Well, I'm back

[Eric the Green]

I think economics has also been front and center for a long time. The nub of disagreement between the parties is Reaganomics/trickle-down economics, and this is also fused with the social and racial issues, because many white people resent paying taxes to help poor non-white people. The religious right naturally aligns with these white people and their culture fears. The democrats defend the old social programs and sometimes propose new ones (of which health care reform was a big one), while the Republicans defend tax cuts and deregulation. That remains the dispute around which party politics revolves, and has resolved for decades and decades. I certainly think the 2008 election was about the growing recession, and Obama spoke up about trickle-down economics and how it didn't work.