During their lifetime my parents were registered as voting members of the Democratic Party. Married during the Great Depression and poor, it was natural for them to support government assistance programs for the poor, unemployed, homeless, and poorly educated. My father dropped out of school in the seventh grade and suffered the consequences for the remainder of his life.

My first real non-union job as a cook began illegally at age fourteen. I also worked my way through college and medical school as a temporary assembly line worker in a union shop factory. I worked only 89 days each year to avoid the cost of union membership; I needed every penny I earned for school but still ended up deep in debt by the time I received my medical diploma from Georgetown University. Afterwards I became a registered Republican since I falsely believed at the time that this party supported small businesses, lower taxes and balanced government budgets.

I joined the American Union of Physicians and Dentists after I became a State of California employee. President Ronald Reagan had by then demonstrated his anti-union, anti-labor policies and Gray Davis, our Republican governor, began freezing wages and increasing work loads for state workers. I stubbornly remained a Republican believing that this was a temporary anomaly.

As I developed an interest in history and studied for my Masters Degree in Public Administration from the University of Southern California, I began to notice a historical bias of Republican administrations for industrial-military spending, large business welfare programs like subsidies and bailouts, tax breaks for the wealthy, legislation fostered by and benefiting wealthy political donors with very little in the way of real, meaningful aid to small businesses, and efforts to dismantle the safety net that was being erected for the most vulnerable poor, elderly, ill-educated, and laborers, both union and non-union.

The emergence of the Tea Party, Freedom Caucus, Q-Anon, white supremacist, neofascist, anti-Semitic, conspiracy theory extremists and their acceptance into and increasing influence in the Republican Party have led me and tens of thousands more to abandon Republicanism and become independents or members of other political groups.

To foresee the future of what is now the tribal right-wing Republican Party, you need look no further than to the past history and reasons for its foundation in Ripon Wisconsin on March 20, 1854. Former members of the Whig party, dissatisfied with their party's policy regarding slavery, met and organized the new fledgling party. Little did they expect to grow so rapidly that in 1860 their candidate, Abraham Lincoln, would be elected President over five opposition party nominees.

The new conservative party currently being organized by former conservative, moderate Republican leaders, will probably begin by only winning a few local elections in 2022. American voters are currently about equally Republican, Independent and Democratic with the greatest losses in numbers by the first in recent weeks and resultant gains by the other two.

The Republicans have the greatest number of extremist sub-tribes so are most likely to subdivide and fractionalize into smaller parties much like the Democratic Party did in the elections preceding the Civil War. Many members of the Independent and Democratic groups looking for an ideologic home are likely to drift into this new conservative party thus repeating the historical phenomenon from 1854 to 1860.

If the new organization adopts a patriotic name like the American Conservative Party and espouses those principals without extremism, its attraction and numbers can be expected to grow rapidly. We can then predict that the Trump GOP of extremism, fascism, despotism and industrial dominance will fade into history and these fanatics will again crawl into the dark closets from which they were encouraged to emerge. That is what American political history has recorded, currently teaches, and predicts for the future.

Do not give up or despair, hope springs eternal and forces for good are hard at work.

~ Raymond Leo Blain