On Thursday I posted a series of charts that all documented a similar theme: Since roughly the year 2000, according to survey data, Democrats have moved significantly to the left on most hot button social issues while Republicans have moved only slightly right.
This wasn't meant to be a rigorous scholarly analysis. And you can argue about margins of error, question wording, choice of topics, and so forth. Still, the gaps are too big and the trend too consistent to ignore the obvious conclusion that over the past two decades Democrats have moved left far more than Republicans have moved right:
I've made this point many times before, and I want to make it again more loudly and more plainly today. It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle. It is liberals. And this shouldn't come as a surprise: Almost by definition, liberals are the ones pushing for change while conservatives are merely responding to whatever liberals do. More specifically, progressives have been bragging publicly about pushing the Democratic Party leftward since at least 2004—and they've succeeded.
Now, I'm personally happy about most of this. But that doesn't blind me to the fact that "personally happy" means nothing in politics. What matters is what the median voter feels, and Democrats have been moving further and further away from the median voter for years:
I've added a scale of 0-10 to these charts to make them easier to interpret. As you can see, in 1994 the average Democrat was at 5 and the average Republican was at 6. In 2004, that had changed slightly: the average Democrat was at 4 and the average Republican was just under 5. In other words, both parties had gotten a little bit more liberal.
But by 2017 that had changed completely. The average Democrat was at 2 while the average Republican was at 6.5. In other words, between 1994 and 2017, Democrats had gotten three points more liberal while Republicans had gotten about half a point more conservative.
That takes us up to 2017, by which time Democrats were quite obviously farther from the median voter than they had been in 1994 or 2004. And it showed: Our election victory in 2020 was razor thin even though (a) the economy sucked, (b) we were in the middle of a pandemic, (c) voters had had four years to see just what Donald Trump was really like, and (d) our candidate was bland, amiable, white, male Joe Biden. This should scare the hell out of liberals.
The best explanation for how 2020 played out comes from David Shor, a data geek who identifies as socialist but is rigorously honest about what the numbers tell us. Here's a long excerpt from an interview he did with New York's Eric Levitz a few months ago:
At the subgroup level, Democrats gained somewhere between half a percent to one percent among non-college whites and roughly 7 percent among white college graduates (which is kind of crazy). Our support among African Americans declined by something like one to 2 percent. And then Hispanic support dropped by 8 to 9 percent....One implication of these shifts is that education polarization went up and racial polarization went down.
....What happened in 2020 is that nonwhite conservatives voted for Republicans at higher rates; they started voting more like white conservatives....Clinton voters with conservative views on crime, policing, and public safety were far more likely to switch to Trump than voters with less conservative views on those issues. And having conservative views on those issues was more predictive of switching from Clinton to Trump than having conservative views on any other issue-set was.
....This lines up pretty well with trends we saw during the campaign. In the summer, following the emergence of “defund the police” as a nationally salient issue, support for Biden among Hispanic voters declined. So I think you can tell this microstory: We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on. And then, as a result, these conservative Hispanic voters who’d been voting for us despite their ideological inclinations started voting more like conservative whites.
....Over the last four years, white liberals have become a larger and larger share of the Democratic Party....And since white voters are sorting on ideology more than nonwhite voters, we’ve ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing, and even on racial issues or various measures of “racial resentment.” So as white liberals increasingly define the party’s image and messaging, that’s going to turn off nonwhite conservative Democrats and push them against us.
....If Democrats elevate issues or theories that a large minority of nonwhite voters reject, it’s going to be hard to keep those margins....Black conservatives and Hispanic conservatives don’t actually buy into a lot of these intellectual theories of racism. They often have a very different conception of how to help the Black or Hispanic community than liberals do. And I don’t think we can buy our way out of this trade-off. Most voters are not liberals. If we polarize the electorate on ideology — or if nationally prominent Democrats raise the salience of issues that polarize the electorate on ideology — we’re going to lose a lot of votes.
