Affluence for all

Stirling has an excellent post that looks at the last 30 years of American politics through the eyes of a boy maturing into adulthood over the course of the same period:

In the years that came, the impression that the Republican party was no longer the party of Lincoln, that of responsible and powerful government, descendant of Hamilton's high Federalism and Teddy Roosevelt's Progressivism, but instead had absorbed those influences that were most repulsive of the proudly provincial, and bombastically bigoted, reaches of the American psyche. Cold days spent in bare apartments watching friends fade and waste away. The sounds of Republicanism had changed, filled with nasty fat faced young men, with an edge to their voice and a kind of absolute certainty that faith overwhelmed fact.

It was 1994, and a young man warned Democrats, his adopted party, that there was an electoral wipe out coming. It came, and a blizzard of the very men who had repelled that young man from the Democrats fell from positions of power, to be replaced by Republicans who were in every way worse. In the rage of days that had filled the dry years of the early 1990's he had read certain words that had convinced him that it was not the party, but the principle, to which he owed his loyalty. That principle was of a liberal spirit, and the possibility of affluence for all. In the words of a President he had come to rate above all others, even his youthful hero Abraham Linooln.

"Freedom for everyone, everywhere in the world."