>>He's not a Republican, he's... you know that brain-replacing fungus
>>that makes dying ants act against antly interests so as to create
>>opportunities for the fungus to infest further ants? He's that.
>>Actual Republicans are the ants.
>
>I would have to disagree with you on that one, Ben.
(...)
>The Republicanism of
>Dwight Eisenhower, of John Chafee, of Chris Shays and Nelson
>Rockefeller and even Bill Weld, is dead.

Which is essentially what I meant. Trump isn't a Republican; all but a handful of modern Republicans aren't Republicans, any more than modern Democrats are Democrats in the sense that would have been understood at the time of the Republican Party's founding.

I mean to say, if I had been born a hundred years earlier, and ended up with the same basic set of views I have as an adult (which is improbable, I grant you, but stay with me here), I would almost certainly have been a Republican, or at least leaned toward them much as I lean (with some repugnance) toward the Democrats today. I'd have voted for Theodore Roosevelt. Hell, I'd probably have broken with the Republican Party in 1912 to vote for him again (and in a sense that's where the party started to go wrong, I would contend, not 1964—when TR peeled off most of the moderate/progressive wing and inadvertently recast the GOP as America's Tories). He, and those of his bent, to say nothing of the likes of Lincoln and Seward, wouldn't recognize what had become of their party by the middle of the 20th century, let alone now. Now they wouldn't even recognize it as a political party.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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