re: #10 freetoken

“Republican” is a label to which people attach themselves, and it becomes part of the self-identity. People usually don’t give up their identities easily, as we’ve seen around here when somebody doggedly won’t let go of calling themselves “conservative” or “Republican” even if they give assent to your critique of the idiocy of many of the positions held many who also label themselves by those terms.

Well said. It’s one reason our politics is more polarized than before. We didn’t used to have one explicitly Christian party and one secular party. There used to be some overlap between Dems and the GOP. In the 1930’s, the Dems had 80%+ majorities in both houses of Congress. There wasn’t such a clearly defined culture war then, so the identity politics that keeps our parties roughly equal in numbers today didn’t apply very much.