So, Holly_P (just kidding!).
Good point about the lesser of two liberals. The difficulty is that a true conservative can no longer get elected in this now-socialist, welfare state, polygolt (not melting pot) country.
I don’t suppose Ronald Reagan could get elected today, partly due the the 24/7 institutional and social media (vastly slanted left) which did not exist in 1980, and partly due to slow but inexorable trends: the increasing liberalization that comes with each generation due to the schools, the lack of fathers in the home, thus more self-indulgent whiners in every generation, and the increasing misunderstanding of the critical role of a free market economy to a well-functioning and literate democratic citizenry.
“partly due the the 24/7 institutional and social media (vastly slanted left) which did not exist in 1980”
What we had were the (vastly slanted left) newspapers, Time, Life, Newsweek, US News, NBC, ABC, and CBS, and that was about it. The leftards were the gatekeepers of what the American people could know or find out.
If you wanted to read the National Review, you had to subscribe, because it wasn’t on the stands. Most people had never heard of it.
When I discovered how biased the media were, around 1982, and started talking about it, people looked at me like I had one eye in the middle of my forehead. *Nobody* believed it.
Walter Cronkite, the crypto-commie scumbag, was “the most trusted man in America.” When he said “the war is now unwinnable” after our military utterly destroyed the Viet Cong in the reaction to the Tet Offensive, we didn’t have any way to fact-check his BS. We didn’t know, and couldn’t find out.
No, the news situation is manifestly better now. Not only do we have many sources of information, but many, many more people know that the dinosaur media are very biased.