mind. First of all, the split within the Republican Party is nothing new. The late, great Phyllis Schlafly wrote about this division in her bestseller A Choice Not an Echo during the Goldwater era. She described the Republican establishment as a cozy little operation run by wealthy northeastern elites who treated the party like a Greenwich country club. She hit the target with her criticism, pointing out that good little Republicans like us were expected to pay our dues, keep our mouths shut, and allow the gentlemen in the room to select the presidential nominee. She despised the northeastern elite almost as much as she despised the leftists who were in the midst of commandeering the Democratic Party.
This same establishment hated Goldwater, Reagan, and Trump in succession. These are the guys responsible for the Doles, the Romneys, the Bushes, and the wars. So when voters turned to the outsider Trump, they thought they were going to get an angry version of Reagan. Instead, his second term has been schizophrenic at best. It seems to many of us who voted for Trump that the Rockefellers are back in charge.
Reagan knew that winning required a coalition. That was his brilliance. He settled on a few core ideas: lower taxes, defeat the Soviet Union, and bring some patriotism back to the country. He opposed abortion and repeatedly called for a constitutional amendment to ban it. But he was affable, and his convictions didn’t prevent him from working with other Republicans or even Democrats to get things done. Reagan showed us how Republicans can win by keeping a fragile coalition together. The infighting didn’t stop, of course, but during the Reagan era it was conducted more in private than through public rants and tantrums.
I don’t believe there would have been a Reagan presidency without the work Phyllis did. She was unabashedly anti-communist, pro-family, and pro-woman. She set the table for Reagan, and if we had stuck to her script in confronting cultural Marxism, we might be a majority party today. Instead, those same eastern intellectuals let the wolf in through the back door.
Schlafly also presaged much of the anti-war sentiment among Republicans today. She called the draft an invasion of the home, was skeptical of foreign entanglements, and was more concerned with fighting communism at home. Her writings are not far in spirit from those of working-class Republicans who believe we should be taking care of business at home rather than trotting around the world getting ourselves into intractable conflicts that are not in our national interest.
Eisenhower also warned of the military-industrial complex. Ike was more moderate than Phyllis in many ways, and there was even speculation that he might run for president as a Democrat. He actually turned down overtures from Democrats who wanted him as their candidate. But he was no less concerned about the dangers of unchecked military power—as was candidate Donald Trump, before someone apparently convinced him that Iran was going to be a cakewalk. This proves another point: a president can surround himself with great advisers, but he has to listen to them. Reagan understood that.
This is all a long way of saying that Republicans don’t always agree. Infighting has always existed, and it is exaggerated by the leftist media, which sees an opportunity to make things worse for us. But I say to hell with them. At least Republicans are still arguing about what they believe. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, seems willing to broaden its coalition to include just about anybody with a grievance and a protest sign: Maoists, radical Islamists, militant feminists, blue-haired lunatics who take over city blocks, anti-civilization Antifa bomb-throwers, and, worst of all, Ivy League graduates.
And look at some of the organizations that support them such as the teachers’ unions. American public education has deteriorated so badly that perhaps the unions should consider removing the word teachers from their stationery. Planned Parenthood, whose practices and politics have become a permanent battleground over abortion and the treatment of unborn life. The Democrats are supported by a trail of NGOs, political financiers, assorted fraudsters, and the ever-present George Soros, whom conservatives have elevated into something resembling King Lizard of the progressive universe.
Republican voters would rather commit political suicide than violate their core principles, and often we have. Democrats, on the other hand, seem willing to embrace almost any new passing imbecility, except, of course, God, patriotism, family, or the defense of Western civilization. The current Democratic Party would make Jefferson and Andrew Jackson vomit.
So where does this leave us?
I wrote some time ago that whatever disappointments Republican voters might have with the current crop of Republicans, there was a benefit nobody had adequately priced into the equation. But, today, I would say there are actually two.
First of all, handing Congress back to a bunch of crooks and crazies is worse than handing the keys of your Ferrari to Keith Richards on his way back from Kanye West’s bachelor party. Staying home on the basis of principle may make a disaffected Republican feel virtuous, but it accomplishes nothing. A Democrat party that was once merely irritating and wrong has, in my view, become a moral peril. And handing it the keys to Congress is a hell of a way to register a complaint against Republican leadership.
Which bring me to Marjorie Taylor Greene as the poster child for what not to do. If Greene was so damn furious about what was happening in Washington, the voters had given her the opportunity to do something about it. She had a national audience, a platform, and the ability to confront the Republican leadership from inside Congress. She could have been a permanent pain in the ass. A lot of courageous people would have loved to have the opportunity she had. Instead she left Congress and wound up on The View.
Contrast that with Schlafly. When she concluded that the Republican establishment was corrupt, she didn’t announce that she felt like an ex-wife and was going home. She wrote a bestseller, went on the road, organized women by the millions, confronted the party bosses, embarrassed them, defeated them, and helped create the movement that gave us Ronald Reagan.
