"Beginning to"

They knew all along. They just know they can get away with more of their agenda being parasites to Repubs rather than Dems. (Although some Dems have shifting closer to courting the Ameritaliban.)

It seems to me that they had a similar discovery a few years back, and then they bought out Shrubby, who told everybody how much he luvs the Jesus, and talked like a movie star cowboy and messed up his sentences just like them, and all was forgotten.

Which, I'm afraid will probably be exactly where things end up in say, eight years or so. Sure, they're disillusioned now, and probably feeling like they've been taken advantage of, which of course they have, but give them two Democratic-controlled administrations promoting progressive values, and the fundies will be back, slavering like greedy children in a candy store over the first GOP candidate who tells them (again) exactly what they want to hear.

We can always hope they will create a third party that will cripple the GOP forever.

But I'm not so optimistic.

You know, when Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock came out, I thought it was crap, but the longer I'm around, the more prophetic that damned book seems to me. There are a large number of people - maybe 30% - who are threatened and stressed by the rate of social change, and the acceleration of it, and those people are fighting tooth and nail to take us back to the imaginary Good Old Days. So we keep taking two steps forward, one step back, on social/cultural issues - but two steps forward and one step back still carries you slowly forward.

The people fighting so hard to bring us back to their idea of the 1950s (which doesn't ring all that true to those who remember the 1950s more as an era when women couldn't buy a house in their own names, when children could be beaten with impunity, when rape was the victim's fault, and when "those people" knew their place) are losing, and they know it. And the more ground they lose, the harder they fight.

The Republicans, who want to take us much further back, to the Gilded Age of the robber barons, cynically use the future-shockers to fight against social progress in their ongoing goal of completely undoing the New Deal. Unfortunately, the future-shockers only see that they're fighting the cultural wars of the 1960s - they don't realize that what the Republicans are using them for is to build that bridge to the 1890s.

Also including.
MFW - hmm, yeah, a conservative version of the Green Party would be awesome. I doubt it'll happen, though - conservative leaders are too well-organized and ruthless, and I think liberal leaders need to learn something from them in that regard.

Geni, you are 100% correct. I am in a position to have regular conversations with evangelical Republicans-of-convenience, and "The Fifties" have iconic status with them. That's the time "before everything went wrong" for them: before hippies, before drugs, before juvenile delinquents, before crime, before sex in the movies, before welfare mothers, before high taxes, before mass layoffs, before the anomie of the heartless city, and so on.

This view resonates less powerfully with some people who are old enough to remember the 30s, when a lot of other things went pretty spectacularly wrong as well.

But it does have a measure of truth. The sixties were a time of very rapid income growth, and with new income, and new freedoms, come problems. Some of these problems had existed all along, but were just coming to light; others were related to the participation of new groups in American society for the first time (blacks as a result of the civil rights movement, Chinese immigrants after 1965, etc. etc.); and others were in fact, evidence of instability and chaos. Civil rights, Vietnam, and the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK: that's enough to upheave anyone.

But these future-fearing evangelicals (who became evangelicals because of these terrifying upheavals) forget that not everyone in the 60s was a dirty hippie, and that the roots of many (not all) of the problems that plagued them were in the beloved 50s, the imaginary 50s.

Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz are stone-pure products of the 60s every bit as much as Abbie Hoffman was. People remember the Rolling Stone version of history because that's what we've been sold; but Ray Conniff and Andy Williams sold as many records as the Beatles and the Stones. The 60s were not entirely "the 60s", just as "the 50s" were not entirely the 50s. Or the 70s, etc.

Another thing to remember about these people is that they--the pre-boomers and the early boomers--grew up then, and EVERYONE thinks that the time when they were children and teens was a simpler time than now. But that's because they were children, not because times were simpler. There are people here who think the 80s or 90s were simpler than now, just because of how old they are.

Carlson is also in the vicinity of the truth: most of the elite Republicans, and Democrats, DO hold these people in total contempt. This could work to Democrats' advantage if they play their cards right (some they unfortunately almost never do). Because these people are madder than wet hens at the Republicans who have played them. They may disagree with the Democrats, but they don't feel cheated by them. They will, in a few years, but maybe the Democrats can mitigate that a little bit. The most important thing they could do is to raise the incomes of the lower middle class, which remain today about where they were when the sixties bubble collapsed in the early seventies.

Did he, by chance, conduct this interview while dancing?

Geni and Fnarf,

Those are two of the best analyses of our current political situation that I've ever read, thank you.

Yes, their goal is to drag us back before the 1950's, before 'everything went wrong' when Brown vs. Board of Education finally remedied (or at least tried to remedy) the terrible injustices of Dred Scott and Plessey vs. Ferguson, and back before the New Deal to the age of obscenely wealthy robber barons and the 16 hour work days for pennies per hour which are currently happening in desperate Third World countries.

