A New Party is Born

For this week of class, we set about forming a new American political party on the assumption that one of the two parties had collapsed. In my group, we decided the following:

The Republican Party had collapsed because it had strayed from its original message of limited government, fiscal conservatism to become a socially conservative version of the Democratic Party. In its ashes, we would form a party based around this platform:

• True fiscal conservatism
• Social Liberalism
• Aggressive Foreign Policy
• Support for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (allowing illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, possibly including a guest worker program)

Our party would be called the Patriot Party.

One of the center pieces of the party would be to maintain our current military posture abroad in order to defend against foreign threats (first and foremost, al Qaeda). But at home, we'd begin an committed campaign to restore the American economy and cut the national debt in half in our first four years. We would significantly alter the failing War on Drugs. Instead of locking people away for relatively minor drug possession charges, we'd incrementally decriminalize marijuana and set up a national program to help the treatment of offenders rather than incarceration. This is both a fiscally conservative and socially liberal position. We would than use the money saved by reinvesting in the economy to stimulate more productivity.

Our base would the middle and upper class at first and they'd be located in the Midwestern swing states. After a couple of years, we'd expand into the Democratic territory of the Northeast and and the Southern states.