A few days ago I wrote a post called "If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals." As you can imagine with a provocative headline like that, conservatives loved it. Liberals were a little, um, less enthusiastic.
But my argument was pretty straightforward: survey data over the past 20 years makes it clear that liberals have moved to the left more than conservatives have moved to the right. This has pushed us far enough to the left that even moderates find some of our positions scary, and with centrist states largely out of play it's become very hard to win congressional majorities.
Over at the Bulwark, Tim Miller has taken on the task of rebutting me. He starts out by saying that my analysis is "absolutely correct":
But when it comes to the actions of politicians, the aggressive, top down Culture War is being driven overwhelmingly from the right. And the shift rightward among Republican politicians on culture war issues is as dramatic—if not more so—than the leftward shift among Democratic voters on policy.
I deliberately focused on rank-and-file voters because they are, ultimately, what matters. Still, it's true that the political ecosystem also includes influencers, primarily politicians and the press, and those work differently.
Miller points out that, rhetorically, conservative politicians have moved far more right than liberal politicians have moved left. I agree that this is obviously true even if I don't have hard evidence for it. However, politicians are symptoms not causes, followers not leaders, so the bluster of politicians means less than most people think. I addressed this a bit in my original post, but it's worth doing it in more detail here. Here we go:
- In a political debate, it's entirely natural for the losing side to be much more vocal than the side that's winning something. In the case of culture war issues, it's generally liberals who are pushing to gain something (civil rights, gay rights, etc.) and conservatives who are at risk of losing something (customs and hierarchies that they've long lived with). So no one should be surprised that conservative politicians are louder and more hysterical about culture war issues than liberal politicians. That doesn't mean much.
- Because we've moved so far left, conservative politicians are free to attack us good and hard. Liberal politicians, by contrast, tend to be more judicious. But this is not a difference between liberal and conservative. It's just that a strong leftward shift gives conservative politicians a lot of room to scare moderate voters while liberal politicians are hesitant to fight back because they know they'll lose even more voters if they do. Always remember: there are more conservatives than liberals in the United States.
- By pushing so far left, we have given the conservative press an easy job. It's popular among certain liberals to say that this doesn't matter because conservatives will attack us no matter what, but that's sophistry. Of course both sides are always attacking each other. But conservative attacks are a lot more effective when we liberals provide them with a big fat target—and we do.
- The liberal press—and here I'm mostly talking about MSNBC—shouldn't be underestimated. They are less thuggish than Fox News, but they press the extreme progressive agenda pretty hard, and not always honestly.
- That said, there's no question that Fox News plays a special role in all this. After a relatively moderate start, they moved to the hard right starting around the year 2000 and they've been uniquely destructive ever since. It's not just that they fight back against progressives, it's that they demagogue and misrepresent and just outright lie with a casual abandon.
Miller's basic case is that social change is constant and, sure, "the scores of millions of people who create cultural change in the daily comings and goings of their lives should be more forbearing with everyone else." Still, he says, it's the "inflamers" who are responsible for turning a normal level of disagreement into a war.
But this is just not the way things work. It's easy for liberals to say "social change, eh, no big deal," but it is a big deal to those who are scared by it. To suggest that the elite conservative fight against lefty change is nothing more than a ruse for the rubes is not just backward, it betrays a deep misunderstanding of how H. sapiens tribalism work. Noise level aside, liberals are every bit as invested in pushing change as conservatives are in resisting it, and the farther left we go the stronger the resistance becomes. This should surprise no one.
However, there is one particular place where I agree with Miller: the deep, dark cesspool that is Fox News. The basic political dynamic here is simple: progressives have made themselves into an easy target and Fox News is largely responsible for using that target as a way of not just attacking us, but of making its audience believe that liberals are scary, unpatriotic, and deliberately trying to ruin America. This has had a big impact on rank-and-file voters, and it's no surprise that conservative politicians have followed along like lapdogs. Without Fox News conservatives would still be naturally louder than liberals in this fight, but with Fox News they've been turned into maniacs.
It's still the case that liberals are fundamentally the ones who pushed first and pushed hardest on social issues over the past 20 years. And it's only natural that this sparked a strong response from conservatives. Beyond that, though, it's Fox News that's turned things truly toxic. So if you're looking for a conservative target, forget the politicians, who just follow public sentiment. Look instead to Fox News, which eagerly accepted its 30 pieces of silver and cold-bloodedly stoked that toxic public sentiment in the first place. They're the ones who turbocharged a fairly normal dynamic and made it into the hellscape it is today.
POSTSCRIPT: I want to make clear yet again that nothing I've said is meant to suggest that progressives are wrong. Generally speaking, I'm all on board with most progressive change. But my personal opinion doesn't mean anything, and it's simply a fact that liberals have moved very far to the left in recent years. This has placed them a long way away from the median voter and made it very difficult to win in centrist states.
I find Fox News unsavory and generally dishonest. Yes, as Kevin mentioned, there are times that the liberal side also falls into a similar moral failing. However, I fundamentally disagree that its Fox News fault. Fox News did not create its audience. Sure, it feels great to blame a single source and point a finger at Murdoch: however, ask yourself this, would those beliefs disappear if Fox News ended tomorrow?
