^ Also the Democractic Party had been wrestling with segregation for decades before. In the 1948 Democractic Convention Hubert Humphrey gave an impassioned speech on the floor regarding segregation and the seating of an alternate delegation from Mississippi. LBJ realized that segregation was important to a segment of the Democrats but was willing to stand up for Civil Rights even though he knew that was handing over the South. While the Republican Party had traditionally been a Northern party with Abolitionist roots after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act they were more than happy to take in Segregationist Democrats.
I answered "yes" but I hope I am not correct. I don't want the GOP to "convert" because I don't think it's truly possible. If they really want to get back to small government, fiscal conservatism, and social independence, I think it will demand a new party. Otherwise, those old elements will continue to play a role - simply due to tradition, pride, and the easy-way-out mentality of simply being contrarian to your opposition. I've told weslinder several times that the above described party would get my vote in a landslide. Every time. Democrats, but without the spending. I don't see that happening with the GOP. They have all the same faults of the democrats, but they continue to hold legitimate sway thanks to their anachronistic social "policy". It's like they gave up trying to uphold fiscal values (Toqueville was quite accurate in stating that "democracy fails when the citizenry realizes it can vote itself money from the treasury") and just appealed to the lowest common denominator to segregate themselves from the now equally spend-happy democratic party. It's high comedy to see wingnuts at these tea parties protest spending after eight years of psychotic Bush budgets. They claim they're fed up with it and it's non-partisan in nature. Yeah, right. I think they can pull it off, simpley because with our current media and entrenchment I don't think it possible to form a new party. I think the media propogates (and has a vested interest in) the two-team mentality. In order to milk that media-orchestrated ideology, the parties are almost forced to exist in roughly the same manner until the country just totally falls to hell.
