A reader diagnoses American politics:
Conservatism and liberalism have little meaning in today’s politics. As has been pointed out so many times by you and others, the Republican party is a party held together by extremists, right wing Christianists, no-tax absolutists, royalists, xenophobes and others fearful of minorities, to name a few. This is a coalition spawned in the Reagan Administration but exposed in the Bush Administration. Independents cannot tolerate it. The extremists are at one another throats. The party is in chaos. Unless Hillary is elected or we experience another threat from the outside, the Republican Party is in an almost impossible situation. Perhaps we will see the creation of a third party. But today the struggle is between realism and extremism, not conservatism and liberalism.
Speaking of the latter, check this out.