Gary writes: "Anyone remember their history? A third party was born in 1854. Within 6 years that party elected its first President and the Whig party, (one of the two major parties) disappeared. It was a troubled time with massive divisions within the nation. We are in troubled times. The divisions are coming. Is the Republican Party and its candidates up to the challenge?"
Is the Republican Party and [are] its candidates up to the challenge?
In my view, no. Not from what I'm seeing.
The Republican Party remains a passive and fawning refuge for the theocratic right. If the party cannot reject the intellectually brittle religionists, who sincerely believe in no separation of church and state, and the unprincipled pragmatist who stand for everything and nothing, and embrace with conviction and action the classical liberal political principles of the founding fathers and the corresponding economic corollary of unregulated laissez-faire capitalism, then the party will continue to flounder and will instead rouse the urge for a new or forgotten party that has a more muscular proposition based on man's rights, limited government and economic liberty.
Oddly, the current political climate could not possibly be better for Republicans. With unprecedented growth of government control over the economy, unfathomable spending, debt, and inflation, and the generally-accepted promotion of the pernicious moral code of self-sacrifice for the collective, the party has been handed its one great redeeming point of distinction from the looters and thugs of the fascist Left.
But, alas, I see no advancing libertarian guard in the party. I see no signs that the Republican Party is "up to the challenge." I see only facile retrenchment and infantile, religious navel-gazing.
Say it ain't so Joe, say it ain't so.
