Almost certainly, there has to be a political party realignment in our future.
"Realignment" may not be an adequate term. It sounds too much like everybody is standing in the wrong line, and that we will have to swap places. I don't think there are many people, other than some Republicans who are dismayed by Donald Trump, who simply want to swap lines.
In the Republican Party, there seems to be a lot of people who think the Grand Old Party has been hijacked by dolts and racists. One might as well add sexists and homophobes and people who think only men should be allowed to wear long white robes that hide their identity. It is not clear whether the more traditional Republican Party standard bearers simply want the upstarts who have taken over the Party to leave, or whether they should themselves leave and build something new.
Similar tectonic fault lines affect the Democratic Party, too, although the shifts there are more familiar. Hilary Clinton is pretty familiar stuff. She has been part of the party power structure for decades. But she does not seem to understand that when her husband was President, the Party edged as far right as it could to to appeal to the right-edging electorate. The Clintons are pretty cozy with that part of the population that Bernie Sanders calls "the top 1%". Hillary Clinton seems baffled at the perception that she is cozy with what we might call Traditional Republicans. Bernie Sanders insists that we need to reexamine what we are doing as a nation. He calls it "a revolution".
So maybe we will get, if not a revolution, at least a rebellion in our political alignments. It would not be surprising for the Republican side of the political spectrum to discover that it will have reshaped itself into at least two, probably ragged, proto-parties; one wearing Mitt Romney's old suits and George H. W. Bush's red socks, and another where Donald Trump's goofy baseball caps seem to have gone.
It does not seem likely that the Democrats will show the same kind of seismic shifts. Democrats don't do very good job of standing in line, anyway, but one can be quite certain that if the right wing of our political opinion redefines its political boundaries, that many Democrats who are themselves pretty much what Republicans used to be, will wander off to somewhere else.
Such political scrambling is not unusual. After all, Richard Nixon managed to convince most of the Dixiecrats in the South that they were really Republicans, so that is why it is in the Republican Party today that one is most likely to hear the opinions about race that once defined the Democrats in the Confederacy. The Party of Lincoln does not sound like Lincoln anymore. Republicans own most of the States Righters today.
It looks like the eggs are being scrambled.
That is probably a good thing.
Especially if the remix results in rethinking the issues.
"Realignment" may not be an adequate term. It sounds too much like everybody is standing in the wrong line, and that we will have to swap places. I don't think there are many people, other than some Republicans who are dismayed by Donald Trump, who simply want to swap lines.
In the Republican Party, there seems to be a lot of people who think the Grand Old Party has been hijacked by dolts and racists. One might as well add sexists and homophobes and people who think only men should be allowed to wear long white robes that hide their identity. It is not clear whether the more traditional Republican Party standard bearers simply want the upstarts who have taken over the Party to leave, or whether they should themselves leave and build something new.
Similar tectonic fault lines affect the Democratic Party, too, although the shifts there are more familiar. Hilary Clinton is pretty familiar stuff. She has been part of the party power structure for decades. But she does not seem to understand that when her husband was President, the Party edged as far right as it could to to appeal to the right-edging electorate. The Clintons are pretty cozy with that part of the population that Bernie Sanders calls "the top 1%". Hillary Clinton seems baffled at the perception that she is cozy with what we might call Traditional Republicans. Bernie Sanders insists that we need to reexamine what we are doing as a nation. He calls it "a revolution".
So maybe we will get, if not a revolution, at least a rebellion in our political alignments. It would not be surprising for the Republican side of the political spectrum to discover that it will have reshaped itself into at least two, probably ragged, proto-parties; one wearing Mitt Romney's old suits and George H. W. Bush's red socks, and another where Donald Trump's goofy baseball caps seem to have gone.
It does not seem likely that the Democrats will show the same kind of seismic shifts. Democrats don't do very good job of standing in line, anyway, but one can be quite certain that if the right wing of our political opinion redefines its political boundaries, that many Democrats who are themselves pretty much what Republicans used to be, will wander off to somewhere else.
Such political scrambling is not unusual. After all, Richard Nixon managed to convince most of the Dixiecrats in the South that they were really Republicans, so that is why it is in the Republican Party today that one is most likely to hear the opinions about race that once defined the Democrats in the Confederacy. The Party of Lincoln does not sound like Lincoln anymore. Republicans own most of the States Righters today.
It looks like the eggs are being scrambled.
That is probably a good thing.
Especially if the remix results in rethinking the issues.
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