Well, right.
(As an aside, I find it somewhat amusing that the party that accuses the GOP of being authoritarian thinks that the solution to the GOP is one-party rule. One party rule never ends well.)
One of the lessons of politics is that the positions of the parties migrate in time. The Democrats were the party of racism up until LBJ; now, they are the “inclusive party”.
Quite a seismic shift, that.
At any rate, there are two drivers behind changing party attitudes (there may be more, but these are the two obvious ones to me);
- A changing electorate. Obviously, if the electorate shifts “left” on social issues (which is really not a “left” shift but a “libertarian” shift), so will the GOP. It will be an incremental shift which is less radical than the shift of the Dems (who are also shifting on these issues; remember that they are also the party of the Defense of Marriage Act just 20 years ago), but they will shift libertarian sufficiently to maintain the ability to compete nationally in politics.
- Economics. Simply put, a left-looking only economic philosophy is a failed one. You cannot bias policy 100% to people and 0% to business and expect growth. So, if Dem economic policy continues to be unbalanced, it will create voters for a more balanced economic policy which promises more affluence. (This will be an interesting juggling act over the next few decades, as our standards of living continue to trend down, but that’s a topic for another paper, I suspect.)
