This is the Best GOP of My Life So Far

This is a party that's embracing its activists, and finally putting daylight between itself and its former distinction of Democrat lite.

2020 was the first time I ever voted for a Republican for president. It was actually also the first time I voted for anyone whose name wasn’t Gary Johnson. I didn’t cast those votes because I wasn’t a Republican, though. I have been not just a registered Republican while living in Nevada (the only state I’ve lived in that offers the option to declare a party when registering, due to its closed primaries), but an active member of my county GOP everywhere I’ve lived since I was 18.

I’ve mentioned before the reasons why I was skeptical of Donald Trump, given his past statements on issues like abortion and gun rights. While he went on to become president without my vote and to vastly exceed my expectations (hence why I voted for him in 2020), I look back now a decade removed from the 2012 election and feel a powerful sense of vindication for withholding my vote from Mitt Romney and vocally criticizing him throughout the election cycle. Ten years later, I have not stopped criticizing Romney, and I doubt at this point that my extreme distaste for him could be any stronger. The only difference now is that ten years ago I was called a traitor to my party for my position. I was told that my third party vote was “a vote for Obama,” and every other tired argument you hear when your party nominates someone utterly worthless and you refuse to hand them the vote you apparently owe them. Today, many of the same people who gladly cast their ballots for ol’ Mittens back then now share the same level of utter disdain for him that I do.

The last handful of months have seen Mitt Romney vote to approve a new Biden-appointed Supreme Court justice, whom less than a year earlier he did not see fit to approve to even the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. It’s seen him skip out on a vote that would have defunded enforcement of Biden’s unconstitutional vaccine mandate that has cost countless healthcare workers their jobs. Throughout the pandemic, before there even was a vaccine, Romney called them heroes. Most of them gained natural immunity through the risks associated with their line of work anyway, but Romney wouldn’t even show his gratitude by voting to let them keep their jobs. He then proceeded to be the only Republican to vote against ending the mask mandate for public transportation. Why? Because he believes “it’s important for public health officials to make these types of decisions, not politicians.”

That last one there is a doozy. Not even his vote so much as that rationale for it. The democratic principles that our government is based on require you, the elected officials, to make the governing decisions that the people live with and stand to be accountable for them. Utah’s voters did not elect the CDC officials who crafted this policy, Senator Romney. They elected you, and I hope they’re sorry for it. This mentality and lack of Constitutional understanding is why I believed Mitt Romney was just as bad for America as Barack Obama. But there was another reason I didn’t vote for him, too. He was bad for my party.

Think for a minute about the GOP we would have today if Mitt Romney had been elected in 2012. If he had been, Trump would never have been elected in 2016. We’d either have a second term of Mitt Romney, or we’d have Hillary Clinton. Regardless, he’d have been the de facto face and voice of the GOP through at least 2020. While the Democrats pushed a radical agenda consisting of sexualizing our children in public schools and solving inflation by printing more money we don’t have, do you trust Mitt Romney to stand in the gap? He’s shown his hand on COVID. Perhaps out of team spirit Republicans would have been willing to go along with prolonged shutdowns and mandates if we had Mitt Romney at the helm calling on us to do so.

Perhaps most alarming of all to consider, how would the party of Romney address the situation in Ukraine? The establishment wing of the party has been beating the war drums alongside Democrats since this conflict began. Senators like Rob Portman of Ohio and Tom Cotton of Arkansas have been very vocal that we need to have more involvement in Eastern Europe. South Carolina’s own Lindsey Graham even recklessly suggested that someone in Russia should simply assassinate Putin. In Congress’ other chamber, Liz Cheney is never one to turn down the opportunity to go to war, and her good buddy Adam Kinzinger just presented the House with the opportunity to give Biden the legal blessing to start WWIII. Thank God he is on his way out, and we can only pray that come August, Wyoming Republicans send Liz (and, Lord-willing, the entire Cheney family forever) packing with him.

Most Republican voters’ falling-out with Mitt Romney began much more recently when he voted twice to impeach President Trump. The same cable news talking heads who called Romney all the same names in 2012 that they called Trump four years later now play the role of Romney’s fan club, praising his acts of bravery and independence by bucking his party. The sad truth is that Mitt Romney acted out of vengeance, intending to unseat or at very least humiliate Donald Trump in a desperate attempt to regain control of the Republican Party. He wanted to reclaim it for the Bushes, for the Cheneys, and for John McCain, whose apparent dying wish was to save Obamacare. This wing of the party has done nothing for us but keep us bogged down in endless foreign wars and continue to take a dive to the Democrats on every important issue that I can recall in my lifetime. It was precisely because I love the GOP that I chose not to vote for Mitt Romney. While others fell prey to the biennial “most important election of our lifetime” narrative, I could not bring myself to sacrifice my party’s future for what would have been the most hollow of victories.

