The New Road

Bachelor Party

We took Eric out for his bachelor party last night:

The company was great and the evening was fun. We ended up talking mostly about politics. Everyone was anti-Bush, some more than others. One guy in particular was a Bush Republican from the first election but has now changed his mind quite dramatically. He thinks that the current administration is bad for business because business likes a stable government, which is not what we have today.

It seems to me that Reagan really bolted on the Christian fundamentalist right onto the front of the party and used that as the wedge to move the party into the mainstream populous. The problem is that this new front end to the party has never really meshed with the back end, who were the traditional pro-business small government types. As an example, how can you be pro-small governemnt and for tons of idealogue based regulatory enforcement? Can you support a business innovation economy and still restrict stem cell research?

Now this friction is even more pronounced because Bush comes firmly out of the front of the party as an idealogue. He is not centered in his party and it looks like he might lose the back end because his radical policies are, as this guy put it, bad for business.

What I want is the old GOP back. The GOP that was pro-business, cigar smoking old white guys. They understood that the Democratic party needed to exist so that the other 90% of the populous felt they had some sort of voice.

This new radical GOP front face thinks that liberal thought is un-American and that liberals are traitors. The goal is the complete destruction of the Democratic party and all non-Christian liberal thought. Problem is that 50% of Americans are Democrats. Is half of American un-American?

The GOP needs to divest itself of this fundamentalist front-end and the Christian right needs it's own party that will actually attempt to implement it's social agenda. This marraige of fiscal conservative and social conservative is a match made in hell for all of us.