This article appears to be full of half-truths. I think it contains a fairly accurate description of the Republican party, and the reasons why they so vehemently cling to certain traditions. However, it attempts to cover up the blind wanderings of the Democratic party as taking intelligent steps forward. There are a couple of subtle flaws that show this.
In the fifth paragraph, the author says this, Innovation is equated with tyranny in politics and heresy in religion. Virtue consists of defending what is left of the old, more perfect system and, if possible, restoring the original government or church. Progress is redefined as regress 14 movement away from the wicked present toward the pure and uncorrupted past.
While the Republicans are certainly fearful of any change, the Democrats seem all to willing to make any change. Neither side seems to be willing to study the proposed change for the short and long term effects. Its actually fairly easy to sum this up: Democrats are the optimists - every change by government is going to work perfectly; Republicans are the pessimists - every change by government is going to screw up the world worse. Neither side actually knows what is going to happen, though, and both seem to be willing to fight tooth and nail to avoid finding out.
Next, the author makes the standard ad hominem attack against Republicans here: Inconvenient facts can be explained away by the true believers. Just because they believe something doesn't automatically make it untrue. Quite simply, Barack Obama does promote certain socialists policies. He nationalized GM. He is trying to set up socialized medicine. Do I think that makes him a complete socialist? Of course not. If so, he would be pushing to socialize/nationalize everything. He doesn't do that. The Republicans are wrong to label Barack Obama socialist, just as the Democrats are wrong to deny that Obama does anything socialistic.
Next, the author makes these statements:
It's hard to come up with arguments that would persuade people who think that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are totalitarians to change their mind.
Nevertheless, progressives cannot cede the high ground of debate over first principles to this kind of reactionary, paranoid populism and fight instead in the swampy terrain of utilitarian social science.
Sure, I agree that you can't really persuade people who are practically brainwashed to disbelieve anything you say. However, there are two flaws with the idea that you shouldn't still present factual arguments against the crazy rantings of a political party. One, there are both immigrants and new adults who are more open-minded than the standard long-time party affiliate. Rational arguments can persuade those people. The second reason is to make sure we aren't blindly following the crowd, as happens so frequently with party members. Every single one of us here has backed something we thought was correct, only to find out otherwise. The thing we should have learned from that incident was not that we corrected our flaw thinking in that one case, but that we could make the exact same mistake again, and coming up with rational arguments helps us double-check what would otherwise be blind beliefs. To reference the above statement, if you can't come up with persuasive arguments that Nancy Pelosi isn't totalitarian, then perhaps you should consider the idea that she is totalitarian.
The final flaws lies in the second to last paragraph:
Do we think that fidelity to our predecessors means mindlessly doing what they did in their own time, even though times have changed? Or do we think that we should act as they would act, if they lived in the 21st century and had learned from everything that has happened in America and the world in the past 200 years?
While we certainly "mindlessly" mimic what happened over two hundred years ago, we shouldn't mindlessly change things either. Additionally, we have no idea how the Founding Fathers might act today. We can make guesses based on their writings, but those guesses could easily be flawed. We need to make sure the changes proposed are the right changes, and on the occasions where we screw up and make the wrong ones, we can easily correct it. The proposed health care reform is the perfect example of this problem. Making some many changes all at one time makes it a guarantee that something (really, several somethings) will be wrong. But passing it all at once makes it impossible to figure out which of the things are wrong, and makes it hard to correct them. Breaking the bill down into tiny, individual changes, passing them, seeing the effects, and then keeping, modifying, or revoking the change as the effects dictate is the right way to do it.
The Democrat party was founded on slavery and has supported slavery since then. The Republican party was founded to end slavery, and they did. The Democrats fought the Civil War to try to keep slavery. When they lost that war, they founded the racist Jim Crow laws in the South. It was votes of Republicans that passed the Civil Rights bills.
Now Democrats are hypocrites for claiming that it's the Republicans who are racist.
Racist, ignortant, red-neck hypocrites -- that's the modern Democrat party.
Summary of the article: If I think it is what makes sense, it is the sensible choice and everyone else is an idiot. Screw history, logic, or what anyone else thinks.
Myself, I think the basics of political ideology is easily judged. Everything either moves you toward freedom or totalitarianism. Practically speaking, you don't want to wind up on either end absolutely, but in general, those that push towards the totalitarian are doing harm. Both the left and the right push that way hard, very frequently.
MacThulhu
It didn't just start with the Left Behind series.