Thankfully we never got that hollow victory, and in this 10 year span we have made massive strides on both policy and electability. The nearly twelve years of my adult life that I have been involved in GOP politics have been marked by either infighting or by exhaustion and defeatism. For the first time that I can recall, there is a spirit of unity and excitement shared by nearly all besides the remnants of the aforementioned old guard, most of whom have left the party by now anyway. For the first time I can recall, we are on the offensive. As a teenager during the beginning of the Obama presidency, it was a big social no-no to speak ill of him. He was the effortlessly charismatic, socially inclusive answer to bumbling, “Bible-thumping” Bush. Bush also remained the face of the unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan due to the complicit media’s willingness to let Obama get away with prolonging them. Today, however, young and old alike share in viral chants of “F*** Joe Biden,” or the more family-friendly euphemism, “Let’s go Brandon.” Democrats call it distasteful, and perhaps it is. However, many of these Democrats are the same people who excused or even lauded Kathy Griffin for posing with a severed Trump head.

People are putting those little “I did that” stickers on the gas pumps to voice their displeasure (and show that they don’t buy into the “Putin price hike” narrative because gas prices had already risen by roughly a dollar per gallon under Biden before Russia invaded Ukraine). Everywhere you turn people are ragging on the many failures of this administration, and the amazing part is that it happened mere months after pundits were declaring the “end of the GOP” in the weeks following the heinously bloody insurrection that led to the death of (maybe) one person who wasn’t a participant — a dark and tragic day in our nation’s history, on par with 9/11 or Pearl Harbor.

Republicans now are enjoying a string of victories electorally, legislatively, and culturally. Between blocking Biden’s budget-busting “Build Back Better” bill, as well as the federal takeover of our election system, to Trump-appointed judges putting the kibosh on some of Biden’s most overreaching executive actions on COVID, Democrats have inflicted relatively little damage on our budget and our individual liberties compared to what many predicted.

At the state level, Florida’s Ron DeSantis leads by example and displays what a Republican official does when he actually listens to the people who voted him into office. DeSantis has followed up his admirable defense of citizens’ freedom and bodily autonomy by doing exactly what I suggested and signing legislation that makes members of the left very uncomfortable. As I said back in January, the goal should never be to implement policies that violate the rights and liberties of our friends on the left, as they so often do to us, but just to poke at them and make them defend some of their more ridiculous positions. After decades of masterfully executed speechcraft and setting up strawmen to knock down, DeSantis has finally broken down Democrats’ ability to misinform the public of our positions. When the left attempted to dub a bill that blocks age-inappropriate subject matter about sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through 3rd grade classrooms as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, DeSantis held their feet to the fire and forced them to reflect on whether teaching 6 year-olds that men can be pregnant was really the position they wanted to defend.

For years, GOP voters were told that firebrand candidates who wanted to take the fight to the Dems and play offense were unelectable. That’s how we ended up with presidential nominees like McCain and Romney. But what have we learned about electability from today’s GOP? That not only does authenticity, relatability, and keeping your campaign promises work, it especially works with non-white voters. Trump flipped a handful of formerly solid-blue Texas border counties that were 90+% Hispanic by 50 points or more between 2016 and 2020. In Virginia, the education-focused campaign of Glenn Youngkin won a state back that conventional wisdom and cable news pundits told us would never go red again because of demographic changes since the last Republican governor was elected there in 2009. In DeSantis’ Florida, an incredibly diverse state, there are now more registered Republicans than Democrats for the first time ever.

Perhaps best of all, the new Republican Party is finally embracing its role as the party serious about reducing government by giving libertarians a seat at the table. In the 2008 and 2012 elections, the candidacy of Ron Paul brought tens if not hundreds of thousands of new members into the GOP. However, instead of welcoming the new Republicans and seeking out opportunities to work together on the overwhelming majority of issues in which we all aligned, Ron Paul was ridiculed and minimized by mainstream conservatives like Mark Levin and Sean Hannity, and his supporters were treated as a nuisance by their local GOP in most states. I bet if you asked them now, they’d take Paul over Romney given the choice.

Since 2020, the COVID fiasco has injected a shot of anti-authoritarianism into the arm of the Republican Party, as the #1 issue of the last two years lit a fire under anyone skeptical of unchecked government power. They may not be card-carrying Republicans, but the conservative movement as a whole is giving even radically libertarian voices the type of warm embrace that Ron Paul’s supporters thought to be a pipe dream 10 years ago. Libertarian musician, political commentator, and comic book critic Eric July is a BlazeTV contributor appearing several times weekly on their programming. Author Michael Malice also appears occasionally on The Blaze, and conservative talk radio’s own Buck Sexton, who fills the time slot left by the late Rush Limbaugh, reads a chapter on Leo Tolstoy in the audiobook version of Malice’s latest offering, The Anarchist Handbook. Tom Woods, historian and host of The Tom Woods Show podcast, which promises to make you “a smarter libertarian in just 30 minutes a day,” was recently invited by Governor DeSantis to attend and live tweet his recent roundtable on COVID policy.

As a lifelong Republican, who was also a member of that sometimes rowdy and unkempt Ron Paul contingent in the 2012 primaries, I’m happy to say I’m still here and I’ve never gone anywhere. While the party I registered with at 18 was not one I took great pride in, it is today. Today’s GOP is more focused, issue-oriented, accessible, and consistent than the party I look back on 10 years ago. It’s kept more promises and it’s finally put the people who kept filling its tank into the driver’s seat by giving the people who have bled for them year after year what they’ve asked for. It’s finally becoming the party that I think might be capable of righting the ship instead of just sinking it slower, and I’m looking forward to doing a lot more winning with this GOP in the future.

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-Brady