An Open Letter To Every GOP State And County Committee In The Country

The political center in this country is liquifying. People are white-hot angry. America does not work for them anymore. They want change. They demand change. If the GOP does not provide solutions, Americans will look for answers from an increasingly radical Democratic Party.

The average age of a first-time homebuyer in the United States is now 40. Not so long ago, it was somewhere around 25. Even more alarmingly, the majority of young people will never be able to buy a house at all.

Prices for everything are on the rise. People are having to choose between filling the tank in the car and bringing home milk and bread for the family. Credit cards are maxed out. Huge numbers of people are struggling just to pay the rent.

The mills and factories are closed. Even major retail chains are going out of business. In many small towns, the only businesses left are the Smoke Shop and the Dollar Store. Meanwhile, giant data centers are being fast-tracked all over the country, stealing good farmland and sucking up the groundwater.

Trust in the electoral process is at an all-time low. Increasingly, people feel there is no point in voting at all. They believe the system is rigged, and they have no real voice.

Government continues to grow in size and expense. Taxes are absurdly high. The national debt is approaching the point where it is a national security threat. The day when America goes bankrupt is fast approaching.

Life expectancy in this country is, for the first time in history, declining. Americans are being poisoned by food produced by a corporate agricultural industry and exploited by Big Pharma. They limp into old age, pumped full of medications and staggering from one surgery to the next.

The educational system is broken. Our children cannot read, write, or do basic math. Children in countries with a fraction of our resources outperform our young people handily on every standardized test there is.

Only the billionaires seem to profit. Government, in fact, appears to exist primarily to cater to their needs and desires. They get richer. They acquire ever larger amounts of influence. The little guy is now a prop trotted out at election time and then quickly forgotten thereafter.

The GOP is doing nothing of consequence to change any of this. It pretends none of this is happening. It fields candidates who talk of “bipartisanship” and compromise. The party lives, it seems, in some alternate universe where all is well, and the future is bright. Americans are holding on for dear life and losing what little faith they have left in the system. Republican senators and representatives pump out newsletters touting changes to state license plates, the next Lincoln Day dinner, and the renaming of a bridge at a county park.

The apparent presumption here is that Americans have nowhere to go politically, that the increasingly radical Democratic alternative is unpalatable and unacceptable. That is a gross and potentially fatal miscalculation.

Within the Democratic Party, the most radical Marxist figures are ascendant. Individuals like Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Zohran Mamdani dominate the news cycle and push almost unthinkably radical policies, including defunding the police, seizing commercial real estate, paying reparations to aggrieved minorities, and the nationalization of the “means of production.” Zohran, now mayor of the nation’s largest city, wants government grocery stores, government child care, free buses, and even higher taxes on those businesses that are still hanging on in New York City.

These are dangerous, misguided policies. They mean the end of the United States as we know it. But in desperate times, people opt for dangerous measures. When your back is against the wall, you can’t put food on the table, and the rent is due, that guy talking about “eating the rich” and burning it all down may not sound quite as crazy anymore. You may have reached the point where you are willing to give that kind of thing a try.

This is, in fact, precisely where the Russians ended up in 1917. The Bolsheviks did not rally them to their cause with long-winded discussions of Marxist theory. They promised “Peace, Land and Bread” to a country starved of all three.

More immediately, this is how Mamdani won in New York. He is a Communist, but he did not hand out copies of the Communist Manifesto and Mao’s Little Red Book. He talked endlessly about rent control, bringing down the price of food, and lowering bus fare. He promised solutions to the problems plaguing New Yorkers. That his solutions will ultimately prove to be nothing of the kind is beside the point.

Mamdani offered a vision of a better life, no matter how illusory. No one else in the race offered anything more than the status quo.

The time for equivocation is long past. The Republican Party has a choice to make. It can stand up and stand for something, or it can sit and watch as Americans opt for a very different, much more radical way ahead.