The Coalition Party

    Frustration aside, recent political events have marked a dramatic shift in the body politic in ways which will most likely profoundly affect the social, legal, and economic landscape of America for decades and even generations to come.

    This is a Goldwater level shift.

    Perhaps I ought to explain.

    Starting in the aftermath of the War Between the States, or War of Northern Aggression if you will, about a generation after Reconstruction, as America was really kicking into gear with the rise of the oligarch who were slurred as “robber barons” responded to on a global, or rather pervasively first world which at the time amounted to pretty much the same thing, workers unionization movement, the political parties were not as any today would recognize.

    As the quasi-socialist ideology sweeps the civilized world it attracts adherents within both parties, the Republicans as well as the Democrats.  It would be rather simplistic to say, and in the past I have, that there were liberals and conservatives in both parties at that time.  However, that is not quite correct.

    The age of the “robber barons” was the height of mercantilist economic ideology in America, and people from all walks of life were simultaneously embracing the technological developments and decrying all the social ills of society, every one of them calling themselves “progressives” or people looking to advance society in the same way the technology was advancing.

    Thus within the Republican party you have elements which support big businesses, like John D. Rockefeller, and also have people who seek to bust up the big business Trusts, like Theodore Roosevelt.  Within the Democrat party existed elitist globalists like Woodrow Wilson, and also have champions of the working man such as William Jennings Bryan.

    This is how you end up with not entirely fringe elements within the Democrat party championing a communist styled socialism while at the same time elements within the Republican party championing a fascist styled socialism.

    However, being America, large swaths of the electorate in both parties are adamantly opposed to concentrating too much power in government just as they are opposed to concentrating too much power in corporations.

    Playing upon this fear of corporate power and the deprivations of the Depression, Democrats managed to prevail pushing their communistic socialistic ideals into many institutions of America, particularly in education and media corporations, which would filter from there through law schools and wall street.

    The rise of the Democrat party was a targeted appeal by to every conceivable small, marginal, special interest, single issue voting group such as: union members, elderly, poor, feminists, homosexuals, minorities, environmentalists, animal rights activists, and any other group they could identify.  They promised each of these marginal groups whatever they wanted, specialized benefits or privileges from the public coffers.

    Passage of the vote bribing program of “Social Security” ensured decades of Democrat dominance of Congress and put the Republican party on the defensive struggling as the cost of that vote buying program was foisted largely upon their big business backers, while many of the Democrat supporters became insulated from such costs by government employment or subsidies.

    Which brings us to Goldwater, and the creation of “conservatism” as a movement rebelling against this emergent colossus of centralized government control of the traditionally diversified limited government upon which America had been founded.  That is not to say that the ideals of “conservatism” were not present prior to Goldwater, Calvin Coolidge proves such, but it was not independently articulated as the core of the political ideology.

    Government had grown almost ten fold as large at the federal level from back to back “crisis” of the Depression and WWII, as the Democrat party was never one to let a good crisis go to waste.  Conservatism was an ideological call back to a traditional America of small limited government, fighting to reestablish fading American ideals to try to keep the republic of the Founding Fathers.

    Americans responded overwhelmingly to this call for a return to traditional values, particularly watching their children being turned into dirty, smelly, hippy communists in colleges, rising drug culture, violent race riots, violent anti-war protesters, hedonistic sex, rising divorces, and an ever increasing welfare state which was the ‘60s & ‘70s.

    Those Goldwater “conservatives” started concentrating in a new home, the rather marginalized Republican party.  Then the unthinkable started happening, this new “conservative” wing of the Republican party started winning elections.  When the crass, deceitful, economic practices of the federal government finally blew up in their faces, the ensuing “malaise” brought Ronald Reagan into office.

    Success breeds success, and Democrats conservatively inclined, whom Reagan referred to as “blue-dog” Democrats (in contrast to the already labeled “yellow-dog” Democrats), started moving from their party of generations and switching to Republican, specifically in the South, the named “southern strategy”, which for the first time since reconstruction made the party competitive in the south.  (In contrast to the appeal of “conservatism” to Democrats in the south, it turned away many “progressive” Republicans in the north.)

    The point of this history is to illustrate why the conservative movement was so ideologically unified in support of the traditional American capitalism, constitutionalism, Protestantism, and nuclear family.

    To counter the shocking success of “conservatives”, the Democrats fell back on their tried and true practices of promising everybody anything they wanted as long as they opposed the positions of the conservatives.  Thus the Republicans, under the leadership of the conservative movement became the ideological party and the Democrats became in opposition a coalition party pooling together a diverse group of people against a common enemy.

    They did not care what the issue was just so long as it opposed the conservatives.  Groups which would be naturally opposed to each other banded together against the Republicans, which is why you could end up with feminists defending Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton, working poor people supporting more illegal immigrant workers, or union workers supporting anti-industry environmentalists.

    You can still see remnants of this today with people like Sen. Joe Manchin supporting his Democrat party which has repeatedly targeted the destruction of the coal industry upon which his own voters depend.

    As the saying goes, “politics makes strange bedfellows”, and for the longest time the only thing holding Democrats together was a mutual enmity of Republicans and the traditional American ideals which they espoused.

    Which brings us up to recent events where the Democrat party which had embedded its philosophical elements of communist styled socialism into the educational institutions of America have created a generation of Americans who are positively disposed towards the ideals of socialism, been taught to hate the history of America, oppose the basic foundational principles of the Constitution, and despise the concept of the family, and often in antipathy to reality itself.

    The Democrat party has openly abandoned those unionists who work in traditional industries such as coal or steel or oil, telling them they should learn to code or learn to install solar panels.  Democrats who championed housewives seeking employment in the corporate world now spurn housewives altogether, wives in general, and even women in sports.  The list goes on and on of the various groups Democrats have commanded to either fall in line or be deemed an archaic fascist and ostracized from society.

    As the Democrats have tracked far left, they have demanded an ideologic purity of socialism and an all powerful centralized government.  This has lead directly to Trump.

    As the Democrats have become the party of ideological purity, they left a gaping hole for a bombastic populist candidate to move the Republican party from being ideologically conservative party into a coalition of divergent interests which are being harmed by the socialist policies foisted on people by the Democrats.

    Political parties, in the same manner as individuals, are often defined by their reaction to their opposition.  In a two party system there is virtually always an ideological party and a coalition party of those opposed to them.  (This is something which confuses people with a parliamentary system about the American political system.)  It is odd, and highly unexpected, but the recent shift of the Democrats in openly embracing Marxism has effected a shift in the Republican party into a coalition party opposed to this ideology.

    This is rather a difficult concept to embrace, and will take some time in adjustment with new allies in such a coalition.  You may soon see the types of strange, seemingly irrational, even hypocritical, political behaviors in the Republican party with which we have grown accustomed to seeing in the Democrats.  We have started seeing this in the “owning the libs” jargon of social media.  This shall be, to say the least, disconcerting.