Could We Dial It Back Just A Little Bit?
We don't have to burn down RPV to save it.
Once upon a time in 1947, the Fairfax GOP Chairman was charged with killing a man in a drunk driving incident. Subsequently in an emergency meeting, the chairman of the Fairfax GOP resigned his office and allowed the unit committee to resume its function.
Remarkably, killing a man in a drunk driving accident did not destroy the Republican Party (at least in Fairfax County, that is).
The editorial position of The Republican Standard is to remain aloof in contests among Republicans, especially with regard to intramural contests. Of course, this does not hold independents immune from either our criticism or our praise, but it does mean that when it comes to intramural fights? TRS stays out of it.
Hands washed.
Over the next 72 hours, roughly 3,000 Republican activists will be treated to the closing arguments over who should lead the Republican Party of Virginia over the next four years.
I happen to know two of the gentlemen running in the race: Chairman Jack Wilson who is running for a full term, and former Delegate Rich Anderson whom I have known for many years. I have not had the opportunity to meet Lancaster GOP chairman Mike Schoelwer, but understand him to be a graduate of the University of Notre Dame, which to this papist makes him a fine individual indeed.
What I am about to do here is not an attempt to place my thumb on the scale. That would be neither helpful nor warranted.
Instead, what I would prefer to offer is a word of caution.
For a number of years, we have suffered a tremendous deal of infighting within the Republican Party. We had majorities, after all.
But then something funny happened. We started losing those majorities. Then we started dropping statewide contests. The old coalitions forged by the “McBollinelli” ticket broke apart. But the rot had begun far earlier than that.
Once upon a time, I can remember when the Spotsylvania Republican Committee would boast of having 400 people at a meeting and over 100 at our monthly breakfasts. Imagine that! That hardly seems the case today (and that is not the fault of anyone in the Spotsy GOP today; times have simply changed).
I can remember a time where negative campaigning against Republicans was anathema. “Remember the 11th Commandment!” would be the call to arms, at least until someone helpfully reminded folks that Reagan himself did not observe his own commandment in 1976 against Gerald Ford.
Thus over time, our unit committees by and large declined as our infighting intensified at every level of our work — and that remains a shame, because the Democrats don’t have this problem. We do.
To me, the Republican Party of Virginia is the aggregation of our unit committees. The district committees help our congressmen, but the State Central Committee is the governing board that is supposed to represent the unit committees.
Until it doesn’t.
Yet these clusters of Republicans that we create in our own backyards are fragile things. Just a tiny bit of infighting and the phalanx shatters. Keeping the guns pointed out towards the opposition is a hard thing to do, especially when it is much easier to fight Republicans than it is to fight Democrats.
But every time we fight one another, we lose a little bit more of those activists who used to come around but just don’t have the time for us anymore.
RPV is only going to be as strong as our unit committees. There is no magic pot of money at the RNC to bail us out.
The elected officials do not exist to bail out the state party.
Our House and Senate caucuses — whose primary role is to find and finance candidates and run them for House of Delegates and State Senate in order to protect our majorities — do not exist to bail out the state party.
They can, of course. But that means they will control the state party.
We discover rather quickly that RPV is ultimately run by a few thousand direct mail donors and a handful of events, namely our conventions and the RPV Advance (and any fundraisers we commit to doing in the interim). That’s it.
My word of caution is this:
If we keep ripping ourselves apart, we will have no one to blame but ourselves as the once glorious Old Dominion reduces itself to a dependency of New Jersey — bringing with it all of their mistakes and idiosyncrasies.
The good news is that we can choose the voices and leaders in the room who make us think, who bring us together, who remind us that our children deserve better than “democratic socialism” and the tyranny of the mediocre.
Find the voices who believe that being a county supervisor or a city councilman is a far greater honor than being Governor of Virginia, or whose aspirations go no further than being a unit chairman and promoting the best and brightest (or just stable souls — we could use more of them today).
I have a little postcard that tries to accurately pinpoint the postmodern disease (WARNING: philosophy nerd alert). The three problems of today’s era are summarized as follows:
We do not trust one another anymore.
We cannot disagree without being disagreeable.
We cannot state the other person’s argument in the best possible light.
Among friends and fellow Republicans, we should really make this effort to give a great deal more trust to the people in the room, to disagree without being disagreeable, and to see the other’s argument in the most favorable light.
This isn’t to say that some individuals are not worthy of censure. Amanda Chase (I-Chesterfield) who broke ranks with the Senate Republican Caucus and was booted by the Chesterfield GOP as a member in good standing comes to mind. But the exceptions should be rare compared to the rule — rare indeed.
The Democrats do not care about our petty squabbles, and the more violent and bitter they are the better in their eyes. Most of all, let’s give Reagan another try:
My 80% friend is not my 20% enemy.
That seems like good advice.
Be wary of the voices that treat our friends as enemies, if for no small reason than the fact that freedom in America really does have enemies — and they aren’t shy about saying so.
We have survived drunk chairmen who have actually killed people before. I am sure our challenges pale in contrast.
But we will not survive infighting — not for long, anyhow.
Go vote.
Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.