Now: maybe you're personally delighted by the Democratic Party's leftward march and maybe you're not. It doesn't matter. Despite endless hopeful invocations of "but polls show that people like our positions," the truth is that the Democratic Party has been pulled far enough left that even lots of non-crazy people find us just plain scary—something that Fox News takes vigorous advantage of. From an electoral point of view, the story here is consistent: Democrats have stoked the culture wars by getting more extreme on social issues and Republicans have used this to successfully cleave away a segment of both the non-college white vote and, more recently, the non-college nonwhite vote.
So why is it conventional wisdom to point to conservatives as "culture war mongers"? As I've mentioned before, it's a straightforward consequence of behavioral economics. For most people, losing something is far more painful than the pleasure of gaining something of equivalent value. And since conservatives are "losing" the customs and hierarchies that they've long lived with, their reaction is far more intense than the liberal reaction toward winning the changes they desire. This produces more outrageous behavior from conservatives even though liberals are actually the ur-source of polarization.
Here's the nickel summary of all this:
- Since 1994, Democrats have moved left far more than Republicans have moved right.
- This has produced lots of safe states in liberal places like California and Massachusetts but has steadily pulled Democrats farther and farther away from median states like Iowa and Ohio.
- Recently, white academic theories of racism—and probably the whole woke movement in general—have turned off many moderate Black and Hispanic voters.¹ Ditto for liberal dismissal of crime and safety issues. Hispanics in particular moved in Trump's direction despite—or maybe because of—his position on immigration and the wall.
- Democrats will remain on an electoral knife edge forever unless they can pull themselves back toward the center.
This is obviously not a popular proposal among the white activist class. But a dispassionate look at voting patterns hardly allows any other conclusion. Moving to the left may help galvanize the progressive base—which is good!—but if it's not done with empathy and tact it risks outrunning the vast middle part of the country, which progressive activists seem completely uninterested in talking to.
It is well within our power to break our two-decade 50-50 deadlock and become routine winners in national politics. All it takes is a moderation of our positions from "pretty far left" to "pretty liberal." That's all. But who's got the courage to say so?
¹And for God's sake, please don't insult my intelligence by pretending that wokeness and cancel culture are all just figments of the conservative imagination. Sure, they overreact to this stuff, but it really exists, it really is a liberal invention, and it really does make even moderate conservatives feel like their entire lives are being held up to a spotlight and found wanting.
Kevin Drum, Murc's Law[1] : The Columnist
[1] The widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics.
His audience is mostly Democrats. Talking about what Republicans should do differently is preaching to the choir. Talking about what Democrats can do differently might actually make a difference.
Someone arguing that moving from "pretty far left" to "pretty liberal" would change anything is out of touch with reality.
And I'm sure the Chicks, fka the Dixie Chicks, could explain to Kevin that cancel culture isn't really a liberal invention at all. Thomas Mann & Norman Ornstein could also explain how their invitations to appear on the Sunday shows disappeared right after they published a book criticizing the Republican Party.
Nicely stated.
Cherries, well picked.
You mean white liberals in the I-95/15 corridor. Piling these votes doesn't do much. White Democrats in flyover country are much more Sam Watson or Marion Butler instead. You must campaign via acreage or face statewide minority status.
Well indeed yes - the loud and the vocal. The degree to which the Left Left commenatariat engages in denialism in responding to Drum and gets itself into a frothing lather calling for bouncing Senators Manchin and Sinema rather underlines.
Were the Republican party not in the grips of blind lower class White ethnic reaction and bumbling (or unable to counteract the Murdoch media narrow focus on White reaction to a narrower sense of ethnic status), they could handily dominate given the complete blindness of the US Left to the non-Leftiness of broad segments of ethnic minorities, notably Hispanic which they seem to understand via the urban coastal lens of New York and similar.
Recalibration would be wise for them. Unlikely to happen however.
