One of the interesting things about getting older is that personal memories stretch back into periods that are increasingly regarded as "history."
Of course we have lots of books and now even videos to document what was, but no written (or video) account can replicate the immediacy of seeing events as they happened.
I'm not an old man (yet), but already I feel like an age of the world has passed. Yes, I was literally born in a previous century, but the political landscape is unrecognizable from what it was only a quarter century ago.
The media blames this on radicalized Republicans, but in fact it's the Democrats who have now repudiated almost their entire party platform from my youth. The GOP has made changes as well, but mostly these are in response to massive lurches from the opposition.
Once upon a time, there were these strange creatures called "pro-life Democrats," and they included prominent figures among them. Bill Clinton famously said abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare." Abortion was lawful, but a tragedy and people of good will should work hard so that it rarely if ever happened.
But now of course it's a great thing, and billion-dollar industry profits not only off of the wholesale murder of America's youth, but from the sales of the unborn corpses as well. Hypocrites like Nancy Pelosi can hide behind the "seamless garment" mumbo-jumbo to defend their betrayal of the Catholic faith, but on what grounds does she excuse cannibalizing unborn children for spare parts?
Democrats used to be the party of the blue-collar working class. Now they despise manual labor as a past time, and also the very masculinity that supports and sustains it. The party that once ranged itself against Big Business is now a slave to it, beholden to dot-com billionaires who want endless streams of indentured low-wage servants to code their platforms and support their server farms.
The southern border was once a prime concern of the Democrats, and there's plenty of tape showing Bill Clinton, Chuck Schumer and other luminaries demanding stronger safeguards to protect American workers.
Now those same sentiments are "racist" or "immoral" and what America really needs is an endless flood of human trafficking, smuggled drugs and unskilled labor to drive down wages.
Free speech was something the Dems loved, but now they hate it. The old ACLU was willing to sue on behalf on Nazis; the new ACLU thinks that "hate speech" shouldn't be protected.
Similarly, the Dems once supported due process for people accused of crimes. Now they and their ACLU allies think it's more important to get convictions than defend the presumption of innocence.
I remember when John F. Kennedy was a symbol of religious integration, and his election as president was hailed as triumph over Protestant bigotry. But now the Dems are the ones pushing anti-Catholic bigotry and suggesting that people of certain faiths are unsuitable for public office.
One of those suspect faiths is also Judaism. The Democrat party is still the home for the vast majority of the Jewish electorate, but they can't sit along side anti-Semites indefinitely. At some point the Jews will be expelled from the party, which will fully embrace anti-Israel policies it's currently flirting with.
I also can remember when Democrats shouted "keep government out of the bedroom!" Now they want it there on a continual basis to document everything that could possibly happen.
In the 80s it was no one's business what consenting adults do, but now the very notion of whether women can consent at all is in play.
Democrat feminism went from "I am woman, hear me roar!" to "I'm a snowflake, and even the slightest pressure will cause me to knuckle under to patriarchy." Hillary Clinton's bitter speech that GOP women vote the way their menfolk say they should was a total repudiation of Democrat feminism. Indeed, one could make the case for repealing the Nineteenth Amendment simply by quoting modern feminists.
Ronald Reagan famously said that he didn't leave the Democrats; they were the ones who left him.
Compared to what has happened since my youth, the change he saw was incremental. Other than the name, it's hard to recognize anything a Democrat of 1980 would have in common with one today.
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