Sarah Palin has come out for the Conservative Party candidate in upstate New York’s 23rd Congressional District. Newt Gingrich thinks that’s a formula for Democrat Party control of the national government. She’s inclined toward the view that the Republican Party has drifted too far from its foundations, and that the public is more inclined to vote for the Democrat candidate than the “Democrat Lite” candidate. He says the factions in the Republican Party have to find common ground or be permanently relegated to the sidelines.

I increasingly side with Palin. The McCain Presidential run really did teach the lesson that the Republican base is not interested in voting for the modern notion of a centrist Republican – which is pretty far from our founders’ vision of the commonwealth. But despite the fact that the McCain campaign was languishing in the weeks leading up to the Republican convention, and was only invigorated by the selection of Palin as the Vice Presidential candidate, not even McCain seems to have learned the lesson or faced the fact that without Palin he would have been killed in the election. That’s why the Democrats are so eager to destroy her. They know what Republican leaders don’t seem to have figured out (or have figured out, but don’t want to acknowledge): Sarah Palin is the kind of person Republicans, and perhaps Americans generally, want to elect. I suspect that if Palin had been at the top of the ticket, the election would have been significantly closer than it was, or a narrow win for the Republicans.

I’m Getting Positively Rebellious

The issue is that the political scene has moved significantly to the left over the last 30 years, and many traditional (not conservative, but traditional) Americans don’t think either party reflects original American values and standards. Add to that the rampant corruption – which we expect from Democrats, who make a virtue of denying traditional moral standards, but don’t want to tolerate in Republicans – and the fact that recent Republican administrations have tended in the same direction the Democrats have now embraced without restraint, and the reasons to support run-of-the-mill Republicans dwindle.

Bill Clinton’s lesson was that personal immorality doesn’t matter if your public morality is politically correct. Democrats swallowed that line wholesale; Republicans are learning the benefits of divorcing personal standards from public standards. But this is nothing more than the “do as I say, not as I do” attitude that’s currently running Washington DC, and that creates two worlds – one that allows people with political power and position to ignore common morality and even the law while the rest of us are forced to buckle under ever-tighter controls. Ordinary people increasingly don’t like that. We are getting positively rebellious.

Gingrich supports the New York Republican candidate on the basis that she is local to the district and won the local party votes. The Conservative candidate is from outside the district; an interloper who launched a third-party bid when he failed to place in the Republican Party votes. Palin, by contrast, is focused on the Conservative Party candidate because he is overtly conservative on both social and economic issues, while the Republican candidate is relatively liberal on social issues and moderately conservative on economic issues. Gingrich is pursuing pragmatic political considerations; Palin is pursuing ideological political considerations.

It’s My Freedom, Even When I Use it Stupidly

I think the real divide emerging in America is not between Republican and Democrat, but between those who champion the Constitution as written, and those who are willing to compromise the Constitution to win elections and find common ground with politicians who are actively destroying the intentions and original meaning of the Constitution in order to engineer society in their own image. In other words, the battle is between those of us who have come to see that when we begin to water down the standards of the Constitution we create the conditions that let others wash it away, and those who think the Constitution is out of phase with the temperament of the country and the world.

The Constitution has always been out of phase with the temperament of the world. It is a radical document that enshrines a very revolutionary notion of what it means to be human – a view no government has ever liked because its prime directive is to limit the power of government and governors. Time has not made the US Constitution more loved by tyrants and would-be tyrants, but less. It is not cherished by those who think they have some special knowledge, wisdom, or mandate to tell their neighbors how to live. The Constitution has never and will never be loved by those who think individuals are stupid and need shepherds.

But freedom, a friend once said, is the ability to make stupid decisions.

Think about that. If the government says you cannot drink sugar-sweetened colas, eat too many potato chips, spend too much time on your couch; if the government says you have to buy health insurance, you must control your weight, you have a civic duty to pick up roadside trash – you are not free.

Does that mean it’s “good” to eat poorly or ignore the environment? No, I don’t think so. It does mean, however, that it’s “good” to be able to make dumb choices. I’m fine with educational campaigns geared toward convincing people to be kinder to their bodies and the earth; I am not fine with even gentle coercion to exercise more or volunteer time to police the environment. And these days, even Republicans are buying the argument that people must be at least “incentivized” to make decisions more responsible to the community.

That’s the problem. I want to elect politicians who reject efforts to whittle down the safeguards the Constitution affords to individuals to make stupid personal choices. Because only when we are free to make dumb choices are we free to make smart choices. When the freedom to make bad decisions is circumscribed, so is the freedom to make good decisions.

