Platform’s Sharp Turn to Right Has Conservatives Cheering
One party platform stated that Hispanics and others should not be barred from education or employment opportunities because English is not their first language. It highlighted the need for dependable and affordable mass transit in cities, noting that mass transportation offers the prospect for significant energy conservation. And it prefaced its plank on abortion by saying that we recognize differing views on this question among Americans in general and in our own party.
The other party platform said that we support English as the nations official language. It chided the Democratic administration for replacing civil engineering with social engineering as it pursues an exclusively urban vision of dense housing and government transit. And its abortion plank recognized no dissent, taking the position that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed.
No, they are not the platforms of the Democratic and Republican Parties. They are both Republican platforms: the first from 1980, at the dawn of the Reagan revolution, and the second the 2012 Republican platform that was approved on Tuesday afternoon in Tampa, Fla.
The new platform with its call to reshape Medicare to give fixed amounts of money to future beneficiaries so they can buy their own coverage, its tough stance on illegal immigration and its many calls to shrink the size and scope of government shows just how far rightward the party has shifted in both tone and substance in the decades since it adopted the 1980 platform, which was considered a triumph for conservatives at the time.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/us/politics/republican-platform-takes-turn-to-right.html
Wow, the 1980 platform that got Reagan in office actually supported immgirants? Wha...?
And in 1956, the Republican platform actually was pro-environment and pro-union!
Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)It's not a political party. it's a fundamentalist-minded cult movement now, always seeking ever-greater ideological purity. The bulk of Republican voters don't actually LIKE the current Republican party, but they stick with it at the voting booth because of habit o disdain for democrats.
FiveGoodMen
(20,018 posts)And there will barely be one in any case since it's clear that so many in this land want the theocratic hell the pukes are after.