If we want political parties and not sects...

[Soph0571]

Tom Watson on the State of the Labour Party...

He counters by asking if I would have preferred him to stay quiet and betray his principles. “I was trying to stand up for pluralism. The Labour party only wins elections when it’s the broadest of churches. But there are some sections around Jeremy and the Unite group that live in a binary world of left and right, good and evil, us and them, in and out. You can’t run a two-party system without nuance and complexity, pluralism and respect for difference. Because ultimately you end up becoming a sect not a party.”

[link:https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/28/tom-watson-was-i-disloyal-i-dont-take-kindly-to-being-told-what-to-do|]

Emphasis mine
Exactly. This is not just about one party though. One can see the same polarisation and them and us in the Conservative movement and Trump is a master at it. Divide and conquer. Harrumph.

[Wounded Bear]

1. In the good old days, both R's and D's had some diversity in them...

While there was definitely a "leaning" left or right of the parties, there were once liberal R's and conservative D's in America.

Both parties also had moderates, who could actually vote across party lines based on a range of issues, both economic and social.

Since Nixon, and especially Reagan, the Repub party has been systematically radicalizing, purging their ranks of liberals and even moderates. We like to point at the Tea Party bullshit of the Obama Era as some kind of turning point, but in reality it was just an intensifying of an ongoing trend. Citing economic motives while spewing racist hatred is a conservative tradition nowadays. I mean, Reagan made his candidacy announcement in the Mississippi town where KKK assholes were lionized for killing civil rights workers.

Repubs have been trying for decades to decouple Wall Street from Main Street, and they have finally seemed to have succeeded. Trump's economy has favored the wealthy and the executive class, just like Repubs love to do, while job and wage growth have been stagnant for workers.

Unfortunately, while there are no moderate R's left, there are plenty of conservadems, at least economically. Some Repub pols like to talk a moderate game, but still tend to vote the party line.