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

[thucythucy]

50. The basic flaw in your argument can be seen in the examples you cite.

Trump, Cheney, and Joseph McCarthy were actual players on our political scene, put forth by conservative Republicans and nurtured and supported by conservatives through most if not all of their political careers.

By contrast, Stalin, Mao, Ulbricht and Pol Pot were hardly American political figures endorsed by the Democratic Party. For goodness sakes, I mean really! I can't think of a single American liberal Democrat calling for the collectivization of American farms, a "Cultural Revolution" to exterminate intellectuals and all foreign influence on our culture, the imposition of a Stasi secret police force or building a wall around our borders, or the mass evacuation of urban populations and the extermination of educated elites. "The Kulaks must be eliminated as a class" has never been a plank in any Democratic platform of which I've ever been aware.

So who pray tell would be the Democratic equivalent of Trump, Cheney, and McCarthy? What Democratic president in power in the last hundred years has been anywhere near as destructive to American politics and the American people as these Republicans you cite? I might offer up LBJ and his disastrous Vietnam misadventure, certainly a major foreign policy blunder with horrific consequences here and in Asia, but in that instance the most vociferous critics were liberal Democrats like George McGovern and Mike Mansfield. Most Republicans supported the war, and their criticism of LBJ was that he wasn't fighting it viciously enough.

I see no equivalence whatsoever between the current Democratic Party and the current Republican Party. Nor do I see any attractive features to American conservatism. Nor do I see any possibility of left leaning Democrats devolving into Stalinism or some such obscenity. But I'm certainly willing to have my mind changed on any of these, given enough evidence.