An ideology is a set of doctrines and values that define political aims and unite like-minded individuals. A political party with an ideology is in the business of persuasion; a party without ideology is in the business of fundraising.

Conservatism, the professed ideology of the Republican Party that advocates limited government, fiscal restraint, self-reliance, and individual liberty, has not been practiced since the time of Ronald Reagan. Oddly enough, it has been consistently rejected by the Republican Party since.

In 2008 the Party nominated John McCain, a de facto Democrat. In 2012, during the primary campaign, Republicans viciously attacked capitalism by calling Mitt Romney a “vulture” capitalist, supporting Obama’s socialist arguments against capitalism. In the same year, the putative gold standard of ideological purity, National Review, denounced Newt Gingrich, a political mastermind with a flawless conservative record and impressive accomplishments, as someone with “poor judgment and persistent unpopularity.”

Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 victory sent shock waves over the Republican Party. For years, Party leaders had been making grand pronouncements on the academic theories of conservatism, secure in the knowledge that they were not in power to implement them. Some probably hoped that day would never come. Although Trump was not a bona fide conservative, in terms of conservative principles whether economic or social, Trump had far better arguments than the Party leaders in the House and Senate, and he has the chutzpah to implement his vision.

Treacherously, many Republicans joined with the Democrats to undermine the President. In a concerted effort to paralyze executive authority, they blatantly subverted almost every program on the President’s agenda. They had actively supported the Democrats’ mania for ever more sweeping investigations of dubious claims, rumors, unsubstantiated allegations, and innuendos that have descended over the President, his family, and his associates. No president had ever been vilified and attacked systematically and violently by his party. The spiteful Democrats hated him for their defeat; the vindictive Republicans could not forgive him for their victory.

The current state of affairs is such that the Republican Party as an effective political entity does not exist. It adheres to no ideology, making elections about rival lists of promises.

The Party is divided between political tacticians, shamefully indifferent to good and evil verging progressively toward the Democrats' socialist agenda, and the idealists, who have no ideological base to lean on, pursuing a segmented rather than comprehensive approach to policymaking.

The idealists are trying to capitalize on individual issues and spending all their energy and political capital attacking illegal immigration, woke culture, climate change, the high cost of energy and inflation, emphasizing consequence over cause and symptoms over disease.

They failed to understand that all those programs are integral components of socialists’ grand ideological conquest and need to be confronted as a whole with superior ideology.

The idealists’ strategy is a classic case of what Henry Kissinger described as “purpose outrunning knowledge.”

While GOP has suffered from a lack of knowledge, the Democrats have made an epochal shift toward Marxism. With the chief components of a “fundamental transformation” firmly in place, Democrats are successfully implementing the strategy of socialist conquest developed by Barack Obama. Obama, who had studied Marxism more deeply than most contemporary Marxists, rejected the old dogma that society requires government ownership of the means of production to implement socialism. He concluded, quite correctly, that as long as government controls the economy, it can replace free-market capitalism with a political economy (a government-controlled economy driven by political ideology). 

Thus by being in a position to control profits, government can gradually impose socialism. Most importantly, Obama ascertained that to control the economy, the government needs to control only three vital sectors – health care, finance, and energy.

The enactment of the Affordable Care Act effectively put the healthcare sector under government control, while the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act imposed control over banking.

To take control of the energy sector, the Democrats reincarnated the 50-year-old myth of anthropogenic climate change. Begun as Global Cooling in the 1970s, it evolved into Global Warming in 2000s, and recently, to acknowledge objective reality, it morphed into the ambiguous expression Climate Change.  It is a sinister ploy to replace hydrocarbons with wind and solar, which are unreliable and uncompetitive and cannot exist without government subsidies.

Furthermore, the Democrats’ war to end laissez-faire is not limited to controlling the economy; it involves a comprehensive, multi-faceted strategy. Accepting socialism would require a massive cultural transformation and major adjustment of the American DNA, permitting the moral lapse from self-reliance to government dependence. The Democrats have been tenaciously emasculating existing institutions – marriage, religion, education, the judicial system, and reliance on individual liberty – as outmoded, unfair, and discriminatory.

In this period of ideological uncertainty, the Republican Party needs to reorient around a new ideology that dismisses socialism and offers superior rationality by incorporating economic dynamism, individual liberty, and compassion. Reason shall confront falsehood: the political system responsible for millions of deaths cannot be superior; free market capitalism based on individual liberty, cannot be immoral; the country that has twice elected a Black president cannot be racist; attacks on the Second Amendment are an attempt to disarm the law-abiding citizen; no borders means no sovereignty; climate has been changing for billions of years; two times two is four, and the law of gravity still exists despite woke culture; inequality is a locomotive of progress, and economic equality can only occur in poverty; and there are only two genders.

To bring the Republican Party's capabilities in line with its aspirations, Republicans should    establish a correlation between a new ideology and a winning strategy. They must realize that although socialism, to some extent, has already arrived, the Democrats are acting from a position of inferior strength. Otherwise, they would not have to resort to the prosecution of political opponents, suppression of free speech, suffrage to illegal aliens, vote harvesting, and mail-in ballots, to name a few known elements of the Democrats’ system to guarantee electoral supremacy.

In his Art of War, Sun Tzu taught that, “The opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.” Yet, the Republican policymakers have failed to grasp and expose the Democrats’ perilous vulnerability:  the Democrats cannot win honest elections. This shows that there is still enough moral vigilance to stop America from sliding into serfdom.

To extricate America from the jaws of Marxism requires a leader of extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness. At this historical juncture, only one person embodied the necessary qualities and a proven track record of accomplishments – Donald J. Trump. His presidency had validated the Roman maxims that the heroes stand alone, and fortune favors the brave.

Therefore, the longer the Republican Party remains ideologically impotent and leaderless, the longer the Democrats’ objectives are misunderstood or ignored, the more difficult it will be to reverse socialist gains, if ever. Without an ideological counterweight, democracy falters, socialism marches, and President Trump’s reassurance that “America will never be a socialist country” doesn’t sound reassuring.

Alexander G. Markovsky is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, a conservative think tank that examines national security, energy, risk analysis, and other public policy issues. He is the author of Anatomy of a Bolshevik and Liberal Bolshevism: America Did Not Defeat Communism, She Adopted It. Mr. Markovsky is the owner and CEO of Litwin Management Services, LLC. He can be reached at alex.g.markovsky@gmail.com

Caricature credit: Donkey Hotey CC BY 2.0 license