Proof the Republican Party was once great!

[LeftishBrit]

4. Interesting. I would not say that the Republican party was ever great, but both parties were far

more ideologically mixed in the past. The Dems were for a long while a strange coalition of progressives and neo-Confederates. The Republicans included mainstream conservatives, progressives indistinguishable from good Democrats, and the likes of Joe McCarthy.

Until the Eighties, it was even possible though very rare to have electoral contests at the state level, where the Republican was to the left of the Democrat. Joe Lieberman got into the Senate by defeating a Republican to his left.

There are some parallels in the UK. There was a time, the so-called 'postwar consensus', where the Tory leadership (though never all Tory MPs) tended to agree with moderate Labourites on the basics of society. Tories were always more sympathetic to the upper classes and big business; Labour to the working classes and the unions; but both parties agreed on the importance of a full-employment state, the importance of public services, and the need for a social safety net. Thatcher here, like Reagan in America, put an end to this. And this enabled Blair to move Labour to the Right. Now in England, the economic policy consensus is in many ways to the right of Conservatives of the Macmillan era. There is perhaps still some genuinely left-wing, anti-austerity sentiment among leaders in Scotland and Wales.