My old college roommate's take on the two parties in 2016

[rogerashton]

I have long marveled at how the big-business interests which have dominated the Republican party's establishment forever have held onto the blue-collar working base of the party while systematically picking their pockets. They did it the same way a good stage magician makes you look at the hand he wants you to look at (conservative hot-button social issues like abortion, gay marriage, and defense) while drawing your attention away from the hand he doesn't want you to look at (tax reforms which primarily benefit the wealthy and inevitably result in massive deficits, and regulatory reform which make it easier for businesses to plunder our resources, destroy organized labor, and decrease worker safety).

The Democratic party's unravelling is more complex. Ruy Teixeira's 2002 book, "The Emerging Democratic Majority" is absolutely prescient in predicting what we are now seeing: the origins of a progressive libertarian movement. That movement is not going away and neither are the demographic groups which comprise it. The old Democratic coalition of Organized Labor, Big-city Machine Cronyism, and identity-based political affiliations is coming apart.

I think he uses "libertarian" in a different sense here than right-wing libertarians do -- as Gore Vidal pointed out years ago, the right-wingers are not "libertarian" but "propertarian."

https://www.facebook.com/notes/ron-cordes/the-future-of-the-democratic-and-republican-parties/10206269402398558

[malthaussen]

1. Man does not live by bread alone.

It's kind of sad that so few get this. They seem to think that only ignorance or stupidity would lead working-class whites to ignore their economic issues, as though these issues were the only ones that matter. Instead, they should take instruction from this fact, and realize that feeding the anger and bigotry will get one a lot farther than any economic issue (except raising taxes, and "free stuff," so long as that "free stuff" is for someone else). Mr Trump clearly understands this.

-- Mal