The GOP no longer recognizes the meaning of the term “public servant” or abides by the Jeffersonian notion that power flows upwards from the people to the government, not the other way around.

Several years ago at a Board meeting of the American Conservative Union, an official from the White House asked to present the Administration’s plan on immigration. At the conclusion of the Bush aide’s presentation, someone asked the question: “Why did the President denounce the Minutemen as “vigilantes?” The aide’s reply was both instructive and disappointing. He simply said, “Because they weren’t authorized.” His answer told us all that conservatives need to know about the modern GOP.

Today’s Republicans are really reconstructed Tories, defending the status quo from on-high on the firm belief that power flows downward. True American conservatives have always believed that power flows up from the people and the status quo must always be challenged. They believed individual Americans rule their government, the government does not rule the people. The Constitution is a check on government, not the people.

Ronald Reagan never would have called the Minutemen “vigilantes.” Reagan, the great conservative populist, would have considered the Minutemen no different than a volunteer firefighter or those who make citizen’s arrests.

Karl Rove saw Bush as the 21st Century’s William McKinley and himself as Mark Hanna. Hanna, McKinley’s political operative, married the GOP and corporate America into a governing behemoth, long before FDR’s Harry Hopkins coined the phrase, ‘tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.” Rove, Tom Delay and others quite clearly wanted to do the same with the 21st Century Republican Party.

The GOP’s new reason to be has led former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee to proclaim that if elected president, he would ban smoking in the United States. Huckabee, like many in the GOP, wants to remake the GOP as the “Mommycrat” party. The remaining Reagan conservatives in the party want neither the “Big Socialist Sisterism” of Hillary Clinton nor the “Big Christian Brotherism” of Huckabee. They want Republican leaders to once and for all stop pandering and recognize the proper and limited role of American government. The GOP must take their fingers off the throats of their fellow Americans and stop telling us how much they care.

In 1980, a reporter asked Ronald Reagan for his view of government. He simply and elegantly replied that the role of government was to protect us from each other and not to protect us from ourselves. No Reaganite – no real conservative -- would even think of banning smoking in America. The GOP is no longer the party of expanding freedom but increasing security. From Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt to Reagan, all understood that the expansion of freedom was what the GOP should stand for and this is what would make it great and successful. And that it would only be successful by challenging the status quo through a framework of freedom, rather than defending it through a framework of arrogance and corrupt power.

The French Revolution ended in what was called the “Thermidor” as the revolution collapsed amidst betrayal, corruption and hubris. So too the modern GOP may be facing its own demise, although it will probably come with a whimper—not with show trials and beheadings.

Some would say more’s the pity.