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.
Where have you gone, Sistah Souljah? A desperate Joe Liebermann turns his DLC eyes to you.
Right. You triangulate if you think the median voter's feet are set in cement. And sometimes you seek to influence the position of the median voter itself. Conservatives do that too. But their positions are already so extreme that they haven't much room on the right.
But their positions are already so extreme that they haven't much room on the right.
This is an important point. Conservative attitudes have hardened into almost a parody of 1950s America. There isn't room more to the right unless they actually try to restore Black Codes and repeal women's suffrage. It's still a problem for liberals if they are getting too far in front of voters. Maybe more inclusion for Black and Hispanic leaders who can contribute their "conception of how to help the Black or Hispanic community." Oops, that's a liberal idea!
A interesting thing happened when "progressive" racists tried to create a "Latinx" plantation.
https://beckernews.com/boom-texas-border-town-with-85-hispanic-population-kicks-out-democrat-in-mayoral-election-39542/
Hey Kevin, this was quite refreshing and accurate to me. I appreciate your objectivity. True Americans should strive towards the common good, not partisan ideals, whether they are conservative or liberal. But wow, much easier said than done.
It is reminiscent of the D centrists of the 1980s, when the party actually had any brains. Those centrists kept me on board until 2014, when Obama & Holder, along with the non-Fox media, effectively sided with the rioters of Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., with predictable results. That was the last straw for me, and I've been independent ever since.
The Democratic Party lies in ruins, along with much of the rest of the political system. I used to laugh at the "throw 'em all out" sentiment, but not so much now. This country's in a tailspin, and you're arguing about where to find the best seat.
Wokeness and cancel culture are not figments of the conservative imagination. They are products of the right-wing propaganda machine. And it seems like Kevin Drum has become as addicted to it as the majority of white Americans. It's heart-breaking to watch someone descend into that world.
Change the issues on the charts and a few key terms and every argument in this could have been written in 60s about the movements for civil rights for African Americans and for women, and for opponent of the draft and the Vietnam War. "They want too much too soon!" was the common complaint from "moderates" who surely agreed with the long term goals as long as they remained as long term as possible.
And to talk of moderation as an effective strategy? Republicans right now are calling Joe Biden a dangerous baby-killing socialist who is out to destroy the American way of life. Catholic Bishops want to deny him communion. Republicans are lockstep in their determination to prevent his administration from succeeding on any matter.
Something's gone wrong with your thinking, Kevin. It's like you forgot everything that's happened in your lifetime.
I hope Tim Dolan is the next pope.
I dare him to excommunicate me!
I couldn't agree with you more.
The problem with the "cancel culture" and "political correctness" cute names is that they're only applied to things on the left. Consider:
A student recently wrote satire about the Federalist Society and Stanford threatened to refuse to let him graduate. I mean, imagine that one, after all it took to get into Stanford and get through four years or whatever. Because some extreme right-wing group complained to Stanford, they immediately contacted the student to say that he might not get his diploma, before they then came to their senses.
Is that not "cancel culture"? Is that not violating rules of "political correctness"? If you ask anyone using those terms what they mean, they'll give you a definition that perfectly fits that Stanford situation, yet right-wingers going after someone on the left would never be called cancel culture or PC.
There are examples like this all the time, just in the news in the last month.
Here's another one: Donald Trumps bellows "Don't say "happy holidays", it offends me!" Is this not attempting to "police language"? If not, why not? It fits all the supposed attributes of political correctness, yet it would never be called that. Which means that the cute terms are utterly meaningless since they're applied selectively only to the left.
Or rather, their actual meaning as used is something like "Complaints from the left that I don't like". Because if the supposed definitions were true -- attempts to police language, getting people fired for doing the wrong thing politically -- then these examples from the right wouldn't be exempt. And they are.
People complain. From all parts of the political spectrum. When the left does it it's "political correctness". When the right does it it's called "complaining".
Even just using the terms is pushing the right-wing propaganda. Because someone like Kevin Drum would never use them to describe the examples above from the right. "Oh Donald Trump is so politically correct".
This is the part people like him can't grasp, it's not that there aren't all sorts of complaints and attempts to get people fired coming from people on the left, it's that those things come from people on the right, center, and everywhere else too. Applying these phrases only to the ones on the left gives the impression that it only exists there -- and *that's* the propaganda.
