Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times, "Cheer Up, Liberals. You Have the America You Wanted." If he had limited himself to noting that American political culture—represented by feminism, gay rights, civil rights, etc.—has largely moved in a liberal direction over the past half century, I'd nod and let it go. Instead he went quite a bit further:
I’m here as an agent of good cheer, asking liberals to step back, take a longer view and recognize everything they’ve won...while what once seemed like powerful right-of-center ideologies have gone down to defeat.... hawkish interventionism... so-called values voters... the conservative ideology of welfare-state retrenchment.
....So not one but three right-of-center ideologies — crusading neoconservatism, moralizing religious conservatism, Tea Party government-cutting — have fallen to progressivism’s advance.
None of these is really true. The war party on the right may be temporarily on the wane, but not because it's truly lost its lust for war. It's partly because the country is tired of war at the moment—a common occurrence in American history—but mostly because there's no particular war they want to fight right now. I guarantee you this, though: If something happens, all it will take is the usual marketing campaign from the hawks to gin up another round of war fever among the public. This is also a common occurrence in American history. War is always over until it's not. Progressives have won nothing on this front.
Moralizing religious conservatism, likewise, is alive and well. It's taken its lumps, but Donald Trump resuscitated it nicely and evangelical Christians now act as shock troops for the farthest right-wing faction of the Republican Party. They're the ones who believe America is about to disintegrate because liberals—who loathe traditional individual freedom—are deliberately tearing it down. It's this kind of paranoid certainty that produces things like the January 6 insurrection. The US may be getting steadily more secular, but the conservative religious coalition left behind is only getting more desperate as it becomes smaller.
As for Tea Party budget cutting—well, that's been part of the Republican brand forever, and the mere possibility of Democrats passing a largeish spending bill in the wake of a pandemic hardly means it's going away. All we need is for one Democratic senator to slip on a banana peel and we'll find out just how eager for battle the anti-welfare state faction remains.
Now, it's true that liberals have won their share of battles. In recent years alone, you can count Obamacare, gay marriage, and lots of stimulus spending among its victories. On the other hand, Republicans have won additional tax cuts for the rich, lots of freshly minted conservative judges, and the imminent prospect of striking down Roe v. Wade. They haven't done too badly either.
It should be entirely unexceptional to say this. Since 2000, voters have opted for 12 years of Republican presidents and 12 years of Democratic presidents. The Senate is currently split 50-50, and the House is on a knife edge. The federal judiciary outside the Supreme Court is almost exactly 50% Democratic and 50% Republican. Presidents are routinely elected by margins of a few percentage points.
We have been a 50-50 nation since at least 2000, and we still are. Conservatives have hung on to their half thanks to Fox News giving them a steady boost of a few percentage points based on fearmongering and white backlash. At the same time, liberals haven't really tried to build a bigger majority, instead experimenting with pushing the progressive envelope as far as they can without falling too far below 50%.
Eventually something will give and one side or the other will win a solid advantage for a decade or two. Or so I assume. But when?
The number of people identifying as White Christian in the US dropped below 50 percent in 2016. I think this is highly significant. The percentage continues to drop. This is more demographic than the result of ideological warfare, and in fact the religious conservatives are as much to blame for this trend as liberals. Because they have failed to adapt their religious message in a way that appeals to young people.
That will happen, I think. It's happened before, and we had things like the Second Great Awakening.
So liberals a proximate cause here, I mean, we're the ones who think it's important to be nice to gay and trans people. But at the same time, it's quite possible for people to find a very conservative and religious reason for behaving that way. Don't laugh, I've seen it.
This will happen eventually, but lots of people are making money and getting votes by telling people they don't have to adapt. It's another Big Lie. So in some sense I'm agreeing. Conservatism is a thing that will never go away. But the issues it attaches to will.
The big changes in American Christianity are happening on the right, and I expect the category of "White Christian" to become an almost irrelevant category within the next decade or two. The people will exist, but the label will explain very little about them.
Yes, liberal and mainline churches have continued to move leftward in their acceptance of things like gay rights. But that is a theologically-based, slow evolution that has been going on for 50-some years as churches first began to accept female clergy and divorce, and then continued to expand acceptance over time.
On the right you see something completely different. What began as a leader-driven embrace of conservative politics with things like the Moral Majority has now been turned on its head. Trump and Qanon have flipped the political aspirations and direction of conservative (still overwhelmingly White) churches into bottom-up affairs. Evangelical clergy now despair of keeping their flock away from Qanon, which has begun to look heretical from an actual Evangelical viewpoint. The so-called Conservative Christian political viewpoint is more popular among self-identified Evangelicals who never actually go to church. The adherents are pushing the church politically without regard to theology.
