“And what party will that be other than a permanent minority one?”
Exactly! They want the happy days back when types like MINORITY leader Bob Michael and MINORITY leader Howard Baker ran things. They want to rebuild the “American Consensus” that was shattered when conservatism began its long march to Washington, upsetting their apple cart.
The picture generally given of the relative position of the three parties (ed: socialism, conservatism, classical liberism) does more to obscure than to elucidate their true relations. They are usually represented as different positions on a line, with the socialists on the left, the conservatives on the right, and the liberals somewhere in the middle. Nothing could be more misleading. If we want a diagram, it would be more appropriate to arrange them in a triangle with the conservatives occupying one corner, with the socialists pulling toward the second and the liberals toward the third. But, as the socialists have for a long time been able to pull harder, the conservatives have tended to follow the socialist rather than the liberal direction and have adopted at appropriate intervals of time those ideas made respectable by radical propaganda. It has been regularly the conservatives who have compromised with socialism and stolen its thunder.The entire article at the link is food for thought. We need a party of liberty.[Conservatism] by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments.