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The religious right and hard core conservatives are Traditionalists, part of a movement that emerged originally in the 1870s in the South and Midwest. As a movement, they are fading, and will probably be gone completely in about 20-30 years. The business wing of the Republican Party (and Democratic Party) were primarily centered along the Connecticut/Massachusetts/Urban New York corridor, and were actually fairly progressive in the 1950s - these are Moderns, pro-business, measuring progress by business growth and very strongly pro-corporatist. By the mid-1970s, a fair amount of these had ended up in the Democratic side of the equation, making up the centrist wing of the party.
Meanwhile, a lot of the civil rights movements that had been strong in the 1960s had ended up shifting increasingly to localized culture change rather than political change, and had also, in many cases, ended up taking advantage of technological social networking technology in the 1980s and 1990s to ultimately end up re-emerging as the progressive wing of the Democratic party (these are Cultural Creatives, and are made up primarily of information workers, writers, librarians, teachers, activists, psychologists and environmentalists). They are, in general, much more of the belief that action should take place at the local level, that communication and network oriented social structures are key to the future and that many of the problems that currently exist have to do with too heavily centralized authority and hierarchical distribution, whether in government, business or education.
My own suspicion is that the struggle of hierarchicalists vs. distributivists will end up being the dominant struggle of the 21st century. This will end up causing an interesting re-alignment, in which Progressives are increasingly going to be finding common cause with both Austrian School Libertarians (the Ron Paul crowd) and even social conservatives that are disgusted with the degree to which large government AND large business are destroying their way of life. This will be especially over the next twenty to thirty years as a more Distributivist social system begins to emerge from the wreckage of the economy and as the existing "Republican Religious Right" dies off (which it is in the midst of doing now, due primarily to old age - most of the leaders of that movement are now in their late 60s and 70s.
What this means is that in the next decade, the Democratic Party will likely fracture along different lines, and a distributivist party will emerge as part of that.
Obama's in an awful position at this stage - these divisions are clearly visible. By inclination, he's likely more progressive than centrist, but the reality is that his own party is clearly under a huge degree of stress, and he's having to balance one against the other in order to get his agenda passed, all the while dealing with the disintegrating edifice left by Bush. Personally, I think that he made a tactical mistake in thinking that the banks and the corporatists would in fact cooperate with him once the initial crisis was at least staunched (and I really question Raum being his chief of staff, as Raum is very much a corporatist and is no doubt at least establishing the agenda to favor the centrists moneyed interests). Now its forced him into a position that's left the festering wound of the banking crisis detract from the health care reforms while simultaneously trying desperately not to be painted as a socialist by the Republican wing of the Corporatist party.
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