What party purity?

[mqbush]

We've been declining since Conservatives radicalized after LBJ's civil rights legislation drove them out of the Democratic fold into the Republican's. For some reason, instead of Conservatives serving to advance Republicans, Republicans served the Conservatives, to the detriment of the GOP. Today the GOP is obsessed with ideological purity, which is not only self-destructive because fanatical, but also foolish because there is no single, consistent Conservative ideal to serve today; it's one big teabag party of unhappy people. The "purer" Republicans get, the fewer of them there will be. One day there will be Democrats and Conservatives, and the Republican Party will join the Whigs in the trashbin of history. What a shame.

We're in a perfect storm of unelected and unchecked financial interests pillaging the middle class in their greed, the decline of a major political party into a PAC for Conservatives, and.... Isn't that enough? America is not an ancient culture looking backward. It's a new country that likes new things, invents and explores and creates. That makes us impatient with title and class and protocol. Conservatism looks back to some dream of order and status, an unchallengeable class structure and wealth and privilege ranking. Conservatism relishes a Taliban-like religious rigor and intolerance, an eternal twelfth-century rule over the unworthy riff-raff. (Who pushes for having one in ninety-nine Americans behind bars, because we're such evil people?)

I know, I know, there are lots of self-identified Conservatives who don't want any of what I just claimed Conservatism wants. That's because Conservatism is now muddied up. But muddied-up or not, it's still adding to the storm. Obama is no Trotsky, no matter what hysterical and absurd language is used by some in their fear. He's less left than Republicans were fifty years ago. Surveys show it's not the American people moving right; actually they're moving left. It's the power of money and far-right influence that pushes government to the right. Things are not going to turn around in one hundred days, or a thousand. If we expect to have jobs again some day, that pay a living wage, the plutocratic financial bodies and corporations are going to have to become part of human society again, with ethics and social contracts. If we want to stop slipping more and more into a can't-do country, some people will have to accept that their time in control is past. We'll get better one day; it just won't happen overnight.

[leftstreet]

1. How long before the Bolivarian Revolution makes its way North?

That's the only hope I see, although it won't happen in our lifetimes.