A Texas GOP leader sees the lack of unity among Republicans as being a result of subgroups divided according to their views on the government’s relationship to the individual.
“We’ve got to push past that divide,” said Lt. Col. Allen West, former chairman of the Texas Republican Party. “What the Democrat Party has done is eliminate their factions. It is a socialist Marxist borderline Communist Party and a lot of the old conservative Democrats have been pushed out.”
While West is a constitutional conservative, he characterizes Gov. Greg Abbott as a progressive or moderate conservative.
“You don't have to be a Democrat to be progressive,” he said. “Progressivism just means you believe that the government has superiority over the people and a lot of Republicans believe that.”
West was a featured speaker at the 2023 Black Conservative Summit in Chicago on March 25 along with former California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder, former candidate for Illinois Lt. Gov. Stephanie Trussell, Indiana Attorney General emeritus Curtis Hill, and Trump political appointee Ken Blackwell.
Freedom's Journal Institute organized the annual conference.
"When you look at COVID, the state of Texas is still under an emergency declaration, which was used to change election law," West said. "We went from two weeks of early voting to three weeks of early voting.”
Under the state’s constitution, the governor of Texas is required to return emergency powers to the legislature after 30 days, which is something Abbott has yet to do.
“He has completely boxed out the legislature,” West told the Southeast Texas Record.
West is no stranger to politics. Prior to chairing the Texas GOP and campaigning for governor against Abbott, along with contender Don Huffines, West was a congressman in Florida.
In the primary last year, Abbott won 66.55% of the Republican vote compared to West who won 12.3% of the vote, and Huffines who garnered 12%, according to Ballotpedia.
"I'm a warrior at heart and I love this country," West said in an interview. "Generations of my family have served this country in uniform, in combat, and if I'm needed on the battlefield being the actual battlefield or the ideological battlefield we find ourselves in here, I'm ready to once again step up and serve this nation."
West retired from the U.S. Army as a lieutenant colonel in 2007.
Although he unsuccessfully campaigned to be the state’s governor and is no longer Texas GOP Chair, West remains involved in Republican politics as the executive director of the American Constitutional Rights Union (ACRU) and ACRU Action Fund.
“I get around Texas and speak and there are a lot of people who are not happy about some of the directions that Texas is going,” he said. “We have to do better in the urban population centers like Dallas and Houston because that's where you see the greatest amount of crime, a lack of quality education, and all of these things.”
Major population centers statewide are currently Democrat-controlled. For example, Democrat Robert Francis ‘Beto’ O’Rourke won Dallas County in the Nov. 22 gubernatorial election with 259,768 votes compared to just 141,654 votes for Abbott, according to the county’s election summary.
“That's how a red state gets flipped,” West said. “If you start to lose those major population centers, it's just a matter of time. It's a numbers game where rural areas like East or West Texas cannot continue to prop you up.”
The secret is simple, according to West. He wants the Republican Party to go back to basics.
“We, as the people…the electorate don't understand what honor, integrity, and character is,” West added. “We have fallen for political gimmicks. We have fallen for talking points and narratives. We're not that educated and informed electorate that our founding fathers hoped we’d be.”
Some 150 founding fathers of the Republican Party of Texas, launched on July 4th, 1867 in Houston, were Black men and 20 were Anglos, according to the Texas GOP website, and West argues that modern Republicans don’t understand how central the black community is to the party’s balance.
“Republicans have lost that history and the other side, the Democrats, have come in and claimed it,” he said. “When I look at Texas, there is no reason why our 1,250-mile border is wide open when we have a Republican governor in office.”