Would Alex P Keaton (the character) be a Repuke today?

[pstokely]

He wasn't a gay bashing racist.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. No and I'd go as far as predicting Barry Goldwater wouldn't be a republican today either.

[dflprincess]

2. No he probably would have been one of those that crossed

party lines in the continuing effort to turn the Democratic party into the moderate Republican party rather than staying with his first love and trying to change it.

We are in danger of having a one party system. But the one party will use two different names.

[Warpy]

8. We're in danger of duplicating the past

The Whig Party basically shot itself in the foot by refusing to nominate the incumbent Millard Fillmore over the question of expanding slavery into the territories. The abolitionists blocked the nomination, the party leaders quit, and the party largely disbanded. In the meantime, the largely abolitionist Republicans had split off from the Democratic Republican Party and abolitionist Whigs found a new home. Eventually the would be aristocrats followed.

The Whigs themselves had been reconstituted from the dregs of Alexander Hamilton's Federalist Party.

It seems the Hamiltonian parties in this country have always been inherently unstable and the Republicans are only the latest proof of that. In order to get elected, they've had to make deals with the devil. The devil for the Federalist Party was the emergence of an upper class. The devil for the Whigs were the abolitionists. The devils for the Republicans have been southern bigots and the religious right. Once the devil asserts control, the party fails. Again.

While the near future will see a struggle in our own more Jeffersonian party to become more Hamiltonian, the latter will eventually split off again in frustration, either resuscitating the Republicans or flocking to the Libertarians or starting a new party yet unheard of.

[semillama]

17. Nice analysis

That makes a heck of a lot of sense.

[MisterP]

16. the current forecast seems to be: GOP shrivels until it resembles Wallace's American Indep.

white, homophobic, whose seats depend on appealing to fundies, gun nuts, wannabe soldiers, and whoever it is Steve Milloy's cretinous audience is
the rest could join the Dems (to keep the name, and thus the blinkers of loyalty--as we saw with the effulgent DU praise for Specter, the wankerrific Bob Casey, and, while he was considering running, the readily-aroused Chris Matthews)
an alternative is some sort of Unity, American, or National Party (which worked out so well in 1822-25), or a Grand Alliance like in Germany (under the ultra-progressive Merkel), post-1960 Colombia (hey, at least the Liberal party's in charge there! did you want Horacio SERPA to win???!!111), or post-1982 Honduras (Azcona was so better than Callejas! we must scream our Hope because democracy is working--not for any participation, mind you, but a ritual between two identical parties)
Either alternative would prove frustrating to America's repeatedly-withered--yet growing, once academic Marxists fully came out of the closet in the 80s--left wing. They would turn away from the "better-than-the-other" system, the fanatic personalism which ascribes all good to the sitting Leader, and the grit-toothed bare-tolerance of leftists and critics of Dems--who seem to rank below child molesters and tire-iron murderers to many Dems. This would create a new alignment or even party--not Socialists, as "liberal" has barely been rehabilitated (despite their absence in the actual halls of power)--but Progressives or Americans.
The Unity party would divert any popular movements to its own purposes: "Want to scare fanatic Repubs/homophobes/the NRA? Stock up on guns!" "Want to fight big HMOs? Endorse the Leader's HMO-written mandatory-health-insurance plan!" "Want to investigate Pelosi? You're a stooge!" "Want to protest? Rise up? Are a hothead who got overexcited in Seattle? You're an agent provocateur!" This totalizing pruning of any effective alternative, usually in favor of incrementalism and obeisance, is the core of "moderation": to create both a muddled policy that's half wrong and half right (the two seem to actually exist, even if not in any Manichean manner) while saying that it's "well-reasoned" and a compromise between two noble, rational, fundamentally equal sides. Sometimes moderation is endorsed because it's less offensive to the far right (and any African-American who votes in the South and part of North Carolina ought to kick themselves if they believe that). In short, this diversion and moderation is more damaging to any good change than a thousand Nixon-saluting, "pro-military," Kent-State-cheering Hard Hats or ten thousand Freepers waving Chairman Sarah's Little Pink Book and cheering Jumbotron videos of Afghan caves and shepherds being engulfed in high explosive.
The Greens (boo! hiss! teh evil!) will be absorbed by the Dems/Unity and then the Progressives: one commentator noted that "green" issues will be absorbed by all parties as the inevitable catastrophes rack up. However, the "pragmatics" will remain anthropocentric, solely concerned with how environmental damage affects Man, the Ape Who Is God's Viceregent: nature has no value by itself, anything that can't be scientifically measured is worthless, and flora and fauna exist to be used isntrumentally (the only valid question being conservation of natural "resources" for "sustainability"). They'll fight global warming, but don't want humanity to make too many sacrifices, and the only times they'll endorse a species is when they can potentially get something out of it (the Amazon-as-medicine-cabinet meme). The "deep" greens will persist in the notion that the ecosphere has an existence beyond one species and, as recent evidence may indicate, may actually have been running INDEPENDENTLY of humanity before 100,000 BC! The sole exceptions will be the fundies--only Gawd can change nature, so it can't be us. Other fundies include the tacky, SF-influenced semi-Raelians (Kurzweil, Bjorn Lomborg), who want to spread GM crops into the environment (it's our right--and you can't object, because plants have been bred, and that's the same as tossing in genes from other species, and each gene is a blueprint for an individual part, not instructions for the growth of an entire being, as those frothing geneticists and embryologists claim) and pray to their computers and O'Neill colony diagrams, awaiting the Rapture of the Nerds in the form of nanotech which will end pesky problems like, population explosion, desertification, and extinction (I swear, they're like some Sharper Image-derived cult).
(sorry about the rant)