Always fun to hear from another communist. LOL
just wondering about the 1994 starting point.
this was about the time of the right wing political/media/religious convergence of gringrich/fox news--limbaugh/ralph reed etc. Rs became a non-negotiating party--abortion/taxes etc. it seems normal that Ds would identify as more partisan in response--they have no alternative.
if the start date was 1968 or so, it would be interesting to see if Rs show a similar partisanship trend through 2000 or so. during that time the binary choice Rs would have no choice either. once they reach binary 'no' convergence state (>1994) their partisanship would stabilize (i think).
The "religious right" didn't care much about abortion, or the Catholic Church, until Bob Jones University lost on segregation.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/
I quit the culture wars even before same sex marriage was achieved. This is Andrew Sullivan’s fault. Activists don’t know when too declare victory and quit agitating. And, of course, social media is a catastrophe. The descent into chaos started with bloggers and ended with twitter and Facebook.
Cable news used conflict as a revenue stream too. From CNN crossfire to Fox News. It all drives conflict and stokes hatred for fun and profit. Shame on all of them.
+1
Lolz, human rights for immigrants rich republicans bring over. I mean really??? That is classic shadow support for the rich. Demonize is nothing than a political term. Republicans shill and lie. You expose the truth, not support people who are scabs for low wages and union busting.
Kevin's analysis may or may not be right (when it comes to the stupid "defund the police" slogan he's certainly right) but it's only about winning. How about policy? "Centrist" policy on especially global warming won't cut it. It's a recipe for catastrophe. So should it be proposed anyway, just to be sure the election is won? How about taking the electoral risk of proposing something more radical?
Which, in the end, is more stupid, holding the White House as one marches down the road to climate Armaggedon, or taking the risk of losing the WH in an attempt to change course?
Climate change as a thing is too far gone. When electrification of vehicles happen, US emissions.Will drop 60%. It was 100 years too late.
EVs are responsible for 60% of the CO2 emissions of ICEVs. Transportation accounts for 29% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. If EVERY vehicle were converted, the most you would see is an 18% reduction. Those are both hard facts. Very easy to verify; the numbers are from the EPA and the Energy Information Administration.
This brings up a larger issue with "progressives."
You are forever shouting about facts and science. Yet here you are, making up lies because they sound good to you. Word to the wise: Try not to tell lies that are so easily traced. Also: Try not to be so arrogant, especially when you are lying.
By the way, this former D (40 years worth) has owned an EV for 8-1/2 years. I've used that ownership to do the deep dive on all things EV and electricity generation. I know what I am talking about. You just make it up; then deliver unfounded lectures; then wonder why people are leaving, and tossing a middle finger at you, your ignorance, your dishonesty, and your arrogance on the way out.
How about policy?
He suggests in the post the default setting should be "pretty liberal."
I don't think inadequate policies with respect to climate change would qualify as "pretty liberal." But maybe you sell it as "Beat the Chinese to own the Decarbonized Future*" instead of "we're going to ban SUVs" etc.
*(Yes, obviously people with actual marketing and political communications skills -- unlike me -- would come up with the exact, hopefully catchy, wording).
Drum is an endless fount of centrist claptrap. In his world, Democrats would be better off if they were Republicans. Why not just register as a Republican and publish this mess at Red State ?
He’s telling you helpless Dems how to win. You may want to heed his advice.
Why I believe Dems won in 2020.
Indeed Republicans seem to be asserting that unless they rig the elections they can't win.
On most of the culture war issues, the liberal position appears to be close to the centrist position:
- same sex marriage
- racial discrimination
I can continue.
Lol, Dems "won" by Trumps moronic crap. Without that, Dems are a minority party.
It was Trump's moronic claptrap that turned out the dingbats in massively greater number than any poll predicted, in 2020 and 2016.
cld, there are also plenty of republicans that didn’t vote for him. I had never not voted for a Republican until the last election. You saying all republicans are the ding bat Trump supporters is like saying all Dems are the ding bat woke AOC crowd.
I am not saying that about all Republicans, but all Trump supporters are dingbats.
There are the corporate Republicans who don't support him, the more easy going 'socially liberal but fiscally conservative' types who don't support him, and a few of the sincerely religious who don't support him. But altogether they amount to a fraction of the other people who do support him who rarely vote or who would otherwise vote for a Democrat who are all motivated by his extremity.