While it's true that even without Fox News there are people who would believe crazy things and harbor ugly sentiments, but Fox has served as an incredible amplifier for it all. Once upon a time the John Birch Society was a fringe group with little hold on the larger public. Now 1/3 of the populace think that a malevolent lying narcissistic monster actually won the Presidency last year despite repeated failures to demonstrate a scintilla of credible evidence. How did that happen ? Could it have happened without Fox ? Consider, if Fox had been around 50 years ago would Nixon have been forced to resign ?
No.
That's precisely the reason Nixon pollster Roger Ailes wanted to start FOXnews.
Kevin's done extensive research on this. Fox News really is the critical problem.
I've thought for a while that the fairly recent left lurch is a reaction to the right's further right-leaning movement that has been going on for decades now. Kind of "every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction", though I don't find it equal. I see it very unbalanced really. While I'm a moderate and would support moderate candidates, drama and fear sell well. The right has been using "moderate" to attack their own side's competitive candidates for a few years and so to battle extremism, takes... extremism? Fighting fire with fire so-to-speak. I could be way off on this, but given the white-lash we've seen since desegregation and the election of Obama makes this all seem about right.
I think this is mostly right, and it shines a light on two key issues with Kevin's analysis:
1) It's sort of definitionally true that liberals move more on issues than conservatives. Conservatives are called conservatives because they don't want to change things, so it's hard to know what to make of the fact that liberals want to change things more; to some degree we define liberal policies by the fact that they focus on modifying current practice.
2) Kevin really does undersell the extent to which liberal extremism is driven by Right-wing craziness. To take a simple example, liberals were by and large less engaged with racial politics before Obama was elected, and I think that was largely because the GOP of 2008 was trying hard to appear as racially neutral (or even sensitive, if you think about the public stance of the McCain campaign). To a lot of liberals that scanned as evidence for relatively low salience for racialist messages in American politics. Then when the right responded to Obama by really cranking up the racial fearmongering, it caused a lot of liberals to reassess exactly how important racism was in American society and this led to elevated liberal focus on racial sentiments. Independent of who is "right" about the importance of racism in American society, I think it's hard to ignore the role that racial messaging from the GOP had in turning liberal attention to this area.
This has been remarked on before and elsewhere, but limiting the discussion to the past 20 years may skew the discussion. What preceded the more recent cultural shift ? What happened between the late 70's and 2000 ?
Indeed. The Ur moment was the decision of capital to first seditiously and then ideologically oppose the New Deal. There's a straight line from the Business Plot through Bill Buckley and his merry band of ex-Reds to Gingrich and Trump. Murdock and Fox News are critical pieces in the Leninist puzzle that is Movement Conservatism.
Very good point. But it's worth remembering that a lot of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act. The total commitment to winning elections by means of waging a culture war really began in the late sixties with the southern strategy. Then in the seventies they made abortion a wedge issue, which it was not when Roe v. Wade was decided: that decision was supported by evangelicals, who also voted for Jimmy Carter. And then in the 90s Gingrich amped up the nastiness, and Norquist said "Bipartisanship is date rape" and the modern Republican Party was born. None of that was motivated by how far left Democrats had gone. In fact, starting in the late eighties, the Dems moved to the right. (The Democratic Leadership Council, and Bill Clinton governing as a Rockefeller Republican). The commitment to all-out culture war had long been adopted by Republicans as their only hope to win elections, long before Kevin's arbitrary starting point. Which makes his whole argument silly.
A lot of Republicans?? They were the majority of vote
No, they were not; neither in the House nor the Senate. ‘Yeas’ from Democrats outnumbered ‘Yeas’ from Republicans; although Republicans voted favorably in higher proportion, their numbers were smaller.
Exactly. Kevin's "proof" is fundamentally flawed because of the cherry picked date of 2000. The GOP went off the rails with Nixon, turbocharged by Reagan, consummated by Newt. Citizens United is the cherry on top. The Powell Memo of 1971 outlined the strategic GOP plan. It was (and is) a very well financed slow motion coup against the New Deal and Great Society. And of course you find white male privilege, racism, xenophobia, and misogyny at the core. Many excellent books have been written on this history.
On any kind of objective measure, the American “left” is not even slightly left.
On any kind of objective measure, the American right is bordering on religious based fascism.
There is no comparison. Idiots believing nonsense does not make it true no matter how much it seems like it.
On any kind of objective measure, the American “left” is not even slightly left.
The "left" in the United States, at least to the extent it is pushed ever further leftwards by the American "hard" left, is pretty far left these days. Certainly its positioning goes beyond being merely "slightly" left. And yes, this is the case even by the standard of other high income democracies. The American hard left supports: de-commissioning nuclear power plants, teaching critical race theory, sanctioning/boycotting/divesting Israel, aggressive phasing out of fossil fuels, sharply more progressive and higher taxes (including wealth taxes), a large-scale expansion of the welfare state, universal basic income, reparations for the descendants on enslaved people, defunding police departments, etc.
