Plus ça Change, Plus C’est la Même Chose. (cont.)

TW: David Halberstam was one of my favorite authors- "Best and the Brightest" and "The Teammates" amongst several others. Am reading "The Coldest Winter" which examines the Korean War and the surrounding period. Came across a passage that resonates pretty profoundly relative to today's political environment. Understand as well the book was written in 2006 and Halberstam tragically died in an auto accident the following year (he was not young 72, but I bet he had 4 or 5 more good books left in him, a real loss). Hence, Halberstam would not have been familiar with the tea-baggers or for that matter only vaguely aware of Barack Obama.
The context of the passage relates to the division in the 1940's Republican Party between their Eastern elite wing (the old Rockefeller Republicans) and their populist Midwestern base (recalling at the time the South was still heavily "Democratic" or more accurately Dixiecratic).

From "The Coldest Winter":
"...the Republican Party was badly split, caught in divisions that were deep, unhealable and profoundly geographic. Part of its leadership represented a wing of the traditional internationalist elite, reflecting the views of Wall Street...financiers...

...the other wing of the Republican Party was very different: it was essentially more grassroots; it reflected old, abiding, small-town America...

These feelings were rooted primarily in the Midwest, where among the governing circles in many small towns and cities there was a fundamental hatred of almost everything Roosevelt was doing on the domestic scene, of his New Deal, which these critics passionately believed was, to use their favored word, socialistic...

...the small-town...wing, the people who knew that they were the real Republicans and that the party should be theirs, and that their values were the truer ones because they were the more American ones..."

TW: This wing of the Republican Party of the 1940's eventually married up with the Dixiecrats, adherents within the growing Sunbelt and some disenchanted Democrats to create a majority in the 1980's. But now the old divisions threaten to hive the party again.