I believe that we are witnessing the death of the currently constituted ‘conservative’ Republican Party, but that death may take a decade to come into effect and until then we are in grave danger.

There is an old saying that if you are not a liberal when you are twenty you have no heart and not a conversative with you are fifty you have no brain. Now, the saying itself is hogwash, implying that liberalism is for the unintelligent and unwise instead of recognizing that both political philosophies have something to offer and have solutions for pressing problems. That said, there is some truth to it. As people age, they begin to drift away from the politics that utilize higher taxes, care less for educational matters, and have a more ‘good old days’ orientation to social change. This is not the same has today’s GOP with its passion for strongmen, its adoration of violence, its callous disregard for the slaughtered, and its hateful attitudes those not of its ethnic/sexual/social identity. None of this is conservative any more than the Holodomor was liberal.

Political science has identified that the generations aging into their full political are drifting far less to the ‘right’ than their parents and grandparents. The American right is poisoning future voters and leaders turning them away in significant numbers. People who were repeatedly traumatized as children, not only by school shootings on the news, but in practice drills against their own potential massacre, have little patience for the ‘thoughts and prayers’ crowd of the baby boomers. People for whom non-traditional sexual lives, roles, and loves are simply a fact of their friend group have no tolerance for the bigoted hated wielded as a political club. People who entered their careers as the world’s economy burned have no use for the ‘capitalists’ that worshiped ‘greed is good’ and stole their children’s and grandchildren’s wealth. As the grim reaper removes the older generation from its perch of political power conservatism and the GOP will change.

That change is however slow and the wounded dying animal that is the neo-fascist movement of the current GOP will not die peacefully. It will lash out, it will thrash, and we must fight it at every level. There are better political times on the horizon, but we cannot dream of those better days, we must fight and survive to see them. It is said that the long arc of human history bends to justice, that is not correct. Not by itself, we must bend it to justice by the force of our actions, our morals, and our will.