Most of our first world counterparts have parliamentary systems where the right-left continuum is chopped up into numerous small parties, so the parties on the extremes are relatively tiny compared to the system as a whole. In America, we have a two-party system so that each party represents a governing coalition of what would be several parties in any other system.
On the right, we have Christian social conservatives, who tend to include anti-minority, anti-immigrant white supremacists, anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-progress traditionalists, gun nuts, and Holy Joes who would like to use the power of the state to impose their Biblical morality (or, in the extreme, a theocracy) on everyone else. We also have libertarians, who want a smaller, less expensive, hands-off government. Then we have the economic conservatives, the corporate fat cats, the plutocrats, and the extended families of the Capitalist class, who are simply interested in things being managed in such a way that they get richer (the country be damned if it gets in the way of profits).
Back in the Nixon-Eisenhower days, the Republican Party had what we would now call “moderate” conservatives, like William F. Buckley and Kevin Phillips, who in the tradition of Edmund Burke, were models of civility, public spirit and intellectual clarity. They saw themselves as a loyal opposition whose role was to urge a more considered “go slow” approach to the social transformations that liberals were pushing in the areas of civil rights, and a more equitable and compassionate society. (These, by the way, were a self-conscious attempt to realize the civil libertarian values of our founding fathers.)
But, since Reagan, these Rockefeller and Goldwater Republicans have become increasingly marginalized by the radical religious right, until now they are no longer welcome in the GOP. Many have defected to become Blue Dog Democrats. There are some members of the Capitalist class, like the Kennedys and Jay Rockefeller who have defected to the Democrats because they see a more equitable society (with a large, affluent middle class) as better for business than a less equitable society consisting of a deeply debt-ridden working class, lorded over by a small hereditary aristocracy of the super-rich, a la Bush I and Bush II.
The more extreme a party becomes, the less legitimate it becomes over time. And this is true in any system. The transfer of wealth that occurred under Bush II ($4 gasoline, the sub-prime lending bubble, the outsourcing of government, etc.) was so rapacious as to drive the whole economy to the brink of collapse. The middle class, being economically illiterate thanks to 20 years of Republican rule, has no idea as to just how close we came to taking the whole world economy down with us. (And we are not out of the woods yet.) Nonetheless, it has become pretty obvious, to everyone but the hard core Religious Right, who tend to confuse political and religious belief, that conservative ideology is bankrupt. Things are so bad that only government intervention can get us out of it.
The Republican party offers us nothing new; so, in effect, it has chosen to double-down on crazy, and so will continue lose elections and get smaller until it is completely irrelevant. Obama’s drift to the Center may well be a calculated bid to ensure that Republicans stay in the minority for the next 20 years. Some are saying that if he shifts to the Left now, he gives the Right something to organize and mobilize against. But if he waits, and lets the Republicans implode, they may very well take the whole right wing with them when they go. I sincerely hope so. I am so tired of the Christian Right and know-nothing conservative ideologues.
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