OUR GARBAGE POLITICAL ESTABLISHMENTS, PLURAL.

In mid-summer, George Will suggested that Republicans who support Donald Trump's hostile takeover of the party be subjected to a wipeout of Goldwater proportions in the general election, the better to clear the battle space for ... George Will, Mitt Romney, John Kasich, the next generation of Bushes, and the John McCain Fan Club? “The measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his removal.”  Plus  "Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for . . . what?"

Don Surber is having none of it.

[C]onservatives already purged the Republican Party of most of its two-faced, double-crossing, lying phonies with the nomination and election of Donald Trump as president. Phonies like John Kasich are now working to elect Biden who would turn the nation into the United States of California.

2016 exposed the flocks of albatrosses hanging around the neck of the Republican Party, dragging it down. A bunch of political consultants from losing Republican campaigns joined CNN and MSNBC as fake conservatives who hate President Trump to balance out the liberals on the panels who hate President Trump.

My history-of-political-economy mind has trouble thinking of Our President as "conservative" in any intellectually consistent sense of the word; I also fear a "liberal" movement that embraces illiberalism.  That, though, might be Mr Surber's point: the choice is not between some synthesis of Burke and Buckley as opposed to Croly and Moynihan,   We're likely stuck with maximum differentiation, rather than median voter manifestoes, all the efforts of the Democrats to have their Biden and Bernie too notwithstanding.  Here's Rod Dreher, extending the argument.

Biden is a weak old man who does not represent the elites of his party, and does not represent the activist base that’s driving this train. People see, and people hear. Despite its many sins and failings, the Republican Party does not have to suffer its elected leaders of major cities calling for monuments to the Founding Fathers to be taken down. This is a massive symbolic issue, and I think Democrats are insane not to see its power.

He preceded that with an observation that ought give the Democrat establishment (if there is one: I'm of the view that the Biden-Harris ticket is an attempt to paper over the schism for now, it will be resolved, win or lose, in the next few years) pause. "Americans know that the Democratic Party elite (which includes the media) is in the grip of extremists to whom proposals like [contextualizing the Washington Monument] are within the realm of the discussable."

It's enough to make a writer called David Prentice on a platform called Uncover D. C. to propose the George Will treatment, only for the Democrats.

If you care about genuinely progressive policies, genuinely liberal ideals that would make us a better country, here is your chance. Your very important chance to remove the radical hard left from the Democratic Party. The hard-left that, if not replaced, would bring nightmarish scenarios to all but the hard-left leaders in this country. You should not believe that chaos, violence, bullying, or blackmailing ways into power is good.

The party should be taken back to real liberalism, espoused by JFK, MLK, John Stuart Mill, Jefferson, and so many others. The party needs to marginalize the hard left, take upon itself ideas that will make the country better, ideas that will elect true liberals and help the country see them as a genuine alternative.

How best do that?

Let me shift to the overarching reason liberals should support and vote for Donald Trump in 2020: They need to take back the reins of the Democratic Party from the radical hard left. If this cannot be done, there will be little open-mindedness, bigheartedness, the opportunity for the little person, respect for other opinions, acceptance of different races, following truth, science, or deeper meaning for all our lives.

Like it or not, the reality is, the hard left has hijacked the party of JFK, the party that once saw itself as making things better, that once accepted that this country had the capacity to do great things for the downtrodden; that party has lost its way. In place of bigheartedness, the hard left has inserted some wrong, genuinely awful, and genuinely destructive ideas.

Hatred of America’s founding, and the great dreams of Western Civilization:

This is NOT a liberal ideal. Liberals once championed free speech, and the freedom to do better.

Yes, it might have been fun to see the verbal terrorism and the progressive intolerance applied to populists, let alone actual Nazis, but now they're coming for you!

I fear, though, that Mr Prentice's clippings in Epoch Times or American Thinker won't change many minds.  I also suspect that any attempt to restore that bipartisan-consensus-comprehensive-reform-settle-it-on-the-Sunday-shows will fail.