Skip to main content

If you can't stand scrambled eggs, stay out of the kitchen!

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Watching a Formerly Sane Man Descend into Abject Religion

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson:  it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work.  Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...
Post a Comment
Read more