Takeover

The 100-Year War for the Soul of the GOP and How Conservatives Can Finally Win It

De: Richard A. Viguerie, Jenny Bath Martin - foreword

Narrado por: Brian Holsopple

One hundred and two years ago Teddy Roosevelt split the Republican Party to advance his progressive agenda. Progressivism, or Big Government Republicanism, became the philosophy of the Republican Party's establishment elite. Fifty years ago conservatives began a battle for control of the party. Now is the time for conservatives to finish the job and take back the Republican Party. All national polls show that the American people self-identify as conservatives by a margin of 2 to 1 or more. Despite the scandals surrounding the White House, the outrageous failure of ObamaCare, and the lack of leadership from Congress, the Republican Party has failed to win key elections because it has failed to deliver on its promises to roll back the tide of Big Government.

In Takeover, prominent Republican strategist and fundraiser Richard Viguerie outlines the way to establish limited-government constitutional conservatism as the governing philosophy of the Republican Party and sanity back to Congress and the White House. Viguerie details the storied history of the battle for the soul of Republican Party and offers practical advice and outlines the steps necessary for conservatives to win the civil war in the GOP and govern America by 2017.

©2014 Richard A. Viguerie (P)2014 Audible, Inc.

Great read about the political days of my life

As a young boomer, this work by an elder statesman lays out not only a clear description of recent US political history but a path to correcting many of the wrongs I see in our great republic. Viguerie's insight is invaluable and seminal to those who desire a resurgence of the prosperity and peace that come from living according to Godly and Constitutional principles.

Required listening

This book is required listening for anyone wanting to get involved in grassroots conservative activism.

Takeover Is Not Merely a Book. It’s a Warning to the Conservative Movement

Richard A. Viguerie’s Takeover should be required reading for every conservative who still wonders why Republican voters repeatedly send reformers to Washington only to watch Washington reform them instead.

Viguerie is not speaking as an academic observer peering down from a think tank balcony. He writes as one of the principal architects of the modern conservative grassroots movement itself. Few men alive understand the machinery of American political power more intimately, and even fewer possess the credibility to say plainly what this book says: the conservative movement’s greatest enemy has often not been the Left, but the Republican establishment that learned how to absorb, redirect, and ultimately neutralize conservative energy for its own preservation.

That is the brilliance of Takeover. It strips away the illusion that electoral victories alone are sufficient. Viguerie demonstrates, with painful clarity, that institutions matter more than slogans, and that movements without disciplined control over staffing, incentives, funding structures, and organizational power eventually become captive to the very systems they thought they had conquered.

What makes the book especially important is that Viguerie does not merely complain. He understands political gravity. He understands that entrenched power protects itself instinctively, whether in corporate media, party leadership, lobbying networks, bureaucratic agencies, or consultant ecosystems. The conservative base often imagines that replacing a few politicians will change Washington. Viguerie explains why Washington instead changes the politicians.

And history has repeatedly proven him correct.

The Tea Party era validated much of his warning. Large numbers of candidates were elected promising constitutional restraint and limited government, only to become assimilated into the institutional culture they once campaigned against. The rhetoric remained conservative while the governing incentives remained establishment. Viguerie saw this dynamic long before most conservatives were willing to admit it.

The deeper value of Takeover is philosophical. Beneath the political strategy lies an older conservative truth: systems shape behavior. A movement that fails to build and protect its own institutions eventually becomes dependent upon institutions controlled by its opponents or by caretakers with no real attachment to first principles.

That insight places Viguerie in the tradition of the serious conservative realists — men who understood that political sentiment alone cannot preserve liberty unless it is paired with structure, discipline, and the courage to confront corruption inside one’s own coalition.

Most political books age quickly because they are reactions to news cycles. Takeover endures because it addresses permanent realities about power, human nature, and institutional capture.

Richard Viguerie did not write this book merely to criticize Republicans. He wrote it to warn conservatives that movements die when they confuse access to power with control over it.

Too many ignored him.

America is now living inside the consequences.