I agree that it's the rich that are the root of the problem, but also I don't understand what the Republican party is (since the great depression) if not a roundabout way to harness fear of downward social mobility to vote in favor of the rich.

And when I say "I don't understand", I mean I really don't understand, because I also recognize that the rich pulled the same shit back in the civil war on the uneducated southern Democrats. The way I see it, today we have "Temporarily Embarrassed Billionaires" fighting for the rich in case they ever get rich, but back in the 1800s they had "Temporarily Embarrassed Slave Owners" who were, again, fighting for the rich in case they ever got rich.

I guess I'm supposed to conclude that the "liberalism" of that time was just misguided because it was attempting to justify abridging others' individual freedoms as an individual freedom. And then maybe the "republic" of Republicanism was seen as the elite telling the uneducated, "the masses are too dumb to be trusted with a direct democracy, we need to elect an educated intermediary to represent us". If so, that seems like....not even close to what the Republican party stands for today; Trump was elected on a Populist platform, the opposite of a Republic.

tl;dr I get that despite the corruption in the DNC, liberalism is a valuable philosophy worth refining and progressing toward. But I don't know what the Republican party still has that's worth keeping.