They confuse loudness and belligerence with positive activity, and I don't think anything will un-confuse them.
To focus on that part of the audience you have to focus on de-motivation.
Kevin's gone of the deep end over the past year and change. According to him the key for Democrats to win is to allow some level racism to appeal to Republicans who are bigoted but not foaming at the mouth white supremacists.
Always good to hear from a racist "progressive" who gave us the word "Latinx." LOL
In his world, Democrats would be better off if they were Republicans. Why not just register as a Republican and publish this mess at Red State ?
I've been reading Drum a long time. He favors policies like decarbonization of the economy via massive government spending, higher taxes on the rich, and a stronger safety net (including single payer healthcare). Those aren't positions taken by very many Republicans.
I don't for the life of me understand how a Muslim ban, telling immigrants to go back where they came from, attacking science as a hoax and expecting the Justice Department to protect Republicans as they commit crimes (for starters) can be compared in any way to extending the rights guaranteed in founding documents to all Americans. Sure, if you define the latter as "extreme" and the former as Real American then you've by definition said the extremists are extreme. Doesn't seem like convincing logic to me.
The Muslim ban and telling immigrants to go home were theater. It meant little and did little. Especially the immigration part. This is my point, stop falling for the talk.
Both the Muslim ban and the immigration actions were incredibly harmful to people.
If you believe that actual harm to people is just talk, then it perhaps explains the difficulties in communication here.
No they weren't. It increased immigration as green visas surged and lowered wages. Your a extremist on immigration. It's simply supporting scabs. The increased trafficking helped business import more illegals as well.
The Muslim ban was ignored and overridden.
wafm
That's a good point but we're talking about "culture war" here, aren't we? How can "the talk" not count as "culture"?
Barack Obama made El Jefe's regime's disregard for subpoenas inevitable when Loretta Lynch met with Bill Climpton for 45 minutes without consequence.
Yeah, that chart's conclusion that the right has only shifted 0.5 points to the right strikes me as a measurement of the normalization of Fox talking points.
Go ask anyone what the "Muslim ban" was in terms of actual policy implementation. I doubt even 5% could tell you. It's important to you, but not to the vast majority of voters. And if you think there isn't residual discomfit with Muslims - even 20 years after 9/11 - then you're kidding yourself.
You can win elections with weak-sauce liberalism or be righteous and lose them. It's your choice.
By the way, for commentators here saying Dems won in 2020, the fact is they lost House seats and made little or no progress at the state levels. It's true that the landscape is distorted by gerrymandering, rural-state over-representation in the Senate, Electoral College, and more. But that's the terrain we're forced to fight on. Proclaiming one's virtue (e.g. telling Hispanics they should refer to themselves as Latinx) doesn't bring in more votes. Delights the base, but they aren't enough to win elections (aside from super-blue districts).
Yep, you want to erase the borders, and are angry when anyone notices. Maybe that has something to do with your collapsing support among Latinos in Texas and Florida?
Hmm this data is from 2014, which is before the Trump phenomenon became established.
In an era of Trump insistence on Republican homogeneity, it would seem that perhaps newer data might be required.
I don't know which datasets you mean. The measures of partisan change on specific issues are all from 2020 or 2021, except for the one for religion, which is from 2018. The political attitudes chart goes until 2017, and Trump had already been the dominant figure on the Republican scene for about two years by that point. (There's almost certainly been some change on that front anyway - the poll predates the pandemic, George Floyd's killing and the protests and riots that followed, the election, the allegations of fraud, January 6th, and both impeachments. Based on my own limited experience and the other charts, I would imagine that each party's supporters have moved even further toward the poles.)
Exactly. Combine that with the starting point 1994 and you get a very skewed pictures. Reminds me of how climate deniers argued not very long ago by picking a maximum year and voting at the somewhat better following years as proof that the planet was cooling....
Having said that: I think the Left should--and could--think more about how to sell their policies. "Defund the police" is unpopular even in the black community plus does not even describe correctly what the plan would be. Stupid. It is not the only example though probably the stupidest.
They just reset the dates. They're still arguing that the planet is not warming...
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/07/03/el-nino-and-the-lengthening-new-pause-now-6-years-10-months/
Kevin,
This is unacceptable. You have literally written "blame the victims".
A more apposite title, better reflecting what has actually happened, might have been "The Worm Turns".
