- The core beliefs that got Reagan elected and re-elected were conservative: lower taxes, smaller government and a stronger, more assertive military. But Reagan was also a pragmatist, willing to compromise, able to improvise in pursuit of his goals and, most of all, eager to expand his party’s appeal.
- The loser could be the party itself. Unless it repudiates the inflammatory rhetoric of the primary, it will lose Reagan’s claim to the center and become more like one of Europe’s chauvinistic right-wing parties. In the 1980s, it was said that the Democrats looked for heretics while the Republicans looked for converts. To watch the spectacle in the 2016 primaries is to see those tendencies reversed.
On a side-note, I've been getting involved in efforts to connect the incoming class of cadets at West Point. Coming from a town of ultra-wealthy social liberals, it's eye-opening to hear what upper-middle and middle class Americans from the Bible belt and Midwest have to say about politics. By eye-opening, I mean it feel likes someone is opening your eye and jamming a life-size cut-out of Marco Rubio through it. But it's interesting.
I'm a liberal-nearly socialist atheist living in one of the reddest, most religious, of the red areas in the country. The only people remotely close to me politically and socially are a bunch of disgusting slactivist hipsters. I feel like this picture every single day.
As a liberal living in Nebraska, I feel your pain. At least it's cool to like Bernie Sanders now, so living on a college campus isn't so bad. I wish people cared more about discussing issues than passing around the same tired, sexist memes, but whatever. It beats the alternative.
Having lived in the south my whole life, and being the other kind of red, I don't think people here are really that committed to the right so much as the right have been the only people talking to them since the 60s. If you can avoid words that are snarl words for them and avoid sounding condescending you can usually bring people around on any given issue. It's more trouble than it's worth most of the time, but you can do it.