The Republican Trifecta: Tea Party, Evangelicals, Moderates

[Sorce]

The GOP will never implode though. Not because I think it's some sacred institution or whatever, but because it will be incapable of re-branding itself. The voters themselves will drift away from it (and at a much slower pace, the candidates), and it will fall into obscurity and replaced with something else, like the Democrats. If anything, I'd say the Dems will split off into two parties (like the aforementioned blue dogs and.. blue cats?, and the cycle will continue.

But this would be on the time-scale of another generation or two. Like, "people will have to die of old age and be replaced" kind of scale.

[Despanan]

[HisDivineShadow]

Too bad the electorate has the collective political memory of a goldfish.

[Despanan]

Well, that's blaming it on the electorate - the electorate pretty much exists to give the illusion of popular control of the government. We don't have that - if we did elections would be about policy, rather elections are about fundraising and outselling your opponents, which guarantees that every single politician we elect is in the pocket of big business.

Meanwhile, the news sets the agenda, and it's in the establishment media's best interest to forget stuff like this because it makes more money for them and their shareholders.

So blaming the general electorate for the American government is like blaming "free Range" chickens that were raised in a barn their entire lives for not walking outside when they open the barn door for that 1 hour or so.

[Zengus]

I'm not expecting big changes to their party any time soon, HDS (hence the "ten to fifteen years" part of my initial post). That post was also more a reply to Rip's call for viable strategies for the Reps than a prediction of what I expect to happen in the immediate future. I do think it would be a viable strategy for them, though, as even though they would lose the support of a significant chunk of their current party they would open the possibility of attracting new demographics, the majority of which seem unwilling to support them at the moment. They'd probably recover from the loss within four or five years. If they keep on like they've been, they're just going to do more and more damage to their longterm outlook.

[Despanan]

Honestly, they COULD rebrand themselves the party of isolationism and personal privacy...but they won't, because they're too tied into the military and prison industrial complexes to do that.

[Phantomgrift]

[HisDivineShadow]

[Despanan]

Both the republicans & the democrats suck - but they suck in different ways. At this point the republicans are sucking considerably harder.

[HisDivineShadow]

Honestly I've been saying just this for as long as I've been debating atheism-theism here. Stuff like Fundamentalist religion and other superstitions tend to foster a heavily warped sense of rationality, which is catastrophic when it comes to politics.