You and I are almost exactly of an age; that means that your first adult political experience was exactly the same as mine: Reagan painting a target on your back. Then, and ever since, came the gaslighting: we are not expected to forgive this; we are not even expected to forget it; we are expected to pretend that it did not happen. I, for one, shall continue to defy that expectation.
What are you talking about? Kevin is suggesting liberals and Democrats aren't sufficiently good at winning elections. Is this really controversial? Just imagine what we might be seeing now if Democrats had simply managed to flip one or two additional Senate seats.
(One might quibble with some of the specifics of what he thinks would work better, but the observation that Democratic political efforts ought to work better seems inarguable to me).
This is like the Global Warming deniers who STARTED at the hottest year on record!
Of Course the Dems have moved the most in the last two decades because the previous THREE decades they all moved about two miles to the right
Today the Dems have now moved to just about the GOP position in the 1950's
Duhh
KD- I am not even sure you agree with your own thesis. Many of the issues you address seem to show Dems closer to center (abortion, taxes, gay rights, marijuana) and many of the others issues seem to be in par with the past - meaning crime is still relatively low, immigration numbers are relatively consistent. In the past you have mentioned the foxification of the conservative movement. I think what one is really witnessing is not so much leftwards movement as the amplification of the right noise machine as clearly evidenced by CRT. Let me put it this way, what does it mean when you have a poll that shows white conservatives think blacks have too many advantages. Now, I don’t disagree that it would probably be better if a small minority of progressives toned it down on some issues (e.g., defund the police) but you there will always be fringes and the media led by Fox will make sure that they get an inordinate amount of attention. As you said in the past, the real problem is Fox News, but I would also add the rest of the media.
Gosh, another person who thinks that spending money efficiently to improve public safety is a bad idea.
It would have been helpful to descend from lofty generalizations to concrete positions. My understanding of the six issues listed is as follows:
Same-sex marriage: you're either for it or against it. It's hard to see how anyone could be 'more centrist' on the issue.
Immigration: neither party has a coherent policy. To the extent there's any consensus on the left, it's that America should comply with existing laws including international conventions.
Taxes: I suppose one could argue liberals don't mind them and right-wingers are against them, but beyond that, it's silly to suggest one side or the other has changed its attitude as part of any 'culture war'.
Abortion: liberals have supported a woman's right to make her own decisions about abortion as long as I can remember.
Religion: I don't even know what this is supposed to refer to. There's no 'liberal' attitude to religion.
Guns: again, it's hard to see what is supposed to have changed over the last 50 years on the liberal side.
In short, the argument that liberals have 'moved left', whatever that is supposed to mean, simply doesn't stand up when tested against the issues Kevin has selected to support his argument. The only way such an argument could be sustained is by substituting what right-wingers dishonestly claim are liberals' positions: they want to take all the guns, criminalise Christianity, open borders to anyone, and so on. It would be sad if Kevin is watching so much Fox, he's begun to believe their lies about what liberals want.
Thirty years ago Democrats weren't urging Abraham Lincoln's name to be taken off high schools. You can say "Well that's an extreme outlier!" if you like, but in our 24/7 wired, twitterfied, murdochized world, mere "outliers" get a lot of coverage.
Maybe Democrats and liberals in the main haven't moved all that much in terms of issues positioning, but many voters apparently don't perceive this to be the case. And lefty cultural memes -- mostly flowing from social justice positioning -- appears to be a big part of the reason why.
It's ok to pander a bit to groups you're not doing that well with, politically. Obama pandered shamelessly to working class voters, for instance, and managed to win Indiana, North Carolina and both Ohio (twice) and Florida (twice). He was talking about foreign policy when he said this (and he caught a lot of grief) but "just avoiding doing stupid stuff" isn't a bad way to go about things.
You're cherry picking factoids to make an argument. Biden is no more radical than Obama; probably less so. To the best of my knowledge people don't stand for election to the San Francisco Board of Education as 'Democrats', but as individuals. You say 'mere "outliers" get a lot of coverage' which of course is true in a sense, but it's also true that 'right-wing lies get a lot of coverage'. Republicans would like nothing better than to have Democrats spend their time diligently chasing down stories about "outliers" so they can earnestly proclaim they're not representative of the party's positions.
