I believe we are possibly seeing a realignment in American politics. Rather than the traditional and now out dated caricatures of each political party, the people are now beginning to recognize that we have a populist vs. elitist alignment which cuts across both parties.
The Democrats have long been able to tap Wall Street for more money than the Republicans. It is hard to maintain the fiction under those circumstances that they are the party of the downtrodden. The Republican Party is facing a rupture because the establishment which controls the party from Washington has turned a deaf ear to the base as it panders after the moneyed interests who just endorsed Mary Landrieu.
What is the difference between elitist Republicans and Mary Landrieu at this point? The main difference is they compete for the same money. They then turn around to respective constituencies and claim populist bona fides. The main identifier of the respective constituencies is race.
Let the establishment Republicans join the Democrat party and let the lunchpail Reagan Democrats combine with the Republican very conservative base to form a majority party to reform America.
Jeff Sessions supports the view that the Reps must separate themselves from the corporate elites and identify with the American worker.
Becoming the Party of Work--How the GOP can help struggling Americans, and itself. By Senator Jeff Sessions An excerpt:
When Americans went to the polls in 2012, the following was true: Work-force participation had sunk to its lowest level in 35 years, wages had fallen below 1999 levels, and 47 million Americans were on food stamps. Yet Mitt Romney, the challenger to the incumbent president, lost lower- and middle-income voters by an astonishing margin. Among voters earning $30,000 to $50,000, he trailed by 15 points, and among voters earning under $30,000 he trailed by 28 points.
And what did the GOP’s brilliant consultant class conclude from this resounding defeat? They declared that the GOP must embrace amnesty. The Republican National Committee dutifully issued a report calling for a “comprehensive immigration reform” that would inevitably increase the flow of low-skilled immigration, reducing the wages and living standards of the very voters whose trust the GOP had lost.
Over the past four decades, as factories were shuttered and blue-collar jobs were outsourced or automated, net immigration quadrupled. Yet the corporate-consultant class has pronounced that an insufficient level of immigration is the problem. A more colossal misreading of the political moment has rarely occurred.
Perhaps the most important political development now unfolding in the U.S. is the public’s growing loss of faith in our political and financial elites of both parties. To open the ears of disaffected voters, the GOP must break publicly from the elite immigration consensus of Wall Street and Davos. Republicans have a clear path to building a conservative majority if they free themselves from the corporate consultants and demonstrate to the American public that the GOP is the only party aligned with the core interests, concerns, and beliefs of everyday hardworking citizens.