Tags
Alexander Hamilton, Conservatism, Constitution, Democratic Party, Elitism and Class, founding-fathers, GOP, GOP establishment, Jefferson-Hamiliton handshake, Republican Party, Republican Party establishment, Thomas Jefferson
Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills
(Updated from 2010, when Obama-the-idea was still new.)
The Hook
The GOP establishment has always kept one foot in the water bucket during a thunderstorm; never fixing that hole in the roof, because, when it’s raining, it too wet to go outside, and when it’s sunny, hell, there ain’t no leak. For a century this view of politics has held sway in state capitals and in Washington alike, but today, it doesn’t take into account that Democrats still have every state into little more than administrative accounting unit, or that the only real defense against this takeover will be a bridging of that divide between the Red and Blue GOP.
Only instead of a united front, we are throwing a three-tiered front; Blue Establishment Republicans, Red Conservatives, and in the last year, (but brewing for a decade or more) an amalgam of American detritus, often referred to by me as the Common Man and Woman, offering a return to an older definition, or hue, of Red.
We know infinitely more about each today than we did in 2009. And it all seems to reside in the absence of a single handshake.
The Class Struggle, the Usual Suspect
Long before I ever got into my book debate with Moses Sands (1998) about the Constitution and common man, he and I spoke many times about the role of class in American society and politics. We agreed it was worse then (1990s- Clinton era) than it had been in the 1890s, at the time of the robber barons, or the 1950s with the rise of the new capitalists after the Depression and WWII. The difference was a simple matter of demographics, a Blue diaspora, and hard math, with far more Americans becoming better educated in a higher percentage of shirt and tie professions…and many, many more in government-related work, where it’s simply harder to be continue to be a conservative and draw a state paycheck. Or. even a Republican, as election results prove in both Virginia and Maryland, when federal employment has turned both states blue. (Certain laws apply here about loyalty to the hand that feeds you which are immutable, and go back to the time of the pharaohs[…]
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