Why I became an "Obamabot"

[Drunken Irishman]

151. The two parties are more un-alike than ever before...

You say 'now' - but the two party system was entirely run by the elites generations ago. In fact, politics wasn't even ideological back then - it was entirely regional. You had liberal Democrats and conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans and conservative Republicans. Grover Cleveland would be a Republican today, and I'm pretty sure Teddy Roosevelt wouldn't align with the Republicans nowadays. Calvin Coolidge would fit in with the libertarian, small government laissez-faire minded wing of the GOP, however, his Secretary of Commerce wouldn't (Hoover, who, despite his flaws, wasn't nearly as passive on economic issues as Coolidge).

Both parties were pretty identical from the top to bottom. They were controlled generally by the same groups, too. They disagreed on minor issues, but with the lack of any type of social conflict to drive the ideologicals, a Republican president wasn't much different than a Democratic president. Case in point: The three presidents who helped define the Progressive Era: Teddy, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson. Teddy was a progressive, Taft a conservative and Wilson also a progressive. Wilson wasn't a progressive because he was a Democrat and Taft wasn't a conservative because he was a Republican - as back then the Democrats weren't truly that progressive of a party, and neither was the Republican Party. It was just each candidate on the national level had their own ideological views - parties weren't, as I said, ideological.

That slowly changed in the 1930s, 40s and 50s - but even then, many Republicans were still liberal and many Democrats were still conservative (while you also had many conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats).

The parties only started becoming more defined, and dramatically different, with the inclusion of social issues into campaigns. Abortion, the death penalty, marriage equality, guns, poverty, race relations - these issues drove the ideological divide. The Democrats became the champion of a great deal of those causes, the Republicans came to oppose 'em.

So, I disagree. The two parties are more different today ideologically than at any point in our country's history. But that's because, for a huge chunk of our country's history, party was region and not ideological.