The 2024 Republican State Convention:  Words Matter

By Art DeJong RPSC Member

Grassroots Republican delegates gathering for the 2024 Republican State Convention in Appleton had a lot on their minds: the antisemitic campus riots, the lawless show trials, the corrupt elections, the cities awash with addicted and psychotic vagrants, the corrupt public health bureaucrats, the authoritarian executive orders, the inflationary spending, the federal wars on energy, transportation, and small business along with more wars to defend other countries’ borders while opening our own. . . , and adding to it all–a self-loathing Democratic Party pushing DEI policies that create even more Division, Envy, and Isolation.  With all this going on, how were these Republican delegates going to answer their stay-at-home friends and neighbors who demand, “Why don’t you RINOS do anything about this mess???”

Republicans at least wouldn’t scream to exterminate Jews or want to murder 9-month-old babies or to castrate confused boys, and they probably wouldn’t host drag queen story hours featuring Democrat heroes who shelter Hamas terrorists in their spare bedrooms, but would these delegates do anything more than curse the darkness?   Would they get beyond bemoaning the symptoms and deal with the real cause of our national identity crisis—the loss of the common principles for which we once stood?

Could any gathering of Americans, even Republicans, still agree on anything significant after being taught for generations that there are no such things as common principles or even any form of objective truth at all?  When even logic is dismissed as a patriarchal plot, and when words themselves are only subjective, lacking any fixed meanings, isn’t power, the law of club and fang, the only thing left?

The lawless power grabs of federal, state, and local agencies have shoved complacent old Humpty Dumpty off the wall.  The real question for this state convention and the national convention that soon will convene remains:  Are there enough “people of the word” left, even among Republicans, to put this country back together again, to restore faith in the national principles and the words that make them possible? 

The State Convention answered with a resounding, yes.  One of the first things it did was to cement into words the bedrock principles that had made the country with the most diverse population in the world also the most unified, stable, and prosperous country. They adopted, almost unanimously, a platform built of five familiar sounding, but long forgotten, planks made of simple, meaningful words:

First, we are one nation (Not atomic specks in a world population).  Second, we are under God (Not under national or world governments).  Third, we are indivisible (Not sub-divided into identity groups). Fourth, With liberty (Not servants of the state), and fifth, and Justice (Not the whims of the mob or the opinions of corruptible judges) for all (Not only for political insiders.)

Of course, opinions differed about what to do about a country that had gone off the rails.  Senator Ron Johnson, in his opening call to save the republic, made a valiant attempt to lay out a path as did Eric Hovde’s barnburner callout of the Pravda press and Tammy Baldwin’s support for suicidal Democratic policies.  Congressmen and state representatives spoke soberly in onstage interviews about what to do when a country loses its unifying principles.  The convention disagreed about ignoring Rejani Raveendran’s late breaking campaign for feckless Tammy Baldwin’s seat.  House Speaker Robin Vos’s absence spoke of significant disagreements about policy, and roll-call votes for delegates to the Republican National Committee suggested tension among GOP veterans and younger fire brands supported by Turning Point USA. But there was little disagreement about the positive principles that unite us.

The virulent attacks on the Constitution, common sense, and on words themselves have served to cement real party and national unity.  Although Democrats in academia, education, and the media deny the fixed meaning of words, they fear and loathe the meaning of every one of the four simple words–Make America Great Again.  

The great country envisioned by the 2024 Republican state party platform is opposite that of the centrally commanded utopia of today’s Democrats.  It is simply a place where individual citizens have the freedom to do great things.  It is a governing system summarized by three, simple but very large words– Liberty Through Law.