Which is exactly the dilemma facing doctors and patients under the proposed national health care bill. Doctors will be denied the freedom to make decisions about what tests and treatments are good for patients. The rationale is to prevent doctors from making decisions that are “bad” because they are not always necessary. Doctors will be forbidden to recommend a patient spend more money on more tests that might be able to reveal a cause of ill-health because retroactive analysis shows that in similar situations those tests were either not necessary or not instructive. That means that individuals will no longer be free to make decisions about what tests and treatments they want to try because someone else has decided that in too many cases people who take those tests or engage in those treatments don’t get the desired outcome, or don’t get a benefit some third party has determined is worth the cost.

Excuse me: that’s nobody’s business but mine. In the end, I am free to follow or ignore even my doctor’s advice and to spend whatever I want to spend on my health care – or I am not free. If the government requires me to get vaccinated, or forbids me to try some treatment, or denies me the right to spend more than my neighbor on my health care, I am no longer in control of my life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness.

The Second Civil War Is Already Here

The promise of the Conservative Party candidates is that they will honor the sentiments behind the establishment of the Constitution. It’s yet to be proven that they will, but it’s too obvious that too many Republican leaders are too willing to let the Democrats set the agenda. And that’s not good for either the Constitution or the autonomy of the individual.

So far, Republican leaders seem more interested in maintaining some semblance of common ground than in recognizing the plain fact that the current federal government leadership has not merely abandoned the Constitution’s limits on government, but is overtly and aggressively dismantling it. This is a denial of reality. The reality is that the current President and Congressional leadership, along with most of the Senate and House Democrat representatives, are going along with the destruction of the uniqueness of the United States. For Republicans to keep acting like there’s some ground for mutual respect is a lot like Chamberlain thinking he could form a mutually-beneficial compact with Hitler.

The fact is that we are already engaged in a civil war. It is not being fought with guns and knives, but the U.S. is under attack. And the enemy is within. Our neighbors, our family, our friends are lined up on one side or the other, and only the Democrat/Liberal “progressives” are on the attack. The Republican/Conservative “traditionalists” are still hoping for a reasoned discussion leading to a restoration of American tradition. We want to avoid open hostilities while they savagely attack and attempt to destroy us and our non-compliant leaders – like Palin.

As we who value the Constitution see it slipping away under Democrat government and a combination of compliance and inadequate opposition from Republican leadership, the promise of a third party becomes more appealing. I have only recently been willing to entertain the move to a third, Constitutionalist, party. A third party is, I think, the alternative to an impending choice between physical slavery and physical combat. Rather than take up arms, let’s take up the legislative and ideological battle: let’s support candidates who are not hesitant to speak up about the divide between liberalism and republicanism (as the founders meant the term).

Let’s support true Conservatives who will champion the priority of the individual, who will reduce the size and scope of federal government, who will enjoin Americans to once again become stand-up persons of high moral character, people who are equipped and prepared to look out for their own happiness, rather than expect some outside agency to satisfy their wants and needs.

Call Me a Traditional American Revolutionary

In the case of New York State’s 23rd Congressional District, I don’t know whether the Conservative Party candidate is that kind of person. But I do know Sarah Palin, and while I do not agree with her in all things (what two people do?), I fundamentally trust her. And I trust the fact that the Democrats and progressives, as well as the liberal wing of the Republican Party, want to marginalize or destroy her. I am not willing to give her my unqualified allegiance, but I am willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. And I appreciate that she is willing to break with the Republican Party on principle.

When she left Alaska’s governorship, Palin said she would support candidates she believes in regardless of party because the future of the country is a higher value than the future of the Party. Here she is acting on it. I say kudos. And I say it is time we each put the country ahead of Party, put pragmatic politics aside – that way has led us into too close an alignment with the destructive forces in our country. It is time to stand on principle.

Principle might lose in the short term, but political pragmatism is already losing. In the current climate, being a political pragmatist is to cooperate with your enemies in your own destruction. It is suicidal. I’m ready to die to the present in order to be reborn as a real American idealist – a revolutionary idealist re-embracing the revolutionary idealism that birthed our country.

Call me a traditionalist, because I strive to be a true traditionalist; an original American traditionalist. But even if you use the term as a sneer, I will wear it with pride. There is no higher patriotism, in my opinion, than taking up the tradition of America’s founding revolutionaries. From now on, I want to champion American revolutionary values: the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of individual happiness. I want to champion the rejection of monarchy, centralized government, and collectivist thinking. And I don’t want to vote for the more “collectivist-lite” candidate, but the most traditionalist-revolutionary. And if the Republican Party is not going to champion republicanism as our founders meant the term, I am not going to support the Republican Party. I’d rather go down fighting for what’s right than continue living on my knees, begging Obama, the Democrats, liberal progressives, and waffling Republicans to leave me some of my God-given and Constitution-guaranteed freedom.

Sarah has stepped forward. She might not always be right in particular choices, but at least she is standing in the breach and pointing forward by pointing us back to our proud tradition and values. We need to get off our knees and stand with her, where we will take some shots but have the opportunity to give as good as we get.

It’s time and past time to raise Patrick Henry’s banner: Give me liberty, or give me death!