Restructuring the US Two-Party System

For over a year I've been hypothesizing that the Republican party has doomed itself to disappear and that the Democrats would split to form a new, more reasonable, two-party system for the US with the "blue dog" and centrist Democrats forming a centre-right party and the progressives forming a left wing party.

Here is a bit from a post by Brad DeLong that echos this viewpoint:

Well, the big bourgeoisie--the bankers--are really annoyed at Boehner. Interestingly, they are not so annoyed at Obama: they understand that he has not created this mess.

With any luck they will draw the lesson that, as Clive Crook put it in one of his few moments of courage, "the Republican Party… deserve[s] political annihilation" for this clown show, and shift their political weight over to supporting the Rubin wing of the Democratic Party.

I don't expect this to happen overnight, but I do expect the Republicans to be punished in 2012. It may take a new third party rising in the interim that lures the right wing of the Democrats to form the new opposition and recreate a workable two party system for the US.

Of course Obama would move to this new right wing party because "Mr. Change You Can Believe In" didn't bother to mention that he wanted to bring the right wing Republican revolution to the Democratic party. He needs to be leading a party that actually wants to follow him with his centre-right views.