We focus a lot on the racial alignment of White Evangelicals and conservative politics, but the movement is making big inroads among other groups. Latinos who love prosperity gospel and hate feminism are a key demographic that is shifting toward Trumpian politics. Catholicism is also producing a schism between the liberal and conservative wings. It used to be most prominent in less visible things like Benedict's restrictions on the autonomy of nuns, but has now spilled into very public things like covid vaccination. Deference to Rome among conservative Catholics is quite low, and it is very loud and insistent. There have always been people who disobeyed the Pope's pronouncements, it's just that they used to do it quietly.
Kevin, you're wrong about the reason we are so close to 50:50 in every facet of politics. It's because your industry, the media, profits most when elections are close, because that stimulates the biggest flow of cash from donors desperate to get that determinative 0.1%.
Everyone says there is too much money in politics. But they fail to ask the next question: who ends up with the money?
money has alway been a thing in american politics as far back as i can remember. the '72 election wasn't particularly close, yet the crimes of watergate were in part motivated by money. the kochs et al don't spend gobs of money because they want "close" elections but rather because they want to get their way. which inspires the other side to raise gobs of money to counter. and then there are the political campaign folk who make a ton of money by telling their clients they need to spend gobs of money if they want to run an effective race. the media don't really care because they get their money either way.
How does "the media" pull off such a delicate operation?
Seems wrong.
We have been a 50-50 nation since at least 2000, and we still are.
No, we are not. That's a fundamental error. We are more like 60/40. It is only the peculiarities of American politics (electoral system, media landscape, etc.) that make it seem like 50/50. If it were truly 50/50, both parties would be winning the pop vote for president on a regular basis. That hasn't been the case for three decades.
One party has completely abandoned all efforts to win the votes of the majority. But Kevin blames the liberals in the other party for failing to win a bigger majority. Sheesh.
If you can't get the diagnosis right, your prescriptions are going to be bunk. No thanks.
If we were 60 40 the GOP tricks would never work. The problem is that it is maybe 52 48 or thereabouts. And it has not changed as much recently as we expected; among other thing Latinos have turned more conservative recently.
It is close to 60/40, but that is nationally. Where things break down is in the split at the local level, and as Joseph points out, that is what muddies things, because the political system is rigged by design (and has been since its inception) to spit out close to 50/50 results at the national level no matter what the actual voters want (and the media also loves this arrangement since it sells a lot better).
Regarding the much ballyhooed Latino gains, the majority of the gains Trump got where primarily among Cuban-Americans, and in specific States, a small gain in male Latino voters, not Latino voters in general. Overall he did about the same as previous GOP candidates have done. Better than McCain and Romney, but worse than Bush.
Latinos in general have always been very conservative, especially those who are 1st generation Americans. They tend to be religious (primarily of the Evangelical faith), very socially conservative, and they tend to have an aversion for government and are used to see it as a problem, which is why so many came to the US in the first place. They should be the base of the GOP given how close they match with the GOP's supposed beliefs, however the GOP has regularly failed to attract them because their constant treatment of anyone not Lilly white as not true Americans pushes them away.
I quite agree with your premise though I do quibble with the percentages, I think it's a bit closer maybe 55 left/45 right. But we are under going tremendous demographic changes as Jay notes so the precise percentages are a moving target right now.
The big questions that will drive the percentages:
1) How many folks will dump Christianity but hold onto White Supremacy?
2) How large of an effect on demographics will the pandemic end up having?
I see #1 being a tiny amount but if it's in the right states and we still have the electoral college, could have an outsized impact. #2 won't be really felt until 2031 redistricting and reallocation post 2030 census maybe?
If the next Pope doesn't fix things, Matt & Liz Bruenig will definitely dump the Christo but keep the fascism.
we might not be 50-50 ideologically, but functionally we are. and in the end that's what matters.
I can only hope the Dems make some sort of positive inroads to gaining a solid advantage. If not, I fear that democracy, as we know it, may be dead and gone.
Now, if we could manage to strangle the media for a long time, both the yellow side (faux) and even WaPo and the NYTimes to keep giving t-Rump and his minions oxygen for their soap box, we'd be much farther ahead.
