Posting at the PI: Is there a Future for the GOP?

seattlepi.com: Sound Off

Following the Democratic debacle of the civil war, the "party of Lincoln" looked a lot like the Tory paryt of England ... a party committed to the welfare of the upper class in a model where the upper class understood that its health and wealth depended on providing jobs for the proletariat. White man's burden was very real, and even more so when "white" and class were synonyms.

This view dominated America until the Depression and WW II. The victory on emergence of the USA as the Supreme power, restored the conservative point of view. Ford made cars, GIs bought them. Ike built roads to run the cars on and ended Truman's hawkish confrontation with China.

By the sixties, with two very similar parties, the people turned to the charisma of JFK. The GOP, however saw a crack in the Democratic coaltition of Southern white populism with labor democracy. Civil rights emerged and the GOP chose sides. The crack was not made by the GOP. The crack was driven by the civil rights movement.

From Nixon through Bush II, GOP votes swung not on the traditional class base but on the political melange used by Lee Atwater and others to break up the Democrats.

Now there is no rational basis for an amalgam of right to life, anti science, gingoism, racial identity and classism. Carnegie's successors are more likely to be Episcopalians, third generation Roman Catholics or secular Jews than they are to be charismatic Christians. Hell, a lot of these folks are Black, oncludinf the President of the USA.

What is left of the GOP, is an irrational, radical melange. To change this. the GOP needs to become more like the GOP of pre WWII, a practical conservative movement without doctrinaire ties to creationism and anti gay prejudice. It needs to find modern Nixons, Tafts, Evans, .....