re: #51 The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
I respectfully disagree that we need a small-c conservative party. The Democratic party covers everything from center-right to…well, more to the right. The GOP is essentially the Neoconfederate Party now, and remember—the CSA was a single-party state. I have no problem with the USA being the same, at least for awhile.
What we really need is a center-left party to balance the Democrats. If the Berners had two brain cells between the lot of them, they could be the nucleus of that, but obviously they don’t.
I think we disagree only on semantics (the Dems would obviously move to the left as a whole if the more moderate members left). The GOP looks like it maybe offers a couple of glowing embers that might be able to try to rebuild some sort of something… at least in comparison to outright jokes like what passes for a US Green Party, anyway.
The point is, I am awfully leery of a functionally single-party state in the long term. As long as we have two decently strong parties that are fact- and logic-based in their views, without any outright bigotry or anything else that stands fundamentally at odds with what I consider to be democratic and American, I don’t give two yahoos what either one calls itself.