Greene could have gone on the attack and taken constructive action. If Epstein disturbed her as much as it disturbed many of us, she had an opportunity to become a formidable voice for decency, reform, and accountability. Instead, she left the room. And following her into tantrum land is not a particularly brilliant strategy for Republican voters.
No, we cannot emulate this cowardice of backing away. We have to engage, and we have to stop assuming that just because somebody is a Republican, he will do the right thing. He won’t necessarily. How we hold our own party accountable deserves a longer essay, but the lesson from Schlafly is simple enough: when the establishment disappoints you, you don’t surrender the party to it. You fight.
Now, apart from the work ahead of us, I want you to stop for a moment, fellow conservatives, and ponder the good things in life.
Because there is a second benefit to all of this, and it is magnificent.
We have been witnessing a nearly decade-long meltdown by some of the most ridiculous people in America. And all it cost was your vote for Trump. Normally, people would have to pay thousands for tickets to this kind of entertainment, but we’ve had a front-row seat to a spectacle that no playwright could have invented without being accused of exaggeration.
Remember the people who organized themselves after Trump’s first election for the purpose of screaming at the sky? This really happened. In New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, people gathered to engage in primal screams at the sky. Yes, our votes helped produce this remarkable form of political expression. When It happened, it seemed difficult to improve upon. Little did we know that screaming at the sky would eventually rank among the most intelligent things the Left would actually do.
Another Republican victory may not give us everything we want. But, the one thing we can reasonably expect, however, is spectacle.
There will be marches. There will be costumes. George Clooney and Rosie O’Donnell will issue emergency communiqués. The next Stephen Colbert clone, whoever he is, will announce that democracy has died. A flurry of stars will threaten to leave the United States and then, tragically, remain. Social media will become the national fainting couch for the Left.
Late-night television hosts will cry, be canceled and then there will be further outrage. There will be petitions and astounding lunacy, such as political protesters acting like cats, dogs or other animals. There will be emergency meetings, and Nancy Pelosi reporting live from inside her ice cream freezer. And somewhere, somehow, an entirely innocent object will become responsible. A statue, a painting, a building, or a historical monument.
Do you really want to miss this? Before you answer, let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we?
There were the climate activists who sprayed orange powder on Stonehenge in 2024, apparently to punish the Druids for inventing fossil fuels. Then there were the protesters in Madison, Wisconsin, who tore down a statue of a Union officer who died fighting slavery, apparently because nobody had bothered to read the plaque. They also attacked a monument celebrating women’s progress. In a single evening, the revolution managed to declare war on both the abolition of slavery and women’s rights. A truly Olympian standard of stupidity.
There was the teachers’ union that declared war on a corporation in which its members’ pension funds held shares, a virtuouso performance in idiocy. If the campaign succeeds in damaging the investment, perhaps the union can organize another protest against its own pension managers.
And who could forget the autonomous Republic of Seattle, encouraged by its feckless mayor? Protesters occupied city blocks and attempted to demonstrate what life would look like without conventional police authority. Surprise that it wound up in chaos and death, despite the endorsement as a “summer of love.” Then Seattle took it a step further, electing a mayor that invited the businesses to leave the city, a standard of recklessness so astounding that even ordinary idiots stand back in admiration.
Rosie left for Ireland but tragically came back. But at least we got a break for a year or two while she was gone. Perhaps another election will persuade her to leave again. Harry and Meghan actually did leave America and go back to Britain. Do we really want to create a political climate that encourages them to come back?
And there were the protesters who claimed democracy was in danger by dumping red powder on the protective case containing the Constitution, the seminal document of Democracy. Another Republican Congress will virtually guarantee this level entertainment for at least two more years.
And do we really want another round of congressional hearings, complete with the hushed tones of cable television dimwits? How boring. Wouldn’t we rather have Michael Moore ranting, Alec Baldwin making an even bigger ass of himself, and Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin declaring the end of the Republic?
So courage fellow conservatives. If it is any consolation, I have no doubt that if Phyllis Schlafly, Ronald Reagan, or Barry Goldwater were alive, they would be disgusted by the hypocrisy and cowardice of some Republican leaders. They would demand answers about Epstein and government corruption. And I suspect they would have little patience for eastern establishment Republicans who cozy up to Wall Street while Main Street gets taken to the cleaners.
But those are disagreements within our party, and we need to confront them ourselves. We cannot leave the room and allow the same establishment that opposed Goldwater and Reagan to take possession of the Republican Party once again.The fact that Donald Trump has, for many of us, failed to deliver on important promises doesn’t mean abandoning the fight will teach anybody a lesson.
It is our party, and we will not take it back by backing away. Life isn’t easy, and democracy is hard work. That’s what makes self-government interesting and desirable. Schlafly understood it. Reagan understood it. And the rest of us had better understand it before the party and take the fight to then, before the Republicans become a permanent subsidiary of the Greenwich country club.
So let’s stop believing everything Republican politicians promise, and use that as an excuse to do nothing or withdraw entirely. Let’s enter the fray ourselves, and bring the party back to the people.
And while we’re doing that, we can enjoy the show.
Spyridon Andrews
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/10/08/republicans-are-fighting-again-lets-enjoy-the-show/
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