[QUOTE=DevNull]
I am sorry that you have to deal with the existence of my opinion by creating a scenario that involves me having lost touch with reality… completely. I do not know what it is like to have to resort to such extremes to cope with the existence of an opinion of another, but I imagine it could be quite a burden to live with. The fact that you went and took the time to write out to me that particular mental shortcoming of yours is a bit odd…
– If you think xxxxx, you have completely lost touch with reality, period. –
Of course what you may be trying to do is conduct an argument by intimidation. By claiming that if I do not think a certain way, or perhaps do think a certain way, then you fantasize that you are somehow in a position to put psychological pressure on me by threatening to think less of me unless I fall in line with your way of thinking.
Not only were you never in a position to intimidate me, but now I know how you think and by pulling such a lame stunt you have lost any trust I had in your words. A person who resorts to psychological pressure is a desperate person. A person with an agenda.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not trying to intimidate you. How can anyone intimidate anyone else via a text-based Internet message board? I’m just exasperated with your impenetrability. Look, I’ll spell it out for you: Until the 1960s, the dominant wing of the Republican Party was the “Rockefeller Republicans”: Socially liberal; pro-civil–rights; pro-business, but not deeply hostile to a limited welfare state. It was Nixon who gave us Medicare, remember. As for hard-right conservatives like William F. Buckley, they were viewed as marginal and eccentric.
But in the early '60s a radical ideological-conservative movement began. It won the Pub nomination for Barry Goldwater (“In your heart you know he’s right!” “In your guts you know he’s nuts!”). He lost by a landslide to LBJ in 1964, but the movement continued and eventually won control of the party, culminating in Reagan’s victory in 1980. And the party has only drifted further to the right since then – see the “Republican Revolution” of 1994, and everything the current Admin has done since 2001. (An excellent history of post-Goldwater “movement conservatism” can be found in Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by John Micklethwaite and Adrian Wooldridge; and another in The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America, by Godfrey Hodgson.)
The Sixth Party System has been characterized by a wholesale exchange of the Dems’ and Pubs’ geographical-regional bases, following the success of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” which broke the “Solid South” and transformed the GOP into a predominantly Southern party (which would have bemused both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis to no end). This realignment has resulted in making both parties more ideologically homogeneous than they were before – conservative “Southern Democrats” and liberal “Rockefeller Republicans” have alike been marginalized, or switched parties; however, in the process, both parties somehow have shifted their political center-of-gravity to the right.
All reputable historians and political pundits, regardless of their own politics, agree substantially on the above narrative. You are the first person I have ever encountered who perceives that story differently. And you’re not even backing up your perception with a persuasive counter-narrative. You simply assert, “The Republicans have moved too far left,” even though they are now further right than at any time since the Hoover Administration; “America is too far left, we need reform,” even though this is patently the most pro-corporate and economic-libertarian and militarily aggressive of all the industrialized nations. It’s not like we’re reading you in National Review or something, it really is like we’re channeling you from some alternate dimension.