[quote]Fletch1986 wrote:
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
I think both parties will struggle to hold their coalitions in any kind of semi-permanent alliance. The intra-party tensions don’t allow for the kind of party uniformity that the pary mandarins want and require nowadays.
Parties used to be broader - there were liberals in the GOP, and conservatives in the Democratic Party, because “liberalism” and “conservatism” were not as rigidly defined as a matter of ideology.
Old Southern conservatives were, in fact, conservative as hell, and were often Democrats, and they often were quite critical of unabashed market economics and the notion of tax-cuts-as-panacea (but they weren’t socialists or anything like that). Old Northeastern Republicans were very much “pro-business” but were also less socially conservative and more internationalist.
The modern parties don’t tolerate that kind of philosophical diversity any more - and the problem that causes is an inability to keep together coalitions needed for a winner-take-all system like ours.
I predict in the coming years, we will see more and more people run as independents, and maybe even moreso, people run as independents on a party ticket and they glady advertise as such, as in “I am an independent running on the Republican ticket”.[/quote]
That’s exactly what I’ve heard from other people who lived through those times and you put it really well.
I’d like to see political parties go back to something like that.[/quote]
There would have to be some serious un-brainwashing of the electorate though.
We could start by burning Hollywood to the ground and fencing off all the exits.
What the republicans don’t get, which team Obama does: social media, the internet, the power Celebrity has over today’s youth, that expecting people to read and grow and understand intellectually on their own is going to keep the party minority, and how damn lazy youth is today.
Or, they could solve SS & Medicare issues, resolve immigration and repeal the Patriot Act, and coast to some easy wins for a couple decades.