[ConservativeNewYorker]

I agree with your excellent post. I will however take issue with your assessment on the Catholic/Democrat alliance from the 20’s to the 60’s. My grandfather once told me, that the only difference between a Democrat and a Republican in that time period, is that the Democrat tended to be labor and the Republican tended to be management. On most issues, including the many hot button issues of today, there was very little difference between D's and R's, until the tragedy of the 1960’s. My family left the party to vote for Nixon, because of his law and order stance and have remained staunchly Republican ever since.

[ansel12]

The election of JFK was the end of America.

[Mach9]

Funny—my New York Irish grandparents, all four of them, were Republicans; but THEIR parents (their fathers, anyway) were Democrats (two involved in Teapot Dome), and I’d agree with your grandfather. But I’m not sure the D-R split came as late as the 60s. Sen. Taft began the separation that defined the conservative-liberal split, and he was early 50s. Then came the split among Republicans—McCarthy/Taft wing vs. the Eisenhower/Rockefeller wing in the mid-fifties which unfortunately resulted in the JFK/LBJ debacle. Because Nixon had creds on both sides of the liberal-conservative Republican split in 1960 (even without Eisenhower’s long-withheld support), he was the GOP’s best hope but still lost, perhaps through fraud. Finally elected in ‘68, he was a better president than any we’d had in the 50 preceding years, the first to understand communism (THE defining Conservative-Liberal discriminator).