Again left/right is just names for names. If the BLM organization is Trotskyist 3rd wave Marxism. Blackhammer is 1st wave Marxism anti-ltbg anti-BLM black supremacist organization. 2nd wave progressives and 3rd wave Marxism basically are anti-white and want a race war. Basically the difference is on class and how to handle it. But it explains why they took a slogan BLM from 3 black lesbians. The problem both them and conservatives have is ignoring blackhammer, which unlike pseudo Marxism aka Trotskyist linage, Blackhammer is violent and appeals to the lowest common denominator.
Thank you in advance for not feeding the troll.
And which looters are you with?
Joe Biden was old and was forced by the dccc to not campaign like he wanted. Why should that scare anybody??? Joe Biden is also not populist in the traditional sense on economic or social issues(gun control being obvious), though he has tried and his brownie points are having some positive effect. If he were younger and ran for reelection, that could improve his performance in flyover country.
The united states of amnesia has one party, the property party with two right wings, republican and democrat.
Gore Vidal
That quote was lazy even when Vidal said it; to utter it in 2021 is an exercise in ludicrous denial of reality. The two parties are the furthest apart they’ve been ideologically since the 1860s.
Is your car still boasting a Nader-Laduke bumper sticker?
To me, the invention of the term "latinx" is emblematic of the self-inflicted injuries of the "woke" left. Take a look at the entries defining the term in Urban Dictionary if you don't believe me.
That and 'critical' anything, academic cocktail party blatherish that seems to start out as parody.
That one is a classic example of "progressive" racism, stupidity, and arrogance.
Think a second: Every noun in the Spanish language is gendered. There isn't even a neutral case. No matter! "Progressives" have decided to throw out the first language of 50 million Americans, because them "latinx" are too stupid to get with the program.
Good luck, racists. See, you don't know any Latinos. You don't want to. Looking for racism? Find the nearest mirror. Incidentally, I'm not like you. I'm well-acquainted with a bunch of Latinos where I live, and your "Latinx" fantasy lost you more votes than you care to know.
Democratic officeholders and candidates used to project centrism more. Maybe they'll swing back to it.
Biden was a good start.
Except that he's senile and corrupt. But hey, he's a Democrat, so why not? LOL
First off, Democrats may have moved to the left more than republicans have moved to the right, but i would argue that it in large part because republicans are already so freaking far to the right and have been for decades that there's no where for them to go. While democrats have been a pretty conservative party if compared to "the left" in other western nations.
I also think people blame republicans for culture wars because they're the ones who make it a war. They take something like critical race theory, which is a academic theory taught pretty much exclusively at the college level or higher and 99% of people had never even heard of before fox news went nuts about it, and made it a rallying cry echoed across conservative circles.
Amen. All very well said (and observed)
Exactly. Kevin has fallen into the habit of saying "The Democrats" are whoever and whatever FOX says they are. If you only watch FOX, you'd never know that AOC and Ilhan Omar aren't the leaders of the party. Do either of them even chair a subcommittee?
yup. which is also weird because kevin frequently points out the role fox plays as a right wing propaganda machine, then ignores his own arguments and buys into their bullshit.
Does anyone remember the War on Christmas? Kevin seems to have forgotten.
We lost a lot of elves.
Merry Christmas, athiest!
Without breaking it down by specific issues, I think this analysis doesn't take you very far. Gun control? Everyone is more liberal than the GOP. Abortion? Likewise. Contraception? Also likewise. Gay marriage? A done deal and likewise. On climate change, racial and economic issues Democrats have shifted leftward, no doubt.
But what about the GOP? Voting rights -- shifted right. Supporting authoritarianism? Rightward again. Gun control? Ditto.
If you're looking at the culture as a whole instead of its constituent parts, I think you will get what Kevin does, which doesn't take you very far.
Everyone's more liberal about guns, said the "progressive." Please come get mine. Been a while. LOL
I don't buy the math. The confusion of median and average, the arbitrariness of the scale (the knife-edges on the 2017 distributions show clearly that the scale needs to be wider), and the suggestion that a conclusion about "the" median voter -- which is not shown -- is "obvious," all undermine the putative quantitative rigor of the conclusion.
