What then happens to personal inegrity…
Complete Colorado, a Drudge Report-styled online magazine, operates under John Caldera’s Independence Institute, a Libertarian think tank. Park County District 3 Commissioner Dave Wissel is fond of touting Complete Colorado as a source of what he perceives reality and truth to be.
It was with interest, then, when I read Caldera’s piece in the January 10, 2024 edition of Complete Colorado headlined: The Colorado GOP’s master plan to keep losing.
I don’t often agree with Caldera. I ascribe to Libertarians what Christopher Hitchens had some time ago: “I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.”
However, I found Caldera’s thoughts cogently honest.
Caldera says, “The Colorado Republican Party will be a lost cause for the next six to eight years as it continues to self-deteriorate. …it’s clear their goal is not to tempt voters in but to drive voters out with their declared jihad on the ideologically impure or not sufficiently Trump-worshipping.”
He posits the Colorado Republican Party’s successes will be regional and that only the conservative rural areas toeing the Trump line will remain red.
I do not embrace loyalty to groupthink over loyalty to my integrity. My party, right or wrong, just as my country, right or wrong, is not rational. Such blind obeisance is intellectually dishonest.
Recognizing historically factual instances of egregious wrongs committed by one’s country is not ipso facto evidence one hates their country. Believing the contrary is evidence one has little capacity for intellectual honesty.
If you, as a Republican or a Democrat, must necessarily support your party’s candidate even though that candidate is a jerk or your platform is bunkum, it puts your party over your country. Doing so would roll the Founders a full circle in their graves. They detested political parties, anticipating the immense harm blind party loyalty would do to the country.
District 3 Commissioner Dave Wissel became the Chair of the Park County Republican Central Committee on February 14, 2024. He applied for the position by saying, “I am working at the local level to keep Park County Great (RED)! We must organize with like-minded people to maintain our conservate oriented government officials. Elections matter, and we need to recruit, support, and elect local leaders who have these core Republican princiles engrained in them.” [sic]
As Caldera noted, traditional core Republican principles are currently corrupted by the “jihad on the ideological impure” who do not adhere to the MAGA message.
Christian Dominionism is the core principle that drives most MAGA mania.
The Colorado Republican Chairman, Dave Williams, said we must “…fulfill what the Lord has told us to do. To make disciples of all nations. …the Lord gave Donald Trump immense favor.”
Williams’s predecessor as Chair, Kristi Burton Brown, wrote in her book, “Do Justice: Practical Ways to Engage Our World,” that God put us in this world, but we are not of this world. “Our goal,” she said, “is not to be accepted by the world but to introduce the world to the Savior.”
Congresswoman Lauren Boebert hit the jihad nail squarely on its head: Trump “was anointed by God,” and “the church is supposed to direct the government.”
The newly constituted far-right Park County Republican Party purged most Lincoln Republicans from their group when they crossed political party lines to oppose Wissel’s run for District 3 Commissioner. Consequently, the Park County GOP has tweaked its bylaws to exclude anyone for “Loyalty Infractions” for five years. Speaking, writing, posting, or displaying any ill thoughts about any Republican candidate or platform, regardless of your belief the candidate is a jerk or the platform is counter to good sense, you’re out of their club for five years.
Will tattling be the mode of weeding out the impure?
Political parties are not democracies. They do whatever they want except with matters related to statutory election procedures. If they demand lockstep adherence to ideological purity tests, so be it.
What, then, happens to personal integrity? How, then, should we take the Founders’ insistence that we all possess the right of conscience? Does enforcing the purity of your groupthink necessarily limit We, the People, to only those who survive the jihad?
