There’s something uncomfortable about criticizing leaders on your own side. It feels disloyal. It invites accusations. And the discomfort isn’t just social. It carries real cost — friendships, reputation, in some circles your livelihood.
But those costs do not compare to the cost of silence, which is the slow, quiet surrender of freedom to unchecked power.
Why We Do This
As believers in Christ, we operate under two responsibilities that don’t conflict — they complete each other.
Our responsibility before God is to obey our government. We do that. But our responsibility under our Constitution — in this country, uniquely, by design — is to hold our government accountable. We are trying to do that as well.
The Founders understood something we have largely forgotten: government is not a thing that stays good on its own. It tends toward accumulation. Toward consolidation. Toward tyranny — not always through villains, but through the perfectly ordinary human appetite for power and the perfectly ordinary human tendency of citizens to assume everything will be fine if they just don’t rock the boat.
Watch even a few minutes of a documentary on the American Revolution — particularly what happened after the war, when the hard work of actually building a government began — and you realize what a miracle the whole enterprise was. Everyone wanted liberty. Nobody wanted to give an inch. The compromise that produced our Constitution was, by any reasonable measure, nearly impossible. And it was built on a single animating idea: that power must be checked, balanced, and never allowed to concentrate.
That design doesn’t maintain itself. We are fighting to keep power from becoming tyranny.
Not for a party, not for a personality, not for a team. That’s the job.
Why “Your Side” Doesn’t Get a Pass
Some Arkansas Republican legislators have complained that other Republicans harm the party when they criticize legislators’ positions and actions. On social media, if a Republican disagrees with an officeholder, he’s labeled a hater. And supposedly, “Democrats don’t do this to other Democrats.” If you believe that, perhaps your name is Rip Van Winkle — you’ve slept through a great deal of history.
We understand the sentiment. These officials worked hard to get elected, and they sometimes face genuinely difficult decisions. But silencing voters is bad for the voter, bad for the party, and bad for the republic.
Think of the campaign volunteers who knocked on doors for a candidate whose actions turned out to be nothing like his promises. Think of the conservative activists who helped elect someone who went to Little Rock and was immediately marginalized — or co-opted — by his own caucus. No voter surrenders the right to influence government simply because they share a partyaffiliation with an officeholder acting against their interests.
When one party holds a supermajority in Little Rock, the only check left is the courage of voters within that party to say something. That’s not a fringe position. That’s how the whole system is supposed to work.
A few pointed questions worth sitting with:
- Should a pro-life Republican stay silent when a Republican officeholder goes weak on pro-life measures?
- Should a gun-rights voter say nothing when an officeholder quietly misses votes to avoid going on the record?
- Should a defender of religious liberty accept a watered-down bill without comment — as Arkansas voters have seen more than once?
- Should a fiscal conservative hold his tongue while government spending grows under ostensibly conservative leadership?
Obviously not. The party label does not purchase silence. It never did. It never should.
The Costs Are Real. So Is the Obligation.
In a state that prides itself on neighbor knowing neighbor — on keeping things civil at church and at the diner — the instinct toward quiet is understandable. It is also exactly what those in power are counting on. The message, delivered constantly and sometimes with our own tax dollars funding the messengers, is that the boat doesn’t need rocking. That the people raising alarms are the problem. That is the sales pitch of people who benefit from your compliance.
The reality is that our failure rate at keeping power in check is somewhere around 95%. We are fighting for what remains. Most people won’t thank you for it. Many will resent you for it.
But criticism of power — especially power wearing your team’s jersey — is not disloyalty. Offered honestly and specifically, it is the most loyal thing a citizen can do. It is how a republic breathes.
You can be grateful your party holds office and say nothing. You can go home and hope for the best. Or you can shine a bright, hot light on what your leaders are actually doing and fight to influence what comes next. The first two feel safer. They are just slower ways of losing.
The work is hard. It is often thankless. It is absolutely necessary.
That’s why we do it.