Balanced media is one thing but to use the media as a soap box for politicians is another. Just report on the news not the idiocy of the idiots.
Starting with 2000, there has only been one Presidential election in which the Republican won the popular vote. In that case Bush undoubtedly got a boost from 9/11 (after which his "approval" went to almost 90%) and the wars which still seemed successful. This is far from an even preference.
True but none of the results was anywhere near a landslide.
As long as there is a debt ceiling, Conservatives will not be defeated. Just saying.
Agree with Joseph Harbin that we aren’t a 50-50 nation - Republicans benefit from the undemocratic features of the US system. They can gain control of the Senate or Executive without even a plurality of the people’s votes, much less a majority. I would say, though, that we are more like a fifty-something to forty-something electorate. If we were 60-40 Democrats would have comfortable margins in Congress.
We need to push the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact through. There is no path in the foreseeable future to achieve a more democratic Senate, but we can grant statehood to the District of Columbia, and offer it to Puerto Rico, which would lead to a Senate that looks more like the population.
How does "National Popular Vote" compact differ from current Republican state laws which allow a state's legislature to override the vote of its citizens? Sounds like your "NPV" is just another side of the same coin.
This is kind of true. At any rate I doubt very much every state would loyally apply NTV if they were on the losing side of the popular vote.
It differs because the NPV is designed to override the electoral college (rather obviously), and the Republican state laws are designed to override the voters of the state. I confess to not studying the various republican laws, but I believe they are a bit vague - the NPV assumes a fundamental counting of votes, not that there is some imaginary fraud which needs to be rectified.
From a game theory perspective, I can't quite figure out where the NPV would actually work. You would need a swing state to vote R, and then the legislature of that swing state would need to be D, so that the votes would go to heavily D California and New York. I basically can't see it.
From a legal perspective I think neither survives a challenge.
But again, the motivation is entirely different. As others have pointed out, its been 20 years of D's carrying the popular vote except once, and when you add congressional elections, its like nine to 1.
Over thirty years, actually; before George W won the popular vote in 2004, the previous GOP win was George HW in 1988.
There is some question about the constitutionality of the NPVIC (unless Congress approves it), but if it is allowed, it would be enforceable in the courts. State legislatures would not have an option to cast electoral votes for any candidate other than the national popular vote winner. President and Vice President are national offices; every voter in the nation should have an equal say in electing them
Well, in CA it's different because we had a ballot initiative in which a strong majority of the voters agreed to it.
If you, you know, believe in democracy and majority rule, you can agree to processes which support them, EVEN IF sometimes those processes won't break in your favor. That's kind of the cornerstone of democracy and rule of law, after all.
This is, of course, why the "libertarian" focus on the sacred principle of "my interests come first" basically undermines democracy.
The voters have chosen a Republican president in one election since 2000. In two others the electoral college, with an assist from the Supreme Court, chose the Republican.
This is typical Douthat. He is like an eager beaver high school student writing an essay. He has an idea and rolls it out with no regard to reality. Teachers give this sort of stuff good grades for originality but a NYTimes columnist should deliver better stuff.
This said Kevin's post is also subject to bothsidesism: Not only are conservatives not losing in the competition for power. They would lose in a fair fight but they are winning because they don't play by the rules. They are now so far from following them that the next GOP victory will bring permanent changes that will be practically impossible to undo and that will fix the GOP in power for a very long time with disastrous consequences for the environment and for various minorities.
Due to the paywall I haven't seen the conclusion, but Douthat is probably correct, but I would speculate he draws the wrong conclusion.
Out of every thousand references to a "divided electorate" I see on non-conservative propaganda media, only a couple ever mention why the electorate is divided. The non-conservative propaganda media cannot help itself, I mean, only when you have people actually storming the Capital can the non-conservative media manage to call it an insurrection.
Liberal policies have "won" in the sense that they have moved to a more than 50% approval rating. But what matters in elections where voter turnout is 40% is how willing someone is to vote in the first place.
And right now the Repub losers are highly motivated to vote, and in our system that produces results out of step with issues.
Since an election can be won with something like 25% of the population, you have to ask yourself who constitutes the R coalition?
Its the losers on (a) culture, (b) religion, (c) racism, and (d) government regulation, including taxes. Liberals keep expecting the losers on these points to simply, I don't know, concede? Admit they were wrong?
As if. That's why there is no point in a liberal victory party. We are nowhere near enough of a majority to have such a party.
The real mathematical problem is that the constituent parts of the R coalition do not even care about the other members of the coalition. They are voting R and that's it.
