15 Apr 2004 UTC M This colon convention gets out of hand after maybe two I ve just looked over the articles you suggested I might take an eye to We will have something to discuss I see You don t take on small issues Much more daring than I am I can have more to say later of course but first impression sis that there may very well be POV objections to most of these on grounds of opinion Now that s inevitable in any sort of political or historical analysis and the best anyone can probably do is scratch a little rhetorical dirt over the most blatant It s the basis for academic debate in these disciplines Politics though is important not just scholasticim redux and so it s worth doing Enough blather I see a major problem in that your perspective is too temporally narrow POV allegations aside I trace the Big Break realignment or whatever in American politics to the Bull Moose Until then both the Republicans and Democrats were broad parties with support from all classes regions etc well the Solid South was an exception for the obvious racist reasons but When Teddy took the Progressives out in 1912 he made Wilson s election nearly certain and more importantly in the longer run many most of those folks never went back Think of La Follette or George Norris or Hiram Johnson progressives small p all and all I think Republicans They wouldn t have been important or comfortable in the GOP of Harding Coolidge Hoover Taft pere ou fils and their intellectual descendents weren t It was the Repuplicans who staged a generations long witch hunt for Commies and unAmericanism Even thouhg it was an idiot Democrat who started HUAC Martin Dies and he had a Soviet spy as a fellow member Dickstein I think it was but the GOP found the structure conveninet to use Think Nixon from his first election or the GOP tolerance for McCarthy Tom Delay Newt Gingrich Bomber Bob Dornan from California etc The Rockefeller wing misnamed of the GOP was the last remnant of the people Teddy had taken out Goldwater just made the ideological contraction more evident blatant inescapable he wasn t actually very much in tune with the modern conservatives now dominating the GOP Too independent of a specific agenda This leaves the Dems as the only broadly based party but remember that old saw about belonging to no organized party I m a Democrat That s a distortion of the historic American pattern of two substandtial widely based parties plus some minors Maybe that pattern is changing or not but it s abberrant Enough Have to go anyway Tell me whether anything I ve said is of any use 23 41