The Toyota Starlet

Figured I ought to tie in the title of the blog with my new hobby.  To better understand current politics, I decided to go back to the beginning of America and read up on the politics and political parties through (American) history.  I was curious what exactly the issues of the time were and how they related to current political discussions.  To be honest, I was mostly curious of the evolution of each of the modern day parties.

To understand how I got to that point, I should introduce my first outsider.  I have a good friend that is a certified genius.  He's also a bleeding heart liberal, but we can't all be perfect.  When I say he's a genius, I'm not just spouting random, blow sunshine up your ass praise.  He is truly a genius.  The best analogy I could use is the "solve life's problems, forget your wife's name" kind of intellect.  Anyway, we have some neat conversations and like to give each other shit about our respective political views.  He has mentioned a few times that today's conservatives are fighting for a way of life that they have never experienced, and I have to say, his arguments hold some validity.  He recalled a liberal economist on NPR saying he felt he was a "conservative" because he wanted things to go back to the way they were when he was younger.  I even went so far as to ask him what a "neo-con" was, because I was curious what the "other side" thought, and well, I didn't really know.

As those thoughts rattled around, I got to thinking how this all got started.  I remember vague terms and ideas from History class (Whigs, Tories, Democratic-Republicans (surely Joe Lieberman's ancestors)), but was it always this bad?  Turns out, it has pretty much been like this from the time the first fish started to walk/first set of brothers felt "brotherly love" (feel free to pick your favorite beginning of Earth tale).

So, where do you start?  I'm not going to include the divisiveness about declaring independence from England, although that is integral, and will likely come up later.  Let's start with a new nation and go from there.

The first two parties were the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans.  Per Wikipedia, "The Federalists appealed to the business community, the Republicans to the planters and farmers."  Fairly broad terms, and obviously, there were other issues, but for the most part, the Federalists believed in a strong, centralized Federal government, while the D-Rs believed in mostly State's rights to govern.  The Feds were represented by Alexander Hamilton, while the D-Rs were represented by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

Sound familiar?  I'll get deeper into the other issues in the next post, which if history is a guide you can expect in about 5 months, as I do more research.

As for the Starlet, that was my first car.  When trying to come up with a name for the blog, for some reason, I kept thinking about the cars I've owned.  It seemed appropriate as the title of this post.

Feel free to comment so I don't think I'm talking to myself.

B-