Progressives in the 1960s were way more 'extreme' than they are today. Today's progressives don't even want to ban the bomb, or legalize public nudity, or legislate for worker control of industry. I suppose you can argue that's what gave America 8 years of Reagan, and perhaps you're correct. But the logical conclusion is that progressives might as well throw in the towel and register as Republicans. To hell with that.
Today's progressives (not all of them, but again, it doesn't matter in the highly digital world we live in) favor taking Abraham Lincoln's name off high schools, defunding police departments during a crime wave, kneeling during the national anthem and turning the centers of major US cities into no go zones. Yes, it's all BS -- except when it comes to gaining the votes of working class voters. And notice I left out "white" -- by now there's overwhelming evidence Democrats lost ground with Black/brown working class voters, too:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/opinion/biden-democrats-moderate-progressive.html
There is a liberal attitude toward religion. It makes people crazy. Practicing believing in contradictory things that have been dictated by authorities is not a good way to produce a scientifically thoughtful society.
Liberal = Atheist
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It's not just about Trump, it's that any extremist opinion must be met with such countervailing extremity as to ensure it's utter annihilation,
https://old.reddit.com/r/trashy/comments/oco0r7/i_hope_this_is_real/
There’s one aspect of this question that might be biasing the results: the choice of topics to include in this analysis. There are a number of pertinent questions for which data might exist that weren’t considered, including voting rights and government corruption. I bet such an analysis would show Republicans have gotten much more partisan in regards to those issues than Democrats have.
There are a few pertinent questions for which data almost certainly doesn’t exist because nobody would have thought to ask them in the 90s, like should a president and a political party be able to foment insurrection against the popularly elected government. Certainly the Republicans have become more partisan on that issue since they convinced Nixon to resign lest he be impeached.
I’d argue all of these are cultural issues too. Yet they’re not included in your assessment. Remember that framing the problem is a big chunk of analysis.
Republicans staged a violent insurrection at the Capitol building. Republicans single-handedly destroyed our tradition of a peaceful transfer of power. That tradition is now a thing of the past - thanks to RIGHT-wing extremism. There are now 400-500 Republican extremists facing federal charges for their attempts to violently interfere with Congress (and arguably overthrow the government).
In fact, according to the Biden administration, the most dangerous threat to domestic security is now right-wing terrorism.
I do agree that “defund the police” is moronic Left-wing posturing. And I would certainly argue that anti-racism (and the explicitly stated idea that whites SHOULD be discriminated against) is enormously self destructive for the Left.
Nevertheless, there is simply nothing on the Left that compares with the violence of Trump’s most extreme supporters. There just isn’t.
If a data set misses that point, re-evaluate the data you’ve collected.
Most extreme supporters??? Yeah, that is the problem. There are definitely people on the "left" both white and black supremacist who support traditional left wing goals.....oh how narrow your view is.
Yeah, spending money efficiently to protect the public is such a stupid idea. We should waste money whenever we can, and get poor public safety as well. That works sooo much better.
Gave a lot of thought to this interesting post today.
I think the more productive way to say it is:
-- Liberals believe in and are comfortable with large social change.
-- Large social change by its nature can cause a backlash which, in our system which gives so much affirmative action power (the electoral college, the Senate) to the backlash powers, can require tremendous time and money to fight off.
A great example is:
-- A part African-American man with the middle name "Hussein" is elected president, twice! Huzzah for liberal openness to the new!
-- But, the election, twice, of this guy leads ultimately to the backlash election of an authoritarian buffoon who does a lot of damage, even though limited to one term.
So, I think it's fair to ask: how can liberals achieve their goals without causing such a large and resource-eating backlash. Or at least, how can the backlash be reduced?
A part African-American man with the middle name "Hussein" is elected president, twice! Huzzah for liberal openness to the new!
And don't forget his surname rhymes with "Osama."
Bill Maher had the best line about this back in 2008: "WTF, Democrats, wasn't Madoff Schmitler available?" LOL.
Ha, good line. I will remember it.
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Norman Ornstein has argued that the polarization is asymetric because Republicans have moved farther right than Democrats. That is because he is looking at voting patterns of actual elected officials. Kevin is looking at public opinion on some issues. As others have pointed out the liberal position on abortion hasn't changed since the 70's. The liberal position on guns hasn't changed while gun laws have gotten weaker and the need for regulation stronger. The liberal position on taxes hasn't changed all while federal taxes have gone down. It is hard to understand what Kevin thinks he is doing here. It certainly isn't what he thinks he is doing.
