Is the sky falling for the GOP?

By Brian Greenspun (contact)

Sunday, March 13, 2016 | 1 a.m.

First truth: The sky is falling.

No, it isn’t. Despite the Chicken Littles in our lives, our skies have managed to stay intact for as long as any of us can remember. It is true, however, that we are doing our damnedest to pollute our skies and cause life-altering climate change, but that is a discussion for another time.

Second truth: The Republican Party is imploding.

Yes, it is.

But, unlike our skies that, despite what we think and fear and do, continue not to fall, the GOP is participating in its own destruction. What is happening to the party of which I was a longtime member until recently is exactly what many of us predicted many years ago.

It was easy to predict that this day would come when the Republicans decided to mainstream the fringe elements of the party in an effort to create a winning national coalition. It had only been a question of when.

I wasn’t the only Republican who felt uncomfortable toward the end of the 1980s and unwanted in the 2000s. The party that best fit my belief system — socially liberal and fiscally conservative — disappeared before my eyes.

In its place appeared a mishmash of disparate groups that came together in such a way as to assure the party of Abraham Lincoln — one that espoused a strong federal government that put the national interest above sectional interests and states’ rights — would collapse of its own weight.

It was only a matter of time before people who believed in a small federal government and exalted states rights over all others, who believed in individual liberties as long as their individual liberties were superior to the liberties of others, who believed that the Bible trumped the Constitution, who believed that the values of the South — that would be the Old South — were American values to be preserved, and who believed that our interests ended at our shores and that the United States should and could go it alone in the 21st century, would experience a coming apart at the seams of that which had been stitched together for political expediency.

That is all that is happening today. To put it in perspective, it is not dissimilar to what happened to the Democratic Party in the 1970s, albeit for different reasons, and so many other political parties that have come and gone throughout our history. Can you say Whigs, Free Soil, National Union, Federalist, Democratic-Republican Party and others that have given us years and decades of representation over our 200-plus-year history?

So, while it is inevitable that a party cobbled together with unworkable groups would eventually come apart — not unlike an Iraq without a strongman to hold it together — it is also likely that the Republican Party most of us knew may come back even stronger and better than ever.

By that I mean that the politics of 2016 have exposed the fault lines among the evangelicals, libertarians, statists, economic conservatives, xenophobes and all kinds of supremacists. The folks who kept the party of Lincoln burning bright for so many decades have all but disappeared or, at least, been marginalized as “the establishment.”

The American political system is designed and works best with two strong parties, representing the vast majority of political thought, coming together to find the compromises necessary to move our country forward — toward that more perfect union that our Founding Fathers envisioned.

So, just as the Democratic Party put itself back together again in the 1990s with President Bill Clinton running from the middle, so, too, can the GOP put Humpty Trumpty back together again after it implodes during this election cycle. History does repeat itself.

I sure hope so. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like my country’s government riddled in gridlock and sidelined from the world stage because of an inability to come together at our shores like we have always done.

I don’t blame any of this on Donald Trump. He is just the latest P.T. Barnum taking advantage of an American born every minute. The blame lays squarely on us.

This is our country. We are the people who must take the responsibility to make this work. Because if we don’t, that beautiful blue sky above us could actually fall.

Brian Greenspun is owner, publisher and editor of the Sun.