Tea Partiers won the battle for the soul of the GOP, says Salon

Scozzafava is not a "moderate". She is not even in the center. I am a centrist, and so I can say what a "moderate" is, but it is the most misunderstood term around.

There is what is good about being conservative and there is what is good about being liberal. Let's start with that.

Yes, what our social structure is built around and upon can be seen as flawed. If you experience the flaws of the existing system in full force, you are inclined to want change. If you experience the existing institutions and practices of society as beneficial to you and yours, well then, you tend to want to keep things the way that they are.

There are people who resist needed change in the conservative camp and there are people who propose and fight hard for pseudo-solutions and semi-solutions on the left that will make the situation worse.

Today's left comes across as more radical than old-style Democrats, more "French Revolution"-ary in its rhetoric and absolutely "true believer" in its failure to learn anything at all from the failure of communism and its murder of 100 million people.

I stand between both of them, and I have been this way since I was a kid. My father was the same way, though at one point he was the conservative I talked to the most who wouldn't admit when the principle he backed was being used in the context where it no longer worked.

My English teacher in a Quaker school was just one of the many more radical liberals who wouldn't admit to limits on their points of view. Those teachers were the progenitors of the Democratic party of today.

I could actually have conversations with both of them in the same day, "interviewing them", as it were. My father was aloof, a great state of mind for a kid to cope with to develop interviewing skills.

Some other points: Dennis Prager, one of the more articulate and religious of the conservative commentators I have liked, once said that the Republican party's elite was totally out of touch with people.

For me, this is because the Republicans are internationalists of the capitalist mindset. They don't want our sovereignty protected. They love WTO and want no walls interfering with the movement of products and services anywhere in the world.

They have undercut the entire American middle class way of life, the way it was in the late sixties.

The Democrats are run by internationalists of the socialist mindset. They want a UN, not a WTO world government, and they refuse to admit that socialism failed and that it is anti-democratic. They implement Trojan Horses against Free Speech such as Hate Crimes legislation and they think that if we were secure in terms of medical care, we would then embrace tens of millions of illegals and an open border.

They are crazy.

The Democrats didn't start out this way. My father was a Democratic city committeeman. The Democrats of Philadelphia were the working class people. The Republicans were the upper classes.

The Democrats tended to be the sons and daughters of recent immigrants. We had Ukainians, Germans, Poles, Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants in my neighborhood. They worked as truck drivers, steel workers, construction workers and lower level office workers.

The Republicans were at my private school. Their fathers were lawyers and other professionals, while the teachers were radical leftists of the kind that has taken over the Democratic party.

The Tea Parties came about because of the rebellion that began under "W" who couldn't resist trying an amnesty for illegals, not once, but twice, while doing nothing to guarantee that the border would be secure, even after 9/11.

That was to protect his NAFTA treaty, a way to extend the territory that American businessmen have at their disposal as a market and as a source of labor. If "W" had closed the border to illegals, there would be a revolution as Mexicans whose farms had failed couldn't find work in the Maquilladora region on our border and had to return empty handed to that failed farm instead of coming into the US.

Those family farms can't compete with the farms of the US and the Maquilladora region can't compete with China anymore. So, he refused to make the deal. Un-frigging-believable his pure willfulness and lack of capacity to compromise.

The democrats talk the talk, but they don't walk the walk of being for the people of the US. They have contempt for the people of the US, and they are inclined to reverse racism and their version of "Reason" being enthroned in a church as it was in the French Revolution.

That is what this is about. This is not a war against "moderates". This is a war against elites, the elites that Lasch so well described in his book, The Revolt of the Elites, a collection of his work on the subject.

Elitists of the right and the left don't want to give the American people what they want: secure borders,  protection against outsourcing, balanced budgets, some limits on late-term abortions, a real energy policy that gives us energy independence, and so on.