Quote:
Originally Posted by The Dad Fisherman
Pretty Much
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I don't think the young man in the article I posted, Michael J. Hout, was telling the extremists in the Democrat Party to shut up. It sounded to me that he was saying, as far as he could see, there was no room for moderates in the Democrat Party. Rather than telling Democrat extremists to shut up, as your insert implies, he said that they made
him shut up. As a classical liberal, rather than "a
liberal in the contemporary sense" he says there is no room for him in the party. He noticed that "among my peers and
in the party at large – namely their dramatic lurch to the left, and
the increasing focus on identity politics over substance — that I was not fighting for a party that welcomed my beliefs
in its increasingly shrinking tent".
He opted to be an independent and possibly in the future a Republican.
A lot of us have noticed what Michael J. Hout has noticed. And many of us have noticed that the "moderate" Republicans had evolved in many ways into a bit lighter version of what the Democrats used to be--big government, program oriented, tax and overspending, Progressive bureaucrats. And the Dems had evolved into what Michael Hout says.
The Tea Partiers and Trumpers that stayed in the Republican Party, and which vaulted it into power, were actually a moderating influence on the direction of the Republican party at large and of the country as a whole. It was they who espoused core American values rather than the phony leftist version of "who we are" mantra into which it tries to wrap us so that their policies can appear to be loaded with "American values." It was the Tea Partiers who demanded true fiscal responsibility and return to the true American mainstream of constitutional order and the right of individuals to live, speak, and worship (or not) with the least government coercion.
Middle America was tired of overbearing government with its elitist lapdog media (including Hollywood) telling them they were in that basket of deplorables Hillary spoke of. And more and more of them began to see that the shrinking of the middle class and intractable national debt was occurring under the long reign of self-identified "moderates" who either really were not, or if they were, then "moderate" wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
Something other than the same old extremist name calling tempered with the wiser "middle" seems to be going on. At least temporarily. Fighting and anger is tiring, and folks always return to comfort--the state in which they can again be bamboozled.