Once upon a time, there were two political parties in America, one was conservative (the Republicans) and one was liberal (the Democrats). Since about 1980 those two parties have morphed into something else entirely. Now we have one party that is conservative (the Democrats) and one that looks a lot like organized crime (the Republicans).
Beginning with Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party began to move to the right on nearly all issues. At that time however, the Republicans still believed in our representative form of government. They wanted a more conservative government, but they still believed in having a government. They wanted to change laws, but, for the most part, they still agreed that we need the rule of law.
Fast forward to the present and we now have a Republican Party that fights against every law, every regulation, and every tax. Their goal is to destroy our government, not to use it to further a conservative agenda. They have no agenda. The Republicans now resemble nothing more than a criminal mob that wants to put the police out of business so they can control the streets.
The Democrats have also changed, only it has been a much more incremental change. In an effort to keep up with a perceived rightward shift in the national conscience championed by Ronald Reagan and then amplified by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and finally Matt Drudge, the Democrats began slowly becoming more conservative on many issues.
But today’s Democrats have not lost the belief that government can work for the people and is necessary for our nation to function. And, on many social issues, they have moved decidedly leftward. But still, the Democratic Party is now, in many ways, as conservative as the Republicans of the 1950s and 60s.
And then along comes Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, true champions of a progressive agenda. Not only have both captured the imagination of a large swath of America, Bernie Sanders nearly overtook the establishment candidate (Hillary Clinton) in the Democratic presidential primary. This could be the start of a new era in politics.
The Republicans have now gone past the point of no return. Their presidential candidate, Donald Trump, perfectly illustrates the utter bankruptcy of their party. They have nothing left to offer. They are a party for the radical and unhinged.
The Democrats are still a party of the mainstream. Hillary Clinton will make a good, solid, conservative president, much like her husband was in the 1990s. But the current Democratic Party is often seen as a party of corporatist war-mongers that is way too close to the big banks and the military industrial congressional complex.
The new Democrats however, the Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders Democrats, offer us something different, something progressive. This could be the face of a new political party.
When I was a child in 1972, I asked what the difference was between the two major parties. I was told that the Democrats wanted change and that the Republicans wanted to keep things the same.
Let the Republican Party slowly fade away. We have the Old Democrats for those who want things to stay the same. Let the current Democratic Party be our conservative party.
For change, we need a new party, a liberal party, sitting firmly to the left of the current Democrats. Call it whatever you like, The Progressive Party, The Liberal Party, or even The Millennial Party. We need a new party that, along with the current Democratic Party, can push the Republicans once and for all into oblivion. Then we can go back to having a liberal and a conservative party to choose from. Then we can go back to having two parties that actually believe in our form of government.