One thing does seem pretty evident just from looking at the red and blue blobs: the median voter has moved left, I would say by at least a point on that (arbitrary) scale. If this is correct, then the movement of the Dem and Rep medians with respect to "the" median is nearly identical.
I'll also say that I don't buy the whole "median voter theory" as a guide to positioning right now. It may have applied once, and it may even apply most of the time, but today in the US it's useless, as many polls have shown. Party affiliation is set in concrete: people don't switch parties in any significant number, and the "swing voter" is a myth. Rather, what happens is some people choose to vote for their preferred party and some choose not to vote, and it's the shift from relative numbers of voters and non-voters within parties -- not shifts between parties -- that changes results. Ergo, appealing to "the" median voter is a waste of time. You energize your own, and you discourage the others. Dems shouldn't try to appeal to moderate Reps by moderating their policies; they should do so by pointing out what crazy-ass idiots the rest of the Republicans are.
Yeah, I did wonder where Kevin's "median" voter might be located for each year examined.
Thank you, Kevin. I've been beating this particular dead horse for over a decade to no effect. Rather than pursuing the two tracks of labor and economic well being of working people, together with equal rights for women, gays, and racial minorities, we were forced to make a choice - a losing choice, IMO.
"wokeness and cancel culture ... really is a liberal invention, and it really does make even moderate conservatives feel like their entire lives are being held up to a spotlight."
Not just conservatives. I'm a fairly far left life-long Dem with a long-term connection to academia who thinks the far out left is unhinged and is needlessly driving voters toward the Republicans. Kind of like anti-war protesters in the 60's chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!" Far lefties are like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz: they lack a brain.
Eh, Marx and Engels said homosexuality and Transgender people are the enemy of the proletariat. Who is the real left wing??
All of life should be just like it was 150 years ago, that would be great.
Especially the widespread and deadly infectious diseases, the lack of even basic sanitation almost everywhere, the appalling and pervasive poverty, the low life-expectancy, the rate of death in childbirth, the dizzying economic instability, and of course all the wars.
But hey, wimmin and darkies knew their place! And something something incentive something growth something something!
Always good to hear from another "progressive" racist!
I think your analysis, while useful in helping shape political discourse, misses a critical factor.
Part of what makes representative democracy work, IMHO, is that most of the time, on most issues, the majority "vote" on a topic is "don't bother me, I'm living my life." That provides "room" for a certain degree of "extremist" energy to be incorporated in laws and regulations. Which keeps those folks from doing things which could seriously upset the community. Like fomenting revolution to get their way :).
But that means when assessing partisan divides one needs to look at not only the "position" but how "hard" the position is. Believing that a four week old fetus is a person and should be protected in law is, or was, an extreme position (which is why the Supremes in Roe v Wade didn't go that way). So long as the holders of that belief don't demand their view be implemented in precise detail things the level of partisan rancor will be "acceptable".
But that breaks down when positions, even long-held positions, become so hardened that discourse cannot take place. At that point, even if one side's views haven't changed the political environment is radically different...because what was once covered by a spirit of "live and let live" has now become "I must defeat you in order to feel okay about how my views are represented."
I submit that, in terms of hardening of positions, the shift has been far more substantial on the right than the left until relatively recently. I'd be interested in seeing if you can dig up any data on whether that's true or not).
I consider myself progressive rather than liberal, which in my mind means I fight for liberal goals but try to be pragmatic about it. FWIW, up until when Trump was elected I decried the fact that few liberals were willing to fight for their beliefs. They mostly seemed to feel okay with the status quo, even if concerned about some shifts. Which caused me to worry because I could sense what the commodization of delusional paranoia being perpetrated by Fox et al was doing to the right wing.
Bottom line, if we progressives/liberals/whatever you want to call us are going to have what we would accept as a reasonable worldview on laws and regulations we are going to have to fight for it. We need, or at least some of us need, to become as hard-hearted and hard-headed as the crazies being nurtured by Fox et al.