Great concise response.
You can yammer forever about guns. Just try getting them.
As I said yesterday, the Overton Window shifted left (and it continues to shift leftward). But, the minority has majority control by virtue of the American construction of representative democracy, such that their culture wars continue to this day, even though they've lost.
Gay Marriage -- By and large, this issue was settled a decade ago, affirmatively in support by significant majorities of Americans. Yet, to this day, the war on marriage equality continues.
Abortion and Contraception Rights -- The Hyde Amendment exists and continues to exist only because the minority control passage at the Senate level by way of the filibuster. We're nearing on nearly 50 years since Roe v Wade, and we're still fighting to protect it, even though the percentage of Americans opposed to abortion hasn't changed. Why? Because of de facto minority rule.
We can go down the litany of issues and they all resolve to an inevitable march towards liberalization. But because American representative democracy bakes in minority control, we keep relitigating these cultural wars long after conservatives have lost.
The Senate isn't a deliberative body; it's the means of slowing down the pace of liberalization of this country.
The Filibuster isn't the tool to prevent mob rule; it's the tool to slow down the pace of liberalization of this country.
The Presidential Veto isn't the check against an out of control Congress; it's the tool to slow down the pace of liberalization of this country.
In our process of liberalization, we make mistakes. That's no excuse to slow down the process. We can, and should, fix things that get broken. The conservative narrative that we have these processes to better deliberate and move cautiously is more than trite, it's antiquated and decontextualized from the real world we live in.
I read through most of the comments and didn't see this, but Kevin, going from "just under five" to "six point five" is not a half point movement; it's a point and a half.
Oh, sorry. The half point was from 1994. My apologies.
Jamie Lynn Spears gets death threats after speaking against Britney’s conservatorship,
https://nordot.app/784229342671257600?c=592622757532812385
There are people who believe so passionately in this conservatorship, who are so personally invested in it, that they send Britney's sister death threats.
Anyone want to bet these are all Trump supporters? I would be shocked if they aren't.
> the Democratic Party has been pulled far enough left that even lots of non-crazy people find us just plain scary
I don't think so. If you're scared of liberals, you're objectively crazy. "Oh no! They want me to have affordable health care!" "Oh no! they want to spend money efficiently on public safety!" "Oh no! They want to people to pass a firearms safety test before they own a gun!"
Look at Pew, which ain't exactly Fox. Liberals are MUCH more likely than everyone else to suffer from mental illness.
Of course people with an actual conscience will be more negatively affected by bad things happening to other people around them, and therefore suffering from mental illness to a greater extent.
People without a conscience and no ability to display empathy are shielded from such bothersome burdens like being affected by other people's suffering.
You represent the nutcases and the criminals. Congrats. Oh, "empathy?" Not quite. For every white man shot to death, 15 black men are shot to death (source: CDC -- look it up), with 90% of those murders intra-racial. But you're a white racist, and you're fine with that.
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The NYtimes has published a guest essay this weekend advocating general debt forgiveness.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/opinion/student-loan-medical-debt-forgiveness.html
“Student loans, medical debt, utility bills, criminal justice fines and fees, and municipal debt all need to be written down or canceled outright.”
This a lefty thing to write and I’m guessing there is no chance it will be done. Yet the argument is put forth. Will it drive millions to dump democrats in the next election? What is the point of publishing these fantasies?
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What Atrios says:
Is it your contention that left wingers can win without centrists?
Left wingers win very little with centrists.
In a very closely divided nation, though, winning even a modestly larger portion of centrists could pay big dividends. I like to remind people that Obama pretty agressivley courted working class whties, and won Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio (twice) and Florida (twice). And he was hardly an actual centrist himself (although sure, his liberalism wasn't hard-edged). In the main, though, Obama marketed himself as a cenrtist-y. Not all that unlike Biden. So that's good. It's just that the rest of the party needs to follow Joe's lead a bit more closely. Simply avoid showy, maximally confrontational, social justice sloganeering, gratuitously invoking race -- and, make it a point to emphasize economic deliverables that appeal to a broad swath of the electorate. That's the winning formula.
Today's "progressives" HATE the common people, along with this country. They are smug, arrogant, condescending, rich hypocrites, and will pay a well-deserved political price for their hatred.