I keep hearing how "we need a viable conservative party." Why? What for?

[thucythucy]

48. A third alternative not mentioned in your first paragraph is

that they might leave the GOP to form another political party, the way liberal Whigs left to form the Republican Party in the 1850s. This certainly seems to be what's happening now, at least on the national level. I think a lot will depend on the success or failure of the new Biden administration.

And yeah, sometimes some taxes can be too high, but that hasn't been true of federal income taxes as an aggregate since the 1950s, if then. As it is the tax burden has shifted downward, off the top brackets and down into the middle class, especially when you consider how Social Security payroll tax is capped and the tax on capitol gains has been so drastically lowered. Property taxes throughout much of the country remain too high, but that's mainly because it's the primary way we finance public education. Shifting that funding into, say, a state wide general income tax fund would go a long away to solving generational poverty. In western Europe even the poorest children have a chance at a decent education, since the money is split more or less evenly between localities. Here, if you live in a poor neighborhood chances are good your kids will go to a poor school, which in so many cases means that familial poverty will continue on into the future.

I find most conservative critiques of liberal policies to be unconvincing. There's nothing magical about the private sector, especially when unregulated. Private prisons, charter schools, mercenary outfits like Black Water, none of them impress me as being notably more effective than government run prisons, public schools, or the regular US military. In fact, quite the opposite. Private efforts at space flight are still mostly tentative, a half century after government run NASA put men on the moon. The Jules Verne notion of private enterprise funding interplanetary space exploration is still science fiction.

The most convincing argument for an opposing party is to try to keep corruption in check. But this hardly seems to be a priority among current Republicans, or even current conservatives. We've just lived through four years of what is arguably the most corrupt administration in American history, certainly the most corrupt since Harding. I haven't seen much evidence of conservatives caring much about any of it.

By contrast, Senator Harry Truman's claim to national fame was his bulldog investigations into corruption at the War Dept. during FDR's third term. Unlike the current Republican Party, which is now censuring anyone breaking ranks even after an actual, literal, bona fide attempt to overthrow the Republic, Democrats in 1944 "punished" Truman by giving him the Vice Presidential nomination. Look at the difference between how Democrats responded to Senator Franken's alleged misdeeds, and Jim Jordan's ignoring the sexual abuse of young men he was coaching at Ohio State. One doesn't need to be in an opposing party to fight corruption. One merely needs to have a moral compass.

I honestly didn't see Democrats abandoning their oversight responsibility during the first two years of the Obama administration, did you? Nor during the first two years of Clinton, or four years of Carter. In fact, the most vociferous opposition to LBJ--if you want to go back even farther--was from Democrats like McGovern and RFK.

The need for an opposition party to fight corruption seems to be salient only when Republicans hold power, at least on the national level. Honestly, I don't see any real argument for the continuation of a national conservative party, aside from, as you say, giving conservatives a chance to rant and feel listened to. Which they have ample opportunities to do, given their control of so much media and their grip on much of mainstream religion. To give them such a huge voice in national politics seems not only unfair to the rest of us, but actually dangerous to the continuation of our small d democracy.

But then I of course could be wrong about all of this.