That conflicts with the liberal/progressive view of the importance of being "reasonable" and "tolerant". But when your opponent has eschewed tolerance (at least relative to where they were a few decades ago) you'd damn well better be a little less tolerant and reasonable yourself if you want to avoid getting overrun.
It's overton window really. Dems abandoned gun control for 15 years and we have a sea of guns and out of control killing. Conservatives continued thrir dismantling of gun laws apace.
Nope. That isn't what data says. The U.S. has out of control illegal guns and falling gun crimes since 1992. Again, your telling a story and lying.
Good luck getting mine, "progressive." LOL
Anybody got a list of which babies we throw off the sled to the pursuing wolves?
The sled/lifeboat is expected to hold everyone.
I'll start with the political consultants and the Comfortable Commentariat. Most of them are gooood eatin'!
Not Elian.
This is like blaming Abolitionists for the Civil War.
The complete collapse of the slave trade by the 1850's was partly why the civil war started. The industrialists also had grievances against the planters for not automating more which reduced growth up north and gave reasons why the working class up north were more itching to fight than the wealthy themselves.
Hahahaha yeah! The Civil War was basically the fault of impersonal economic forces and the hostile actions of the North. The poor white Southern slave regimes were just innocent victims. All that “secession” stuff and all those resolutions by Southern legislatures emphasizing the importance of slavery and its centrality to their political identity were just … uh … innocent reactions! Of the innocent!
Exactly the analogy I immediately thought about. Those Republicans just moved too far to the left when they elected Lincoln. The slave states didn’t move to the right, the Republicans moved to the left.
>> Since 1994, Democrats have moved left far more than Republicans have moved right.<<
The current Republicans have seriously moved towards fascism. If that is t moving to the right, what is?
Fascism??? Nope. African style banana republic, in this case plutocratic dictatorship, yes. The fact you mumbled Fascism is just why people don't like liberals. You can't even get your systems right.
Perhaps since you have changed your screen name you think it is ok to reply to me. Please don’t.
I know, you have the Christian guilt of mother mary.
Neo-Fascism. It can morph. Arguing over labels misses the point. It will still be a sh!thole.
I believe they prefer the term, "to the right of Attila the Hun".
This is a really dumb analysis which ignores the differences between economic and social issues and what happened before 1994. The idea that Democratic politicians fomented the culture war makes no sense. The parties switched on racism approximately between WW II and 1964. The national Democratic party, which has always been the more leftist economic party, converted away from supporting racism in the South. Republicans, who have usually been the rightist economic party, decided to get the racist vote by deliberately making racism the basis of their appeal to white lower-income voters. This of course distracts them from economic issues and allows Republicans to pass all sorts of things which have resulted in the growth of inequality. This switch also allowed Republicans to get the Southern fundamentalists on their side. Those fundamentalist had previously had been Democratic since they are white racists also.
The racists and fundamentalists have probably not moved much in their racism and fundamentalism, but these things have deliberately been relied on more and more by Republican politicians. It should be obvious to anyone that Republican racism became much more blatant after the election of Obama. The culture war is absolutely essential to the success of Republicans - they have basically given up on real economic issues, just throwing around nonsensical accusations of "Socialism" and "Marxism". For Fox News, which Kevin blames for a lot of things, it is all culture war, all the time.
Democrats actually moved considerably to the right economically up through the Clinton administration, but yes there has been movement back to the left in more recent years. And since Republicans doubled down on racism in recent years there has been a reaction on the left. There are subtleties to these things, but Kevin is completely on the wrong track in blaming the left for the heightening of the culture war. Actually the plutocratic element which exists in both parties generally prefers the culture war to a class war.
"Republicans, who have usually been the rightist economic party, decided to get the racist vote by deliberately making racism the basis of their appeal to white lower-income voters. ... This switch also allowed Republicans to get the Southern fundamentalists on their side. Those fundamentalist had previously had been Democratic since they are white racists also."
