Reply #30: Excellent

[PATRICK]

This see-saw margery daw that some political wisdom(that loves the Tweedledee-Tweedledum image of corporate bipartisanship) keeps trying to superimpose upon political reality needs a serious jolt. Your post is instinctively on target. Why the Gilded Age GOP descended into Scrooge presiding over the glum Depression is important. With accidental(TR) and rebuffed reformers(Populists were at first former GOP) they hardly looked back. Even now GOP defectors are a a constant bleeding away of genuine public servants, genuine moderates, genuine thinkers. The Dems may be a hodge podge lurching oddly in the right direction on all the right things and a few dangerous ones but the soul pinched GOP is an even odder array of the corrupt and the seduced and the not too bright- hardly healthy for a sound business style party.

FDR made only one difference to the GOP. they turned completely, anti-democratically(small d) rabid for power. If the Dems became entrenched, lazy and tainted the GOP took anything that worked to ruin them. The little they had to offer were all phrased in negatives and selfishness, the mirror of their desires. The seduction of their business base was the core, that civil government and sharing restrained them. The pitiful corporate giants of today have some bizarre re-translated dream of being like their robber baron forebears, skipping over business per se and getting right to the cheating and robbing and immorality needed to sustain dangerous power. This is much deeper than the Yankees versus the Red Sox, patterns and cycles and other mystical beliefs based on a mere two centuries of extremely different, changing circumstances.

Bluntly, the GOP- whatever its currently insane make-up is consistently headed to the toilet. The real battle is for the default people's party open to ALL the influences. The question has always been hidden. How will the future politics be formed? new parties? Faction within(the start of course)? A redemptive salvaging or total makeover of the GOP to preserve appearances, the party of Lincoln and the considerable local hardcore base that is yet untouched by the national party madness they were loyal to? We are not even close to sanity yet. TIME doesn't get it. In time we hope they do.