I do think that if we have to have a party system, we should more of them. The GOP has become wholly the party of doing whatever #45 wants, with no core at all other than “looking out for #1.”
The people who ostentatiously left the GOP (rather than standing up and fighting from within or taking real action) are now haranguing the Democratic Party, but all they want is for them to become the old GOP, the racist, pro-business, pro-billionaire party that was at least polite and pretended otherwise. They did that: they were called “neo-liberal” Democrats (they were neither new nor liberal), and they collaborated in creating a country with higher income inequality than many banana republics, and helped set us up for #45.
I could see the “moderate Republicans” team up with the yellow-dog Democrats and form that party; meanwhile, we could get a genuinely progressive party back into play with the next generation of Democrats. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Bernie Sanders is NOT a leftist or socialist. He is a center-left at best, a social democrat, which used to be the center of the Democratic Party from FDR through LBJ. Meanwhile, the GOP has moved completely away from anything but the most far-right we have ever seen in this country since the 1920s (when the KKK openly ran someone for President). It’s a fringe group that controls disproportionate numbers of votes through gerrymandering that locks in extremists – it’s practically apartheid, and it will be if the Democratic Party doesn’t get over itself and get moving.
It is possible that the GOP will collapse under demographic weight (the decreasing numbers of old, white, racist, men) and the Democratic Party will break into Progressives and “moderate GOP” Democrats, but it’s going to take more vision and leadership than I’ve seen thus far. And FIRST we have to break the domination of the crazy right-wingers over the courts and the gerrymandering…
I do think that if we have to have a party system, we should more of them. The GOP has become wholly the party of doing whatever #45 wants, with no core at all other than “looking out for #1.”
The people who ostentatiously left the GOP (rather than standing up and fighting from within or taking real action) are now haranguing the Democratic Party, but all they want is for them to become the old GOP, the racist, pro-business, pro-billionaire party that was at least polite and pretended otherwise. They did that: they were called “neo-liberal” Democrats (they were neither new nor liberal), and they collaborated in creating a country with higher income inequality than many banana republics, and helped set us up for #45.
I could see the “moderate Republicans” team up with the yellow-dog Democrats and form that party; meanwhile, we could get a genuinely progressive party back into play with the next generation of Democrats. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Bernie Sanders is NOT a leftist or socialist. He is a center-left at best, a social democrat, which used to be the center of the Democratic Party from FDR through LBJ. Meanwhile, the GOP has moved completely away from anything but the most far-right we have ever seen in this country since the 1920s (when the KKK openly ran someone for President). It’s a fringe group that controls disproportionate numbers of votes through gerrymandering that locks in extremists – it’s practically apartheid, and it will be if the Democratic Party doesn’t get over itself and get moving.
It is possible that the GOP will collapse under demographic weight (the decreasing numbers of old, white, racist, men) and the Democratic Party will break into Progressives and “moderate GOP” Democrats, but it’s going to take more vision and leadership than I’ve seen thus far. And FIRST we have to break the domination of the crazy right-wingers over the courts and the gerrymandering…