With analysis like this, it's strange Democrats wonder why the majority of whites voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. Hint: in the 21th century white people really don't like being labeled racists by lefties.
Always fun to see a "progressive" racist project its racism onto others, from its lily-white rich suburbs.
Republicans --when you start out fascist-lite there's not much further right you can go without being self-evidently evil, even to yourself.
You mean that running a populist demagogue for President, refusing to accept an election result, and ransacking the Capitol is not Radical Right Wing activity? Democrats made them do it? That is rubbish.
Trump is a pseudo populist. Trump is about the foreigners buying his organizations services which are bought by anti-American countries in general. You really need to educate yourself. Your whole post is why people don't like modern Democrats.
Agreed, but he ran as "soft" on some social issues in 2016 e.g. defended Welfare. Claimed Healthcare was easy.. Remember "Gays for Trump"? He shapeshifted to get elected, vague on a lot of key stuff. Many projected their own hopes onto the vacuity*. But he was always a right wing radical donning a populist mask.After election the mask came of
*I remember a Muslim woman saying she voted Trump because he would fix Obamacare
Obamacare & carbon pricing were centrist in design, but rejected by Republicans.
Yeah, but those weren't really pure culture war issues, but economic ones. The environmental movement and racism have a long history tovether. AGW theorists are so white, it hurts.
Republicans make everything a culture war. Renewable power is Marxist, Mask wearing in a pandemic is an assault on fundamental liberties.
Thanks, "progressive" racist!
As a Republican, I absolutely love that so many commenters here are denouncing Kevin and his analysis. By all means, keep burying your head in the sand. But if you want a piece of friendly advice from me, a moderate Republican…Kevin is correct. It’s obvious to lost people Dems have moved so far to the left that it would be unpalatable to vote for most of them.
81+ million to 74+ million.
You lost the argument. Good day, sir!
You’re talking about presidency, where we had a lunatic running. Dems didn’t live up to expectations in other races. I’d you think there’s not a cultural backlash to “wokeness” you are blind.
So now it is Woke to spport legal gay marriage, reasonbable control of gun carrying, and retaining Roe v Wade? This is Dem policy. The "wokeness" scam is a cover for right wing objectives.
Utter nonsense! So republicans used to believe in gun control, campaign finance restrictions, voting rights, civil rights, oh and don't forget DEMOCRACY! Not they don't believe in any of that but it's democrats causing all the grief in the country! I don't say this lightly as I've been reading Kevin for about a decade, but he is nuts posting this drivel. He is practicing something he regularly rails about, people using statistics to justify an opinion. Sorry Kevin, this doesn't fly.
I also believe the capital riots were a foreign invasion. One planned by Russian intelligence and they used their militias like the Oathkeepers(which they bought from the dead Georgia state militia) and the proud boys to stage the invasion. Both those groups members were over in Russia multiple times over the Trump Administration. Liberals just don't see the big picture. Read FBI drops people. It's so good. FBI drops likewise show the surge in black supremacist organization that is illiberal and anti-identity
I find the change in distribution among Republicans just as if not more interesting than the shift of the average.
And looking again at the “charts” I am struck by how the end result looks like what you might see with a pot of two fluids being spun faster and faster. The two fluids leave the center of the pot and start climbing the walls…
I feel increasingly fluid.
I feel increasingly dizzy.
I feel I’m gonna hurl.
I agree with mostly except I think the dems should somewhat talk right and govern left. no one pays attention to what policies get implemented lately.
whatever we can do to stay in power to fight global warming is essential
Most voters are not liberals.
Most voters are not median, either. This data is showing that there are no median voters.
. . . even though liberals are actually the ur-source of polarization.
That's like arguing the ur-source of pain is the doctor who is re-setting your broken arm that didn't heal right the first time.
That liberals are the real origin of polarization is only a real point if no one argues against it.
It doesn't matter if 'the median' doesn't get it, the median no longer exists.
