Taking personal responsibility for Republicans

We conservatives have been whining a hell of a lot about some of our Republican leaders at the Federal and State levels lately. Some of them have shown ethical lapses, others have strayed from the conservative values they were originally elected on. We've gone on and on about it, but we've really accomplished little. They make little moves to quiet us down and then go right back to doing what pissed us off to begin with. Despite our complaining, I'm not sure we are accomplishing a lot.

As I see it, we really have two choices. We can be pragmatic conservatives, working off of the motto, "Yeah, they're asshats, but they're our asshats." That means putting politics above conservatism. After all, the majorities in our State and Federal legislative bodies are important if we want to accomplish any of our goals. Our alternate choice is to be "conviction" conservatives. In other words, we can apply the conservative value of personal responsibility to ourselves when it comes to Republican representatives who fail to represent us. Yes, those elected Republicans are doing stupid things, but we put them there, and we can bring them home. This isn't without its perils. Convinction on personal responsibility means backing, supporting, and volunteering for stronger conservative candidates who can defeat tarnished Republicans and/or RINOs in primaries while sending a message to the party that we won't support the incumbent. These primary fights inevitably mean that Republicans will lose seats in legislatures, though, because they will weaken whichever Republican wins.

The majority of us right now are trying to walk somewhere in between "pragmatic" and "conviction" conservatism, myself included. We can complain from the middle all we want, but it isn't going to accomplish much. Yeah, the subjects of our ire will make little concessions to us, but once we are quieted down, they'll be back to business as usual We either resign ourselves to the nature of politics and accept that more often than not, most Republican representatives will not be as conservative as we'd like while also working to raise the stature of solid conservatives, or we actually take personal responsibility for the less than conservatives we've elected and do something about it. Otherwise, get used to a whole lot more of the same in coming years. Such is the business of being the majority.