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Edited on Tue Oct-07-08 01:10 AM by Spider Jerusalem
hard-core social conservatives and reactionaries (because, let's face it, that's what these people are) are comparatively few in number in the larger population; they're largely concentrated in the South, Midwest and Mountain West states (and thanks to demographic shifts favouring increased urbanisation their numbers are declining in the South). The present-day Republican party has managed to exploit the social fears and prejudices of rural Protestants and stereotypical 'angry white men' since the days of Richard Nixon and the Southern Strategy; as this becomes an increasingly unviable path to electoral success, the Republican Party will of necessity change, as it changed before, as the Democratic Party too changed.
At the close of the Second World War, the success of the New Deal in the US, and the election of Attlee's Labour government in the UK, led to a generally liberal tendency in both Democratic and Republican administrations here, and in Labour and Tory governments in Britain. This is something that persisted for over thirty years, by and large; the Thatcher government in Britain, and the Reagan administration in the US, began a shift to the right of the centre of the political spectrum, in response to a decade of economic malaise and the breakdown of Keynesian economics and the social welfare state. This shift to the socioeconomic right was largely across the board; the American Democratic Party, and the British Labour Party, both shifted right in response (most notably on economic issues--see as examples Bill Clinton, who was, on most things, to the right of Nixon, and Tony Blair, who was quite rightly called a neo-Thatcherite).
What we're seeing now, with the economic fallout of massive deregulation, is to some degree a repudiation of the economic neoliberalism and free market absolutism of Thatcherism and Reaganomics. There will be a corresponding shift in the political centre; this may take a decade or more to shake out, but it WILL happen. When it does, the relative importance of the resentments of rural religious fanatics as a part of Republican electoral calculus will likely ALSO fade; what they don't realise is that they've been played for suckers, the GOP never really intended to give them a theocracy, or ban abortion, or abolish welfare, or deport illegal immigrants; they never intended to, because removing the reasons for their resentment would deny them the leverage that the political exploitation of those issues gave them, allowing for a cynical division of the populace along social and demographic lines rather than along socio-economic ones and thus encouraging many of these self-styled 'consservatives' to vote against their own interests. With the coming political realignment, they're likely to find themselves surplus to requirements.
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