> The real mathematical problem is that the constituent parts of the R coalition do not even care about the other members of the coalition. They are voting R and that's it.
True. The GOP has managed to cobble together a coalition of many single-issue groups: anti-choice on abortion, anti-gun-control, anti-tax, ‘Christian’/‘family’-values, fearful white people (not excluding white supremacists and anti-immigrant types). These issues are the GOP’s identity, enforced through litmus tests, so that low-info voters know that the Republican always agrees with them on their pivotal issue. I wonder, though - now there is a new litmus test: do you support Donald Trump unquestioningly and obediently? So far he hasn’t deviated on any of these issues (well, he’s a serial adulterer, sexual predator and tax cheat, but the family-values types give him a pass anyway). But clearly some Republican voters are turned off by his speech and behavior. They aren’t going to vote D, but they may be more likely to stay home.
I know I should have stopped reading after "Ross Douthat", but then I really should have stopped after all of the conflation of "left/right" with "democratic/Republican" in the post and the comments. They are not the same. The country supports most leftward policies by a considerable margin, but because of branding, media sloppiness, and gerrymandering & other electoral tricks, it's near 50/50 D/R.
The 'Conservative' ideology is nowhere near defeat because it is not so much an ideology as it is a cookbook of recipes for grabbing and holding on to power at any cost. Which recipes will be used at any given time may differ -- and often do -- but the intent is always the same: To feed the maw of the power-hungry.
> Since 2000, voters have opted for 12 years of Republican presidents and 12 years of Democratic presidents.
s/voters/Electoral College/
Just my impression from knowing a couple of very conservative Catholics (like Douthat, in other words), but for these folks, gay marriage and the fact abortion is legal (and will remain legal, no matter what the SC does, in the kind of high-income states where a Douthat or my acquaintances would ever consider living: California, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut) they view as a total loss. In other words, they feel deeply oppressed and that they have no influence on the society of the reprobates among whom they live.
Progressive ideas poll well....So conservative run on "values", i.e. the long con so they stay in power and don't get prosecuted.
How about destroying both????
"None of these is really true. The war party on the right may be temporarily on the wane, but not because it's truly lost its lust for war. It's partly because the country is tired of war at the moment—a common occurrence in American history—but mostly because there's no particular war they want to fight right now. I guarantee you this, though: If something happens, all it will take is the usual marketing campaign from the hawks to gin up another round of war fever among the public. This is also a common occurrence in American history. War is always over until it's not. Progressives have won nothing on this front."
Not to mention the fact that "Progressives" can equally warmonger with the best of them. War is not an ideological construct.
"The US may be getting steadily more secular, but the conservative religious coalition left behind is only getting more desperate as it becomes smaller.
It may be more desperate but that still doesn't affect the fact it's no longer the "Moral Majority" it claims to be but just another special interest group.
"As for Tea Party budget cutting—well, that's been part of the Republican brand forever,"
Until Trump came along. Now we find out they don't mind spending money, just on those government programs that benefit their constituents and funders (ahem!farmers; ahem! oil companies).
The thing you have to understand about "conservative" ideology is there's nothing "conservative" about it nor diactic. Smaller government is a libertarian notion. There were just as many anti-communist liberals and others on the Left and traditionalism is just that, a respect for tradition, nothing more. Society by its inherent nature changes throughout the centuries so the idea one can stand athwart history and scream "Stop" is about as useful as King Canute trying to command the tides by the sound of his voice (which is something any "conservative" fellow would deem crazy from the start). No what "conservatism" is a a grouping of reactionaries, malcontents, irascible individualists, radicals, ex-Communists and bigots who in most circumstances would have nothing to do with each other if not for a political purposes i.e. the hatred of political liberals and the desire to beat them at the ballot box. That's it. That's the only reason they stay together. Give them power and they cannot govern effectively because the very notion of being governed i.e. told what to do or just following the rules are anethma to them unless they are the ones doing so.
Even before Trump, George W. Bush showed that most folks on the right don't care about reducing government spending. Under Bush, federal spending grew faster than at any time since President Johnson decided to simultaneously implement his “Great Society” program and fight the Vietnam War.
Bush crossed conservatives on an issue that many if not all conservatives really do care about when he nominated Harriet Meyers to the Supreme Court. Conservatives complained loudly, and Bush backed down, withdrawing the Meyers nomination and nominating Samuel Alito instead. In contrast, I'm not aware of any pushback from conservatives over Federal spending under Bush. Most, if not all, conservatives simply don't care about increases in government spending as long as Republicans are deciding how to spend the money. The “Tea Party” movement didn't begin to form until after the 2006 election, when Republicans lost their majority in the House, and it didn't really take off until Obama took office.
