interesting blog entry in today's HP by Gary Hart

[DemBeans]

It's entitled "The Parties Are Over", and deals with the coming realignment of the electorate and current feelings of disenfranchisement from the current party structures.

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Out of power, the watchword among Democrats, and many independents, is: “I don’t know what the Democrats stands for.” That’s because the Party’s old coalition—traditional liberals, labor, minorities, women, environmentalists, and internationalists—is in the process of disappearing and a new one has yet to be formed. Millions of people wait to hear what the twenty-first century Democratic Party stands for, and Democratic Party “leaders” are not saying until they see what the new coalition is going to look like. They are afraid of taking principled stands for fear of alienating some group they think they need. So there is a kind of stand-off. Voters afloat want to hear what the Party has to say, and the Party is trying to find out what they want to hear.

But many traditional Republicans don’t know what their Party stands for either. It used to stand for balanced budgets, resistance to foreign entanglement, laissez faire economics, smaller government, and individual freedom. Not any more. That old coalition has disappeared as well. The new Republican Party stands for big government, huge deficits, pre-emptive warfare, massive nation-building, neo-imperialism in the Middle East, intrusion on your privacy, and a semi-official state religion dictated by fundamentalist ministers.

This new Republican Party is merely a temporary diversion because its new political base is too far out of step with mainstream America, an America which includes the traditional Republican base. Democrats used to be the Nanny Party in the secular realm; the neo-Republicans have become the Nanny Party in the religious realm.

We Americans, though, are a nation of independent, socially tolerant, fiscally cautious, environmentally concerned, well-informed, globally-conscious citizens. This pretty much leaves most of us adrift, at least from the two old parties and the increasingly dogmatic, rigid, orthodox, intolerant neo-Republican party, a cabal that seems intent only on consolidating political power in fewer and fewer hands, reducing its elected officials and judges to disciplined automatons, protecting corporate excess, secret policy making, and forcing all of us to become fundamentalist Christians of the sort that would make even John Calvin appear liberal.

The entire entry is at http://www.huffingtonpost.com

[Toby109]

1. In '88 Gary Hart

would have beaten GHWB like a rented mule if not for the Donna Rice episode.

[madinmaryland]

2. I don't know if he would have,

but I like your comment:

"beaten GHWB like a rented mule"

I think he would have made it a lot closer that Dukakis/Bentson, and might have actually pulled it off, as a lot of people (the so-called Reagan Democrats) were getting Reagan Fatigue.