The Unity moderate party would probably have those Dems who generally tell America to sit on it and spin: Baucus, Bayh, Begich, Michael Bennet, Cardin, Carper, Casey, Conrad, Dodd, Dorgan, Feinstein, Gillibrand, Inouye, Tim Johnson, probably Klobuchar, Kohl, Landrieu, maybe Lautenberg, Lieberman (or the Repubs), Lincoln, McCaskill, probably Menendez, Mikulski, Nelson and Nelson (or the Repubs), Pryor, Reid, Rockefeller, Schumer, Specter, Stabenow, Tester, probably Udall and Udall, Warner, Webb, Whitehouse, and maybe Byrd and Cantwell. These would be joined by the opportunistic moderates--Brownback, Collins, maybe Ensign and the great whore Lindsey Graham, "Peckerface" Gregg, McLame, and Snowe. It would have 39-45 Senators.
The Progressives would be Akaka, Bingaman, Boxer, probably Sherrod Brown, Durbin, Feingold, Harkin, Kenndy, probably Kerry, maybe Lautenberg, Leahy, Levin, Murray, Reed, Sanders, and Wyden. This would have 14-20 Senators; in the House it would be Kucinich-led. Its distribution is mostly New England, the Great Lakes cities, and the West Coast--all the "unwanted" parts of the US to the Repubs, and later probably to the "anti-elitist" (yet somehow always pro-Wall Street) Unity party. The Progressives would have to overcome no little regional slander about "far-out," "extremist" constituencies that won't play well with the gun-toting rural psychopaths of "Real Amerika" (disregarding the fact that, before the 1920 Klan-assisted Red Scare crackdown, the CPUSA's foothold was in OKLAHOMA, and that the 1890s Progressives ran North Carolina and did swimmingly in the Blue Ridge/Smokies until the Southern Dems successfully whipped up some race hatred).
The freshmen Burris, Hagan, Kaufman, Merkley, and Shaheen, I have no idea.

FYI, in 2000 I predicted fundamentalists in second-tier places of power and troubles with bin Laden and Islamists!

[Ezlivin]

3. No.

But him and Skippy would have moved into a commune.

[supernova]

4. I think he'd call himself Libertarian

Conservatives who like dope and nudity.

[IDFbunny]

6. or a blue dog democrat

[TheKentuckian]

5. I'm not sure if Nixon would still be included

Boss would be kicking him out now, at any rate.

[mdmc]

7. yes

[izquierdista]

9. Maybe a Log Cabin Republican

And planning a trip to Iowa with Skippy.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

10. He'd be a popular RW talk show host who bashes Michael J Fox.

[tomreedtoon]

11. Yes. Right wing beliefs were his God.

If you ever saw episodes of the show, you know that he hung onto his beliefs as the only sane thing in his universe. Better than his public TV operating father, his hippie mother and his New Age flake sister. It was the only thing he could call his own. And as it started failing him in particular circumstances (like the important double episode where he spent time with a shrink and basically relived his life) he still hung onto it.

Alex P. Keaton was not a happy man.

[TahitiNut]

12. Nope. He'd be a DLCer ... fer shizzle.

[Terran]

13. No one's asking, "Who the hell is Alex P. Keaton?"

I'm surprised. Is everyone here over 40 these days?

[Yukari Yakumo]

14. We have Wikipedia and Google. We can figure it out. {nt}

[pstokely]

18. I'm under 30, but I've seen the reruns

[CreekDog]

15. Growing up in the 1980's, I took on most of Alex's opinions and love for Reagan too

The party of today as well as its leaders are not anything I would have recognized back then.

In 1988, I was volunteering for Bush 41's campaign (not old enough to vote though) but by 1989 I was having a change of heart growing up and finding the answers weren't as simple as Republicans wanted me to believe.