Reply #204: I don't know if age is a factor in the discord,

[Blue_In_AK]

but I am of your generation (a couple years older), and I agree that Democrats today are nothing like Democrats of tha past. For that matter, the republicans of today are nothing like their predecessors either. There used to be such a thing as a "moderate" Republican, even a "liberal" Republican, someone with whom you might disagree somewhat but someone you could still respect. What's happened since Reagan is that the entire political landscape has shifted far to the right so that a markedly centrist or even somewhat to the right Democrat like Obama can be labeled a socialist by those even further out on the fringe.

Maybe for a while after the McCarthy witch hunts and whatnot in the '50s, Republicans dialed back their inner Nazi for a few years and became somewhat reasonable. With the success of Ronald Reagan, they felt free to tap into that fringiness again, and now they've taken it to ungodly extremes.

I'm really worried about this country. We have a long way to go to get back to the middle.