They don't seem to remember how genuinely difficult life was for many, if not most people then.

I have always believed that both parties feed their extreme fringes red meat to keep them loyal, but have no intention actually following through on their promises. It’s ironic that the same red meat feeds both fringes. The Gays and Abortion. Both parties leverage them to get their extreme fringes all frothy with rage, but never take serious steps to actually deliver because they know that without the red meat, the nutters on the fringes would stay home.

Failure to perform only become problematic for the party in power, so we are seeing more examples from the Republicans today, but both parties are guilty as hell of holding their fringes in contempt. Remember it was Clinton that signed the Defense of Marriage Act and gave us Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Fact of matter is that neither party respects their fringes, but they give them lip service to motivate them to get out to vote and get the vote out. Guaranteed that if the axis of power flipped tomorrow, it would just be a matter of time until the global warming, gay marriage and anti war factions of the Democratic party figured out that they were being played the same way.

Best hope for good government would be if the Ds and Rs polarized themselves to the point that the moderates from each party broke out and formed their own third party between them. Maybe the first plank in their platform could call be to call for a government that restrains government power, rather than unleashing it, and backs checks and balances rather than an executive branch on steroids. There would be plenty there for the fringes of both the Ds and Rs to hate, but that most of their moderates could probably support.

It's very interesting talking to an evangelical about the civil rights movement, because they believe it's theirs. All of the things they say about "The Fifties" (tm) is predicated with "well, of course, segregation was a problem, but we solved it". Recall that a very large percentage of evangelicals is African-American. They spend a lot of time defending themselves from the charge of racism, as if racism is the only thing that needed to be removed in order to form that more perfect society we keep hearing about.

But of course racism is woven into the fabric of America in complicated ways, and complications are not what evangelicals are looking for. When you start to unravel 300 years of injustice, it's unlikely that everyone will just perk right up and say "well, OK, then, glad we got that over with". The long term effects on both blacks and whites, not to mention everyone else, are severe and ongoing, and, dare I say it, the inequalities continue to this day. Racism isn't something you (a person, a victim, a society) stop doing one day.

But one of the appeals of evangelicism is easy answers to hard questions. And, like all emotional appeals to deeply seated feelings, evangelicism persuades not by reasoned argument but my unleashing stuff from inside that can't be argued against.

But it also responds to leadership from outside, and if that leadership is sincerely speaking the language of evangelicism, and George Bush does, then they will move to him and follow him in great numbers--greater than just "the base". The base cannot be led in any other direction, but almost everyone else can. Now the Democrats need to figure out how to get their attention.

while i agree that the notion of the two parties sucks and that there need to be more options where those of us on either side of the political spectrum feel that we're represented by those who truly share our beliefs-- it won't ever happen in the US.

well, not unless we completely change the way we elect people to office. our "winner takes all" system of voting-- also called direct representation-- eliminates the viability of parties over the number of two. additional parties only fracture the vote and make it easier for the dominant two parties to come to power with smaller majorities.

in order to truly have a multi-party system, we'd have to switch to proportional representation, like in many european democracies.

imagine this: there are 435 seats in the US House. say 1/3 of them were up for election in a system where we had proportional represenatation-- representation which is based on national seats, not state/regional-based seats.
so of those 435 seats, say 145 were up for election. the democrats, the republicans, the greens, the labor party, the women's party, etc all put forth their list of the 145 people they would send to national office, and then the people vote.
the R's get 28% (41 seats), the d's get 30% (44 seats), the greens get 15% (22 seats), the labor party gets 10% (15 seats), etc...

this means that each party sends their top X number of people from their list and each party, as long as they clear a vote threshold of a set %, they get to send representatives too.

democracy works so much better this way-- you still get coalitions of smaller parties joining larger in very black and white issue votes, but in general participation, etc is much higher because people feel like their support earns them a voice.

sigh. if only in america...

The only thing that's going to solve the two party problem is publicly financed elections.

You can't have a functioning government if the people's representatives are slaves to the corporations that pay for their multi million dollar PR campaigns. That's why our current system has ceased to function for the poor and middle class.

Until we have publicly financed elections, it's only going to get worse and more outrageous.

Both my parents ran for office, unsuccessfully, on different tickets. So, I grew up around Republican and Democratic politics, and around many elite Republicans and Democrats. While elites on both sides deride Evangelicals, rural folks, the poor, etc., I have noticed one substantial difference. Democrats actually do kind of care about the welfare of the public at large. The Republicans truly don't give a shit.

"Conservatives resist cultural change and personal liberation; liberals resist economic dynamism and globalization. Libertarians embrace both. The political party that comes to terms with that can win the next generation." Cato Institute via Andrew Sullivan. They claim Libertarians are the real swing voters. I think they are right.