Moving to the imaginary center never worked for any Democrat. Oh, but Joe Biden! Joe Biden was already there, he didn't change, while here you're talking about the party as a whole, characterizing it singularly, so trying to artificially move that just for the sake of appearance is going to fool no one and make it seem like you're the fraud.
The only thing that works is running against Republicans, the one thing Democrats never do because they've allolwed the media to tell them they need to prioritize the idea of bipartisanship, as if you don't want to seem like the aggressor in the face of the guy who's slitting your throat.
The Republican Party is an ugly thing that should never have existed at all. Until four years ago it wasn't even a real party but the instrument of keeping corruption legal, and then Trump appeared and handed it over entirely to the baboon colony, history's biggest dupes.
Even Trump doesn't really understand what he did, he was just doing what he does naturally, corrupt and ruin everything around him. Whether corporate America can wrestle it back is an interesting question, but mostly I think they can't.
Democrats get nothing plahying nice with evil, it only allows evil legitimacy.
In politics you can't just go ahead with a good idea, you have to build up steam for it, and if all you're doing is working to allow the diminishment of your own position, your position goes nowhere.
The Republican party shouldn't even exist, it needs to be destroyed, it's cancer, it needs to be exterminated for all time along with every other instrument used to corrupt and exploit the social conservative population, or it will destroy the Earth and everyone on it.
My point being there are no median voters, only death and no-death, sadistic murderers and everyone else.
So you think the torture-is-good crowd have an important contribution to make?
Do you think.
Another point here is that there are three political parties in the US, the corporate political management party that formerly controlled the people who vote for Republicans, The Republican Party, the baboon colony, now openly working to established a 'popular' rationale for seizing the government by force so they can establish a one-party dictatorship and rule by decree, and the Democratic Party, which must accommodate everyone else.
Kevin's point is the intra-Democratic issue of accommodation, where I would say the best way the ensure accommodation is to most clearly define what the other two parties are all about, and that they are the enemy of all humanity.
That will bring people together more than allowing poison a seat at the table.
That’s a good way to win voters. Declare the party that about half of them belong to shouldn’t exist.
Works for Republicans.
I’ve never heard a Republican say the Democratic Party shouldn’t exist. But if they do, why do you want to emulate them if they’re so bad they shouldn’t exist?
No, they say liberals are an existential threat to their imagination land, which is a place where they're in a permanent, existential conflict with all things, except the four guys they actually know, so that's why they're preparing for armed conflict.
But, to your better point, in this environment, where most positions are all but fossilized, turning out your partisans is the entire key to winning any election, and to do that you need to motivate people who may not otherwise vote, and those people are not going to be motivated by mush that sounds like all the other mush they've heard, they will be motivated by positions and policies that will clearly do something to knock it all off square one.
And they will never be motivated by arguments about a 2% alteration in the excise tax.
They are good with Dems existing as long as they can arrange a majority can' t vote for them. A one party state in practice rather than appearance.
I suppose Saxby Chambliss comparing Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden during a period of intense American feeling of besiegement wasn't (wink wink) a call for a loyal Georgian to use some of what Susan Angell later described as 2nd Amendment Solutions.
So I’m a little confused.
The Republican Party has, since the 90’s, increasingly and heavily relied on conservative media propaganda, overt lies, feigned outrage, and (cough cough) racism to keep its voters corralled. They nominated Donald Trump as their standard bearer in 2016 and ditched their entire platform in 2020 in lieu of “whatever Trump wants.” Yet, Republicans are a steady ship who haven’t moved much in the last 30 years. Meanwhile, the radical Democratic Party nominated Joe fricken Biden in 2020 and have been the ones responsible for stoking culture wars to their detriment (riding a knife’s edge victory of 7 million votes in 2020).
Kevin, your theory has bits of value but much of it needs work. Yes, Republican propaganda has leveraged Open Borders!!, Defund the Police!!, Woke Capitalism!!, etc into scaring the hell out of some voters (most notably in key Midwest battleground states). But I just can’t look at the Republican Party and see a coalition that hasn’t moved much.
