To Win The War For America, The GOP Must Know It’s Happening

The reactions to last Tuesday’s elections can be broadly divided into two camps. “Why is everyone losing their minds over leftists winning predictable races in blue states?” and “The GOP had better wake up or we’re toast in 2026!”

If it had just been predictable races won by predictable people, the first reaction would be understandable. But when the GOP loses its supermajority in the Mississippi Senate (a state President Trump won last year by 22 points) and when both GOP incumbents in Georgia’s statewide Public Service Commissioners races are ousted by Democrats for the first time in decades, some deep soul searching needs to take place — and stat. 

Probably the best take came from Scott McCay’s reaction to the elections, in which he said the left has defrosted the cold civil war we’ve been in since at least 2015 (and probably since the 2000 presidential election) and that the right is still acting like it’s 1996. It’s not just that Senate Democrats took the country hostage for 42 days or promised to eliminate the filibuster as soon as they get their hands back on power. It’s not just that Eric Swalwell has publicly promised that Democrats will investigate every group that worked with Trump, or that James Carville fantasized about goose walking Trump voters and allies in orange jumpsuits through D.C., while “patriots” spit on them.

It’s that someone as vile, immoral, and death-mongering as Jay Jones was able to win his bid to be Virginia’s next attorney general. When only 46 percent of polled Virginia voters say Jones’ murderous fantasy texts are “disqualifying,” the problem is more than DEI racism and groomers disguised as teachers (bad as those are). It is that a good percentage — probably a majority — of Democrat voters now share Jones and Carville’s dreams. 

McCay, in his piece at The American Spectator, makes the logical case for the GOP to finally, actually, honestly go on the offensive and start passing a fusillade of bills aimed directly at helping struggling Americans in areas such as health care and housing. He’s right. It’s just that we can’t leave such an important job only to Congress. As it always is in a self-proclaimed self-governing, republican polity, the majority of steam will have to come from the people. But in that truth lies the trip-rope. 

Before he was assassinated, Charlie Kirk put his finger on why, exactly, the American right faces an uphill battle against the left: It lacks a revolutionary mindset. As Kirk pointed out, conservativism is, naturally, a defensive position, protecting what we have and what has been handed down to us from the left’s bayonet charges. We want to build things — businesses, churches, families, legacies. Nonstop agitating political movements are not on the list.

This has been a crippling problem since the post-WWII conservative movement began. William F. Buckley famously (or infamously) admitted that if he had lived during the American Revolution, he probably would have been on the British side. When the biggest founder of post-war conservatism says he would not have been for American independence, there’s a flaw in the system. 

The first thing to do is to acknowledge and internalize that we are in a war — not a disagreement, not an argument, not a debate (Kirk made his life’s mission debating, and the left celebrated when he was shot) — but a cold civil war. In that acknowledgement must also be the acceptance that a big number of so-called fellow citizens would cheer if you or I died tomorrow, which leads to only one conclusion: We’re playing for keeps. A lot of commentators and internet jabbers have said something similar over the decades, but this time, the wolf is really there when they cry. This is the most important step since a problem can’t be tackled until it’s been correctly catalogued. 

One element that must come from this acceptance of reality is a new American identity for the 21st century. If “conservative” is a defensive position, and we need to take the offense, then an entirely different way of thinking needs to be adopted. What does it mean to be an American, especially when New York Times opinion writers declare that because there was no common culture across the colonies in 1775, a military-aged Pakistani illegal alien is just as American as you (probably more so because he’s not white and not Christian)? How is that national identity expressed? At home? At work? In politics? We have not had to deal with existential questions like this since 1865. A warming cold civil war, though, makes them mandatory for two reasons: 1) We need to know who and what we are, and 2) it is easier to gain converts and allies when you can articulate what you are for and not just what you are against. 

Another thing that has to come from this mental gear shift is building a structure that doesn’t just counter the left but defeats it. Charlie Kirk and a few others have done this, but more is desperately needed. The DataRepublican X account has pointed out since last Tuesday’s elections how the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote machine and political activist networks are juggernauts, not just because Bill Gates and George Soros fund them but because of their jet-engine slick efficiency in making every penny count.

DataRepublican has also pointed out that nothing closely resembling this exists on the right. Even five years ago, teaching ourselves this structure would have been a herculean effort. Now, thanks to AI models like Grok, it is doable and possible to make the subject a crash course and master it. 

A third result of this mindshift has to be looking at the long game. Mark Steyn once quipped that Republicans get out every other second Tuesday of November to save the country, while the left is working to pervert and destroy it all the other days in between. The war didn’t end when Trump rewon the White House, and it won’t end next year when the GOP (pray God) not only keeps but expands its majorities.

“If we would have the horse of old/ Scour ye the horse anew,” G.K. Chesterton wrote in The Ballad of the White Horse, and it’s just as true now as it was in 1911 or 878. It also means expanding our vision past D.C. and back to our own states and localities. We need to be actively building anti-Californias and the opposite of New York City, not just to protect ourselves but to let the facts speak for themselves when people compare red and blue.

There’s a lot of work to do between now and next November. So we had better get started and be anxious for the fray. 

Nathan Stone is a storyteller who looks at culture, politics, and religion from a different point of view on his YouTube channel Nate on the Stone, and who exercises moral imagination in his writing. A lover of books, music, and the outdoors (especially with dogs), he earned a master’s degree in American history from Liberty University in 2016. Subscribe to his channel and follow him on Twitter.