In thinking about just how drastically things have changed from when I was born, the Republican Party used to be the party of business. The Democrat Party used to be the party of labor. We do not live in that world anymore.
This labor/business dynamic made a lot of sense. And their competition was healthy. You wouldn’t want either side gaining total control as one would either lead to workers being impoverished by business interests winning out, or labor interests winning out and turning into communism. So each side keep each other in check benefited everyone.
Labor had a natural advantage of having more people. Business had the natural advantage of having more money. There was corruption on both sides, but it was minimal enough to keep a healthy society humming along. If business wanted to maximize profit, and couldn’t effectively do that by screwing over labor, they could do it covertly. Like hide the danger to the public from harmful products, and use the Republican Party to cover their asses from that public.
Bill Clinton saw this and said he wanted in on that action, and turned the Democrat Party from a labor party into a 2nd corporate party that peddles profit through public betrayal. And so we’ve been humming along for decades now with two wholly corrupt parties that stabs the public in the back and gets financially rewarded by it from various corporate entities.
But this system has a serious vulnerability. All any politician has to do to be wildly successful is come along and just do what people want and tell the corporate corruption machine to go fuck themselves. But any politician that did that would expose the system for it’s corruption, and if you profited from it, you would fight that politician with the fury of hell.
This is why you have both Dems and Republicans who go after Trump. It’s why you had a bunch of corrupt neocon Republicans become Democrats. And it’s why you now have a new Republican party that is a big tent party: men and women. Whites and blacks. Gay and straight. Hispanic and Asian. People from all walks of life. While the Democrats are the party of corruption. And Democrat voters tend to be the dumbest people in the country because these are the people who haven’t figured this out.
Trump brought an alienated and homeless group of people: the voters, to the Republican Party and did the impossible. He turned the party of corrupt business into the Party of average Americans. Not everyone got the message right away. But the GOP today is the Party of the People. The Democrats are a joke. A party solely based upon corruption and fooling stupid people to support that.
The times, they are a changin’.
