Lukewarm Gets You Spit Out: A GOP History Lesson for the Dems

Good morning, gang. Glad you're here. Today is Wednesday, July 22, 2026 — hump day, and the calendar's determined to make it weird. It says it's Mango Day, World Brain Day, Sophia Day, Vanilla Ice Cream Day, Gorgeous Grandma Day, Sprinkle Day, Hammock Day, Penuche Fudge Day, Pi Approximation Day, Rat Catcher's Day, Lion's Share Day, Fragile X Awareness Day, Be a Good Teammate Day, and Beta Glucan Day. Do the math on 22/7, catch a rat, share your fudge with your grandma, and be done with it by lunch.

Today in History (offered because if you want to know who you are, you need to know who you've been):

1376: The Pied Piper of Hamelin allegedly lures the town's children away after being stiffed on his rat-catching fee — the legendary root of Rat Catcher's Day.

1587: A second English colony lands on Roanoke Island, to vanish later without a trace.

1796: General Moses Cleaveland founds the settlement that becomes Cleveland, Ohio.

1894: The world's first motorized race, a 79-mile run from Paris to Rouen, is staged by the newspaper Le Petit Journal.

1916: A bomb kills 10 bystanders at a Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco.

1933: Aviator Wiley Post completes the first solo flight around the world in just under eight days.

1934: Bank robber John Dillinger is gunned down by federal agents outside Chicago's Biograph Theater.

1937: The Senate rejects Franklin Roosevelt's court-packing scheme.

1942: Nazi forces begin deporting Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka; the same day, gasoline rationing kicks off along the Atlantic seaboard.

1943: General George S. Patton's forces capture Palermo, Sicily.

1944: Soviet troops liberate the Majdanek concentration camp, the first major camp freed in the war.

1946: Irgun militants bomb the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91.

1957: Walter "Fred" Morrison files the patent for the flying disc that becomes the Frisbee.

1975: The House votes to restore Robert E. Lee's citizenship, 110 years late.

2003: Forces kill Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay in a raid near Mosul.

Birthdays today include: George Clinton, funk pioneer (Parliament-Funkadelic); Paul Schrader, director (Taxi Driver, American Gigolo); Danny Glover, actor (The Color Purple, Lethal Weapon); Mireille Mathieu, French singer; Albert Brooks, actor and director (Broadcast News, Finding Nemo); Don Henley of the Eagles (Hotel California); S.E. Hinton, novelist (The Outsiders); Alan Menken, composer (Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid); Al Di Meola, jazz guitarist; Willem Dafoe, actor (Platoon, Spider-Man); John Leguizamo, actor (Moulin Rouge!); Keith Sweat, R&B singer; David Spade, actor and comedian (Tommy Boy, Saturday Night Live); Rhys Ifans, actor (Notting Hill); Jaime Camil, actor and singer (Jane the Virgin); Rufus Wainwright, singer-songwriter; Selena Gomez, actor (Wizards of Waverly Place, Only Murders in the Building); and Javon Walton, actor and boxer (Euphoria).

If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday — you're in good company.

* * *

Yesterday. No — fifteen years ago. Sorry. Time has a way of mugging you when you're not looking.

Anyway, back then, I wrote a piece torching the GOP leadership's addiction to "centrism." These days, GOP voters spot a RINO — Republican In Name Only — and dump them the second the larger strategy allows. Back during the Bush years, centrism still had the party in a chokehold, and everybody smiled and called it healthy.

That changed as time revealed the failures of that mindset. Washington was fighting over "spending cuts" that cut nothing — smaller increases wearing a cut's clothing to the costume party. I dug into my personal archives and found that I wrote, way back in 2011:

The message to the GOP has been made clear in recent days. No more spending. No more compromise with the Democrats who have never cut a government program, save defense. Not one. (All they've done is cut a percentage of the growth off, and they call it a cut.) It's time for us as citizens to act as adults would when the kids have overspent their limit, as the Democrats have by a factor of 10,000 or better. I say, it's well past time to cut up the credit cards.

In that same piece, I quoted PJ Media alum Melissa Clouthier, who was swinging the same hammer (in a piece also long gone from the internet):

I'm tired of Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Tom Ridge, and the rest of them. I'm tired of the pontificating. I'm tired of the holier-than-thou bearing. I'm tired of the self-important smugness. Most of all, I'm tired of losing big elections and being lectured by the losers about how to win.

And I'd just like to say this to moderates feeling tweaked in the current Grand Old Party: Get over it.