Much of what is referred to as ‘the culture wars” has been stuck in deadlock. Abortion and guns for example. Where Democrats have moved “radically” in the past 30 years is on gay rights and immigration. As in, the modern Democratic Party now stands for basic human rights of the LGBQ community. And they have increasingly been alarmed by Republican demonizing of immigrants (again, a basic human rights issue) in pursuit of a nationalized populist electoral strategy. Almost every “fight” waged by Democrats is in pursuit of some sort of basic human right (e.g. The idea that unarmed black people shouldn’t by gunned down by police with such regularity, or that climate change is a catastrophe for future generations). Most Democrats don’t believe in open borders or abolishing police forces. They do believe in human rights.
So you think gay marriage is a human right? Why were Obama, Biden and Hillary all against this human less than 10 years ago?
*human right
it's really weird and sad that you waste time trolling an obscure blog's comment section arguing with people who don't give a fuck about anything you say.
Because they were following the strategy that Kevin is suggesting here.
As you know, it worked perfectly and Republicans totally accepted Obama, Biden, and Hillary Clinton as legitimate politicians and not at all as baby-killing socialists who were out to destroy the American way of life.
This may be an accurate analysis of the voting public, but, as some commentators have already pointed out, the change measured from 1994 doesn't start from a balanced point and therefore is slightly misleading. In 1994 (and before) the left was basically centrist or even center-right (especially in comparison to a non-US political spectrum) and by virtue of that, the right was just significantly more extreme right, so when there is movement left it's not always indicative of movement into a genuinely leftist position rather than a movement *toward* a leftist position. This may be splitting hairs because I agree with Kevin's analysis in term of the movement itself, but it is really important to realize that this is in no way proving that we are moving toward an extreme left position, it just means we are moving away from an extreme right position in some cases.
Also, while the voters may hold more left-leaning positions, this is not necessarily reflected in the politicians we send to Congress. Not only does the left have fewer wingnuts and outright grifters than the right (not that we have a great stable but we have nobody quite like MTG or Madison Cawthorn, etc.) but it is demonstrably true that the legislation that actually gets passed by Congress and the voting patterns are more weighted to the right. The left has made some legislative gains on some social issues but very little in other areas. Even the ACA was heavily watered down to appease the right, and even it was already largely influenced by Republican Mitt Romney's MA health care law.
This is an older article but it shows voting patterns in Congress and pretty clearly shows that the right is become more partisan in terms of voting on legislation while the left is not becoming quite as highly partisan, despite what the attitudes of the voters are.
https://www.thecrosstab.com/2019/01/04/how-much-has-congress-polarized/
I think the potential disconnect between the attitudes of the voters and their Congresspeople is a large part of why the approval rating of Congress are so low...
This is an unusually bad post; not even necessarily for the ideas KD is trying to convey, but for how poorly he's articulating them.
Who among prominent Democrats is "canceling" people or talking about defunding the police or whatever? Little to none of that is happening, and to the extent it is it's only among a handful of deep blue district representatives.
Really -- this is all a figment of your imagination. This is the era of Joe Biden and Joe Manchin and Merrick Garland. What on earth are you talking about?
Why do you think it has to be a “prominent Democrat”? It matters just as much when it’s your democrat neighbor or someone on the street.
Because if we don't confine ourselves to prominent Democrats we have to compare your Democrat neighbor saying some public safety funding should be redirected toward root causes of crime to someone's nutcase relatives saying the vaccine has microchips and reposting gas-the-Jews memes.
Fair enough.
Unless you live on a college campus, "your democrat (do you have to be so obvious?) neighbor" has never seen or heard the term "latinx" and doesn't know what "woke" means.
I see commenters here all the time use “ Latinx”. I don’t think they are prominent Democrats.
I’m not sure what you mean about bring so obvious.
"Latinx" came from "progressive" stone-cold racists.
Who was the professional boxer who said,
'You certainly have a point when you hit me in the face like that, why don't I meet you halfway and step closer'?