An old friend posted a meme that essentially said that the Left-wing and the Right-wing were both attached to the same bird. Below is my response.
As a political science graduate, that has not been true since I was a youth. What we call the left today, was the center in my youth. I can remember when I was on a first-name basis with the chairmen of both my county's Republican and Democratic Parties, and they were friends who often sat together at political events. That was not too long after Dan Evens went from being the Republican governor, to being man who made the Evergreen State College the hippy paradise it still largely is. Of course, that's so long ago, I was youngest chapter officer in Young Republicans. Yes, I used to be a staunch Goldwater Republican.
I still like old Barry, because he was a hell of a lot more sane and rational then even the most 'liberal' Republican in Congress today. We'd argue about almost everything, but in a way that would help each of us understand the issue a little better. The "Republican" party of my youth is now effectively Presidents Obama and Clinton, and Hillary will make yet another moderate, pro-choice, Republican calling themselves a Democrat in the White House. What calls itself the Republican Party is now controlled by the very Lunatic Fringe that Barry Goldwater hated with a passion. It is an alliance between the John Birch Society, the KKK, and the American Fascist Party.
We are not talking about two wings of the same bird. We have a Republican Party that is fighting over who will be the next Speaker of the House, and the competition is at this time seeing who's more willing to destroy what little recovery we've made from the Bush Depression by shutting the government down as a way to defund Planned Parenthood. When they are not off the deep end, they are still actively trying to make us serfs owned by our employers, or worse, if we can't find any work. On the Democratic side, we've got one candidate who is an actual liberal Democrat, who wants to restore the middle-class, and expand it to be more inclusive, and a number of establishment candidates who are willing to throw the working class under the bus, as long as traditional white middle-class Democratic voters support them enough to win. It's not two wings. It is a battle of life and death between the modern Aristocracy, the 1%, and us working stiffs.