I even dug up a quote from then-candidate Mike Huckabee, of all people, in a CNN piece also long since gone from their site. (I must say, I'm really glad I invested in the extra disk drive arrays! The ability to go back to stuff I've written years ago has proven quite useful.) 

In an interview with the California newspaper The Visalia Times-Delta, Huckabee said the GOP would only further decline in influence should it alienate social conservatives, largely considered the most energetic and loyal faction of the party.

"Throw the social conservatives, the pro-life, pro-family people overboard, and the Republican party will be as irrelevant as the Whigs," he said in reference to the American political party that largely disbanded in the mid 1800s.

"They'll basically be a party of gray-haired old men sitting around the country club puffing cigars, sipping brandy and wondering whatever happened to the country. That will be the end of the party," he said in the interview published Thursday.

Does that last paragraph sound familiar? It should. That's the exact caricature Democrats painted of the GOP for decades — and they weren't far wrong. They just assumed the GOP would keep playing along with the sketch. One Donald John Trump cured them of that illusion, with an impressive degree of finality. 

Trace the last several election cycles and the pattern jumps off the page like a jump scare in an amusement park fright house. GOP rank and file kept firing the GOP establishment figures as fast as they popped up. Bob Dole. John McCain. Arlen Specter. Mitt Romney. Lincoln Chafee. Jeb Bush — leadership's handpicked golden boy — who cratered so spectacularly in the 2016 primaries that he didn't survive past February, pulling way under 10% everywhere he showed up. Message sent. Donald Trump took the nomination that year. Message sent twice, in case anyone in the establishment box still had the volume down.

Call this a stretch if you want — I'll drag you to the Bible for it anyway. Revelation 3:15–16, John of Patmos writing to the church in Laodicea:  "I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth." (NIV)

John's talking about faith, not politics. I'm not borrowing the verse for theology; I'm borrowing it because the instinct to distrust the lukewarm, the noncommittal, the fence-straddler runs bone deep and shows up wherever humans cluster into tribes. Notice John doesn't call them "moderates." That's a modern euphemism, dressing up an old grievance in a Brooks Brothers suit and a Brioni tie, tailored a size too tight.

Back in the 2010s, GOP rank-and-file anger didn't stop at the Democrats — it landed just as hard on the RINOs running the show. That anger never cooled. It just found new furniture to burn.

Look at how fast the base torched John Cornyn. Look at how McCain, Romney, and Jeb Bush flamed out before that. Notice the pattern? GOP voters sat on their hands for McCain, Jeb, and Romney for one simple reason: The political center they were pushing is a fantasy. It doesn't exist. It never has.

Remember how we ended up with George Bush, and by extension, his kid? GOP leadership decided Reagan needed Bush as ballast for VP. Their concern? Reagan was — sing it with me, kids — "too conservative." We went along because the alternative looked worse. At least, so we thought at the time. (There's a whole column buried in that rabbit hole. Another day, for that one).

Which brings us to now — and the actual point of this piece. 

We find ourselves decades into a GOP revolution that started with Reagan and still hasn't finished, with the base dragging the party by the collar back to its root philosophy and burying the "moderates" along the way.  

The Democrats are now running the identical play — except they're not creeping toward the center; they're sprinting away from it, hard left, and, amusingly, calling the sprint "courage." The brand is Democratic Socialism (DSA), and it's coming for the whole party and not asking permission.

The truth is simple: The DSA isn't hijacking anything. It's just trying to drag rank-and-file Democrats back to their own philosophical roots. They'll work overtime to convince you that Democratic socialism isn't communism. They conveniently skip the part where Stalin said socialism's whole job is to produce communism. And guess what? That has been the very foundation of the Democrats for the last 60 years, the Democrat rank and file not admitting it notwithstanding. 

The GOP built itself on rugged individualism and the small government required to protect it. The Democrats built themselves on the opposite of every word in that sentence. That gap hasn't closed — it's widening, fast, as they push for more government control over more of your life, one aspect at a time. The phenom that is Trump has forced them out in the open with that mindset.

Understand me clearly: The word "radical" is a literal translation from the Latin, meaning "from the root." The value of being a radical is measured by what root you sprang from.

Watch the Democratic Socialists of America go to work on the rank and file. Watch, too, the Democrat rank and file recoil, as they are forced to face the actual philosophical root of their party, which, it turns out, they’ve never really identified. The split we’re discussing here foretells a warp-speed crash and burn.

It's going to be a very revealing midterm, kids. I better have a word with Alexa about ordering more popcorn.

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