"It’s also dangerous for America. We need two political parties solidly grounded in the realities of governing. Our democracy can’t work any other way. "

I like Robert Reich, who recently suggested in Business Insider.com that the no-brainer choice for the Democratic Party is Obama-Clinton, with Joe Biden becoming Secretary of State.

Last week Reich wrote a piece that lays out a summary of the deterioration of the Republican party as a party for the entire country and all the citizens: Why the Republican Crackup is Bad For America.

Some describe the underlying conflict as Tea Partiers versus the Republican establishment. But this just begs the question of who the Tea Partiers really are and where they came from.
The underlying conflict lies deep into the nature and structure of the Republican Party. And its roots are very old.
As Michael Lind has noted, today’s Tea Party is less an ideological movement than the latest incarnation of an angry white minority – predominantly Southern, and mainly rural – that has repeatedly attacked American democracy in order to get its way.

... This isn’t to say all Tea Partiers are white, Southern or rural Republicans – only that these characteristics define the epicenter of Tea Party Land.

The Tea Party that public parades its values and priorities reflects in a contemporary extreme the Southern states' rights priorities that were more powerfully reinvigorated with the civil rights legislation of the 1960's.

In a poll of Republicans conducted for CNN last September, nearly six in ten who identified themselves with the Tea Party say global warming isn’t a proven fact; most other Republicans say it is. 

Six in ten Tea Partiers say evolution is wrong; other Republicans are split on the issue. 

Tea Party Republicans are twice as likely as other Republicans to say abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, and half as likely to support gay marriage. 

Tea Partiers are more vehement advocates of states’ rights than other Republicans. Six in ten Tea Partiers want to abolish the Department of Education; only one in five other Republicans do. 

And Tea Party Republicans worry more about the federal deficit than jobs, while other Republicans say reducing unemployment is more important than reducing the deficit. 

In other words, the radical right wing of today’s GOP isn’t that much different from the social conservatives who began asserting themselves in the Party during the 1990s, and, before them, the “Willie Horton” conservatives of the 1980s, and, before them, Richard Nixon’s “silent majority.”

The political darlings of this angry and outspoken "old white men" minority in this country reflect the degradation of statesmanship and compromise that served the country well as underpinning of civic discourse and negotiation. A cadre of Republican statesmen that included Eisenhower, Bob Dole, even Barry Goldwater has been replaced by self-interested and shallow political hacks who only have one hymn to sing to that angry old choir.

But after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as the South began its long shift toward the Republican Party and New York and the East became ever more solidly Democratic, it was only a matter of time. The GOP’s dominant coalition of big business, Wall Street, and Midwest and Western libertarians was losing its grip.
The watershed event was Newt Gingrich’s takeover of the House, in 1995. Suddenly, it seemed, the GOP had a personality transplant. The gentlemanly conservatism of House Minority Leader Bob Michel was replaced by the bomb-throwing antics of Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay.

Reich summarizes his thoughts and I agree with him whole-heartedly:

 It’s also dangerous for America. We need two political parties solidly grounded in the realities of governing. Our democracy can’t work any other way.