"Hawke" wrote in message
...

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...

"Wes" wrote in message
...
"Ed Huntress" wrote:


Go all the way, register for the dark side. Maybe torricelli will
run
again

Wes

I'm not registering Dem in NJ. I know too many of them.


A man without a party. So sad. Join the Libertarians then. Larry
will
be happy.

I couldn't stand the cocktail parties.


So what do you think the Republican Party you miss stood for?

Wes

Prudence.


Please explain when that was. From what I have seen the republicans have
been nothing but a representative of wealth since the day Lincoln was
shot.

Wealth and prudence are hardly contradictory. And the period of greatest
circumspection for the Republican Party probably was from around 1954 to
1980. If Nixon wasn't such a weird nut, we'd remember him more for moderate
good sense than for being a weirdo and a criminal. Goldwater was an
important directive force for the party but he hardly was prudent or
circumspect -- but then, he didn't win, either. He lost a lot of the
moderate and liberal Republicans.

Before Nixon's Southern Strategy, both parties had substantial liberal,
conservative, and moderate wings. George Romney was a moderate, as was Ev
Dirksen. Rockefeller and the New England Republicans were fairly liberal.
And as you know, Southern Democrats until that time were mostly very
conservative -- authoritarian/reactionary, actually. In areas of the country
dominated by one party or the other, there generally was a mixture of
conservatives and liberals within that party, within a given area.

Reagan went off the deep end with his deficit spending. It made sense while
we were recovering from the recession in the early '80s but it made no sense
at all after recovery was underway. But he completed the conservative
takeover of the Republican Party that was begun by Goldwater and maneuvered
by Nixon to win the South. As it happened, he re-defined conservatism in the
process, partly by ignoring deficit spending for the sake of tax cuts, and
prudence went off the table when he did.

They have always supported unregulated free markets and we have the panics
and crashes galore to show how imprudent that policy is.

It's not true that they always supported unregulated free markets.
Individual responsibility, economic liberty, yes. But there were plenty of
Republicans who favored regulation and saw no conflict between prudent
regulation and economic liberty, because it was still accepted then that
markets are a great force but one that also had the potential for
self-destruction. People still remembered the Depression.

You're conflating conservatives with Republicans. Most conservatives have
been Republicans but until the populist sweep completed by Reagan, there was
a substantial percentage of Republicans who were not very conservative.

The brutal facts
never seem to change their idolization of free markets. Today's mess is
just
another example of the same thing. 1920, 2009, their philosophy never
varies
so if they were ever prudent it had to have been done covertly. Otherwise
I
would have noticed it.

Hawke

You would have noticed it if you'd paid better attention to American
political history, too. d8-)

--
Ed Huntress