I understand the tongue-in-cheek fun of the After Party suggestion on a recent stratosphere lounge. However, based on my own reaction to it and that of many others I have talked to, it is not a good idea because it is perceived as unserious and flippant. It’s the very same reason that people do NOT want to vote for the Libertarian Party despite leaning heavily toward libertarianism. A pot-smoking candidate, a BLM-praising candidate, a presidential candidate in the primaries who strips during the convention? No-one takes this serious.
Ron Paul ran as an LP candidate but he realized that he had to stay within the Republican Party to have a chance to be taken seriously by the voters. I think an After Party will be taken even less seriously than the LP and good people like Ron (or Rand) Paul and Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley would never want to be involved in something like this.
So what is the alternative? I think that my primary choice is to take back the Republican Party and make it into an America First party. I have included a mock-up picture of how I think roughly we should present ourselves. It should be branded as “The Party of Lincoln” and the Democrats should be consistently referred to as “The Party of Slavery.”
The slogan of the party should be “Freeing slaves/fighting slavery since 1865” or something to that effect. I think the essence of the Democratic party is not racism but slavery. They enslave people, and when it became politically incorrect to enslave black people, they started enslaving the working and middle class instead.
I do not think that an animal should be the maskot of the party. I think it should be Lincoln, and the symbol of the party should be the American flag. When people think of this party, they should think “The American Party.” I know Bill said that the word “American” is tainted, but I think that’s wrong and he doesn’t really believe that because he called his series “Moving back to America.” He could have called it “Moving back to the After Party” but that is silly and no-one wants to do that. America is a good word for 80% of Americans, and by taking ownership of that word, the correct delineation is made between the Americans and the Un-Americans. Slavery is Un-American, communism is Un-American, racism is Un-American, globalism is Un-American, critical race theory and the 1619 project are Un-American.
I have no idea why the Republican Party has given up its greatest cultural asset, namely Lincoln. Why, oh, why, do they not at all times present themselves as “The party of Lincoln” and frame all their policies in terms of freedom from slavery? Why, oh, why don’t they brand the Democratic party as the party of slavery, Ku Klux Klan, and Jim Crow? Why? It’s so silly. Patriots could easily win this culture war if they just were unitely willing to call out the evil by its proper name.
8 replies on “After party? The American Party”
Bill is a very smart guy. I don’t believe even he thinks the After Party would be a credible platform to run on. What I understand about this, and what he seemed to say in the Stratosphere Lounge tonight, is this is meant to be a movement. Not a platform. I may be wrong but I think he sees it as a way to push back against the left in a sophisticated, in your face means of attack. A more entertaining way to get people to listen about what needs changed and how to do it. A movement that can throw its weight around and back candidates that are fit for office. I think he likes it because it would be a way to energize people that are just plain fed up with both parties.
I think if Mr. Trump follows through with the Patriot Party, all of this is MUTE. As I will joint that right away.
Moot. It is ‘moot’.
Thanks
I think Bill likes After Party so much because “after party” is a term common in LA and shoebiz/theater and he immediately gets it and assumes everyone else will too. He doesn’t realize that in the rest of the country, you would have to explain to at least a quarter of the potential members what an ‘after party’ is and that they should think it is cool.
“I think it should be Lincoln”
That is a very bad idea if you want to recruit a large party, in the same way as Whittle’s rejection of the term Patriot party is wise.
Hard as it may be for those of you from other regions to believe, but there are a lot of people from the South that have a very poor opinion of Lincoln. You may think “well, I don’t want those evil racists in our party anyway… it will be great to weed them out.” But that buys into the delusion that Southerners are taught the same thin propaganda that the rest of the country gets and deliberately chooses to be on the side of evil. They don’t hate Lincoln because they are racists and he freed the slaves.
White Southerners in the past, and still in some places (either officially or their family histories about how things “really happened”) were taught such delusions as:
*Lincoln didn’t free the slaves in America, as slavery was still legal in all the slave states who were loyal to the North through the war and even after his death.
*As Commander in Chief Lincoln was responsible for enslaving more people than anyone else in American history, except “it was different” because it was enslavement to the Army and called “conscription” (which had never been done by the US before. Why did Washington cross the Delaware?). An odd innovation for a ‘great emancipator’
*Lincoln himself claimed in a short obscure cemetery dedication that the war was not to end slavery but to prevent government by the people from going extinct, though in defense of the “it was a war to end slavery” crowd this is an unbelievably obvious lie since a) the South wasn’t trying to determine how any of the Northern states governed themselves, they just wanted to secede and set up a new govt for themselves, and b) the govt they wanted to set up was almost a carbon copy of the US constitutional structure anyway with a few crazy ideas like term limits and banning omnibus bills.
Yeah… crazy I know, but Lots of white Southerners do not have a warm fuzzy feeling towards Lincoln and they think it is due, not to them being hateful racists, but to having a better understanding of history. Don’t hate them, it’s not their fault they were taught all these weird lies. Just have the wisdom to pick a cute raccoon in a hat that nobody could hate.
I lost the logic halfways. The ibertarians “lose so fucking always” for a set of reasons. How does it follow from here that a new party with a solid message and good candidates would also? And why start makig wild guesses on what Ted cruz would think even before the idea was written on a napkin?
Reusing GOP again is tempting, but look how far Trump got with that. Now is the perfect time to juse it as jumpboard and leave its skeleton behind.
And if you can’t convince the population that you’re the better choice, well, it will the problem with either you or the population. 🙂
I would suggest diving deeper into the history of Lincoln and all the things he (and others) did that brought about the Civil War. Hint: It wasn’t just about slavery.
I disagree that 80% of our population is okay with the word “America” (or the flag, our history, the Constitution, etc.) at this point.
I do agree that the “After party” runs the risk of not being taken seriously, but I also think any word used by Trump will be tainted as well.
Maybe that will change once all the people who voted for Joe get a personal taste of what they voted for, but right now with conservatives being labeled as domestic terrorists, think it’s best to go with something fresh. IMO