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Has nobody brought up the Marjorie Taylor Greene thing? I guess I'll jump on that grenade.
After break with Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene will resign
In some respects, it seems like the current GOP coalition is beginning to fracture. Up until recently, MTG was a high profile face in the MAGA movement. The fact that she is bowing out seems to represent something of a sea change in DC politics.
Both parties seem to be having problems, and to me, at least, it's fascinating that the problems seem to have a lot of overlap. In no particular order, both the DNC and GOP seem to be having a lot of internal problems with the following:
In some respects, it almost feels like a realignment might be creeping up on us. Is anyone else getting a similar feeling? Are there any alternatives that fit current events better?
I get a similar feeling, but sometimes I feel like the Dixiecrat realignment never fully resolved and we've been dealing with it (Goldwater, Reagan, Gingrich, Trump, etc.) ever since. The movement from Dems = labor and Rep = management/bankers/owners into whatever we have now never seems to have reached a stable equilibrium.
In conditions of full suffrage, there aren't enough management/bankers/owners to sustain an entire political party by themselves. They/we tend to cluster in a particular party, and pull off a certain faction of the middle/lower class to make up the numbers. So you can have aristos + loyal yeomen against the middle class, or the Wall Street + blacks + LGBT alliance, or the bankers + tech + based alliance, etc. But these tend not to be stable long term.
This might be the key difference that I hadn't thought about it. However, even after full suffrage and that division fracturing for presidential elections, Dems basically controlled the house from FDR until Gingrich. That probably hid some of the realignment that was going on.
The donor class of Team R still being management/bankers/owners who desire Big Line Go Up Forever while the base is increasingly anti-immigrant chuds (it's not a boo-light, I'm one of them) is definitely not stable.
It was a very different Democratic party though - it cheerfully included Dixiecrats, even if they voted with the Republicans on hot-button left-right issues. Part of the 1994 Gingrich landslide is about thermostatic backlash against Clinton (and Hilarycare in particular). Part of it is about generational turnover in Congress replacing older conservative Dixiecrats with younger conservative Republicans, meaning Congressional conservatives are all in the same party and can therefore now elect leadership that reflects their views. The generational turnover was particularly strong in 1994 because most of Congress had been caught up in a chickenshit cheque-kiting scandal of the type that really annoys a lot of voters.
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