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Strategies & Market Trends : Asia Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frodo Baxter who wrote (8727)	6/9/1999 8:20:00 AM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9980

<<All successful political parties must thread the needle with conflicting constituencies. That Republicans have not been able to do that bespeaks more a lack of strong party leadership rather than any structural defect inherent to its voter base.>> Yes, but they also contain the seeds of the demise of the group. Democrats had a coalition of Jews, blacks, unions and anti-semitic, anti-union segregationists for a long time. It didn't either form or break up because of "strong leadership" or lack thereof, though I suppose you could say that it took some pretty clever people to put such a crew together. But the reasons for staying together were mostly independent of leadership, there were historical reasons for why this could happen, just as there are historical reasons for why people who are essentially libertarians currently think that somehow they belong in the same party as the religious right, people who would impose their views on the entire world if they could. The breakup of the democratic coalition happened because the people who formed it died and the reasons for their loyalty couldn't be passed on to another generation. It wasn't a "reasoned" loyalty, it was leftover from as long ago as the Civil War, on the one hand, and the union wars of the first few decades of this century. The current Republican coalition doesn't have that kind of glue, it is more opportunism with libertarians and religious right people each thinking that they can exploit the other group for their own mutually exclusive purposes. Being "reasoned" rather than experienced, it won't last as long. The two parties in the US have successfully made it psychologically extremely difficult for more parties to develop in the US, and until that block is overcome, we will continue to have very strange bedfellows in political parties.