Is USA going in a Liberal (progressive) direction?
I read that one and it was , in my opinion , really really stupid.
Covid deaths, infant mortality, maternal mortality, gun deaths, child poverty, education , freedom of press , democracy, freedom..… you are slipping and slipping in the opinions of unbiased international experts on all crucial issues and in statistics on healthcare even compared to nations that sure don’t have your resources (not m opinions but facts)
America is a failed state when it comes to public health , democracy, freedom, social progress and climate due to the fact that a minority of right wing extremists are able to manipulate the elections any way they choose and because they are able to sabotage the democratic process.
Many readers commenting today are not agreeing on Mr Drums statement on a 50-50 situation and looking at it from the other side of the pond I must say I sure don’t agree either.
Trump “won” with the support from just 46% of 55% of Americans of voting age. 45% choose not to participate , for one reason or another. That’s not 50% of the population .
Why aren’t Americans voting?
Are non voters evenly distributed on the left-right scale?
20% of non voters are not voting because they can’t find a candidate to endorse .. just one example
One cannot claim a liberal development just because Democrats are in power. This article states that gay marriages and Obamacare is big liberal wins. Gay marriages isn’t much to brag about if one wants to be a leading western country and Obamacare may be a win but it is still a lousy health insurance in an international perspective and statistics on healthcare is , as mentioned above, going the wrong way.
Stimulus spendings mentioned is just alms compared to comparable nations.
You have , in my opinion, for decades , been patterning yourself after a classic Third World plutocracy with no middle class since it’s possible for a group of insanely wealthy people to buy political influence, a gift handed over by a group of politicians dressed up in black robes impersonating judges .
This is the result…
What is happening in USA is hardly what your liberal has been working for and blaming them for your downfall is a little unjust
I guess my usual fan club will show up.
I will answer interesting comments in 7-8 hours from now (slow motion due to time zones) but it’s not that interesting with comments not commenting on the topic , comments that are on Sweden from someone who is utterly uninformed on us
Greetings from your Swedish friend
Attack on Facebook is so extensive employee security badges won't work to access the building,
https://www.rawstory.com/even-facebook-employees-security-badges-aren-t-working-denying-them-access-to-company-buildings-nyt/
I think that a good deal of it is a chicken/egg issue. If the progressives can get control of Congress and the White House for even one term, they will be able to do the highly popular things, like universal health care, that conservative Democrats have been blocking. Doing those highly popular things will, in turn, cement their popular support, permitting them to do more highly popular things.
The 2008-2010 Congress looked like it could have been that Congress, but the progressive agenda was again blocked by conservative DINOs like Lieberman, Baucus, and Obama. What's needed is a progressive Congress, not just a Democratic Congress, with a president who will at minimum not stand in the way.
I wish that were true. But remember, Social Security has extremely strong support among Americans, yet even older voters who benefit from the program directly, on a monthly basis, continue to vote Republicans into office who attack the program, and have made sporadic attempts to cut or privatize it. Granted, Republicans paid a small price for trying to repeal ACA, but that passed quickly. Forty-some percent of Americans are either single-issue voters who focus only on what they oppose (abortion, gun control, the rights of LBGTQ+ people, …), or vote as an expression of their devotion to the cult of Trump.
If progressives can consistently get 55-60% of the popular vote, they can stay in power forever, regardless of the forty-some percent of single-issue voters.
The American spirit,
https://i.postimg.cc/8k7wWPtZ/d-is-for-delirium-who-once-was-delight.jpg
Kevin's right: the country is broadly divided on an equal basis. No, it's not perfectly 50/50. Probably more like 53-47 in favor of Democrats. James Madison takes care of the rest.
Yes, yes, all that. But the states' GOP legislators are gerrymandering and otherwise reducing/eliminated the voting franchise to make the GOP a permanent majority and America a theocratic plutocracy.
Witness:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/gods-will-is-being-thwarted-even-in-solid-republican-counties-hard-liners-seek-more-partisan-control-of-elections
Not thy will, but Trump's will, O Lord.
Lol. The voters have opted for 4 years of GOP presidents and 20 of Democrats.
You just got done talking about how anyway you look at actual votes Al Gore won Florida!