I'm not commenting on the desirability (or lack thereof) of such policies. Nor am I claiming you can't find similar positions in the progressive/left communities abroad (you can). But this tired old claim that the left in the US is so much more moderate or conservative than the left in other countries is bizarrely, almost laughably inaccurate. Perhaps what throws people off is the lack of concrete accomplishments on the part of US lefties.
Concrete accomplishments are literally the only thing that matters. Being “for” something is meaningless if you’re not making it happen.
The way I see it, if you’re not making it happen, you’re not really “for” it.
Thus the left is not left.
If the left was say…. killing the rich and seizing control of their jobs, I’d say they were as far left as the right is right.
This is quite clearly not even close, so my point remains.
Concrete accomplishments are literally the only thing that matters.
I don't disagree that the left hasn't achieved as much in the United States as it has in most other high income democracies. Your original claim -- the one I'm pointing out is inaccurate -- was about ideological positing. Not policy accomplishments.
Those are great points, but aren't we talking here about Democrats and not "the left"? The charts KD posted in the original post from The Economist purport to show that Democrats are more extreme than Republicans. That's what I have a problem with.
The Democratic party in recent years has been led by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. Seems to me only arguably with Biden is the "left" driving anything. In my lifetime the Democratic Party has become the party of economic growth. Is that extremist?
Slave/reparations aren't traditionally left wing either. Let's be honest and say the whole left/right thing can be changed at will.
The centrist, by Canadian standards, government of Canada stands for teaching critical race theory, aggressive phasing out of fossil fuels, higher and more progressive taxes than the US, an expansive (by American standards) welfare state, and modest police budgets (Canada has never had the bloated budgets that are common in the US, so "defunding" isn't an issue).
Even the Greens are not united on the subject of nuclear power, so I don't think that you can make elimination of nuclear power into "the leftist position". Canada has never had slavery, so reparations are not relevant. In other words, the positions you ascribe to the American hard left are mostly centrist positions north of the border.
Few dispute the idea that the political spectrum in the US is to the right of what it is in many high income democracies. The false claim I was pushing back on is that the left in the United States is to the right of what it is in other such countries. In the main, that's simply not true. What is true is that it hasn't achieved as much power as the left in other democracies. Those are two very different things.
In Germany, Biden would be leader of AfD.
Even Bernie would more likely be CDU than SFD.
Anthrax or pizza for lunch? Can't we just meet in the middle?
Liberals have always been pretty far left. It's just that conservatives start to like what liberals achieved, and they turn it into the status quo.
There are very few republican voters/conservatives who actually want to turn back social and environmental policy to 1850. Most conservatives dont want slavery back. They like child labor laws and laws against child abuse. They love weekends and paid holidays. They would be livid if their wives were fired the moment they got pregnant. If they went in a time machine to Dickensian London they'd be absolutely horrified. Heck, if they went back to 1975 they'd be grossed out by the litter and the omnipresent tench of diesel fuel.
This is the permanent state of things. Liberals will always be pushing for change, which will always make them extreme compared to the status quo. Conservatives only rarely push for unprecedented changes. They mostly want to stay still or go back 20 years, not 100.
I dunno. I think this topic is way more complicated than can ever be captured by any polling data.
Sure seems like the most important "social" issue -- by far -- is immigration. Gay marriage and abortion might get people worked up, but in the end, those "social issues" don't change society much. Gay people get married and buy houses and if anything, once the issue (gay marriage) is settled by the Supreme Court, we hear less and less about it. Abortion is fundamentally private and doesn't change the life of the small town much.
But immigration surely does. When meatpacking-plant towns in the midwest which a decade a two ago were all-white and 100% Christian suddenly have thousands of workers from Sudan -- Muslims even! -- then you really have social change, in people's faces every day 24/7.
But on immigration who is really for social change? It's actually the Republican party which to serve its business interests which wants "open borders" -- unlimited arrival of workers, and better if they are not citizens, and cannot become citizens who have political power.
This is why Trump's motto was "Build the Wall". Not "no more gays" or "no more abortions". It's the wall against immigrants from other cultures that's the big motivating factor, and on that issue, we are trapped in the tug of war between the two factions of the GOP -- the donors who want "open borders", and their voters who want a wall.
Democrats are mostly sitting this one out. Though you could argue under Obama the Democrats were more restrictive on immigration than Republicans would ever manage to be. (The business types would rebel.)
So I think when it comes to pushing "social change" it's really the business types of the Republican party who have become "extreme". Meanwhile their voters are "extreme" in another way.
And because of the affirmative action program for rural whites called the Electoral College and the Senate, we Democrats are mostly just on the sidelines watching the donors see if they can control their voters.
Pretty much every study shows that the most anti immigration places are ones with the fewest immigrants in it currently. So guess again.
Well I wouldn’t expect a community full of immigrants to be anti-immigrant. Why would immigrants be against immigration?
It’s true even for white people who are many generations deep in America. It’s racist separatist whites who fear immigration. Which is of course absurd.
Eh, that ain't no affirmative action program fool. It's to force the country to work together. Got it yet???
The only political issue that matters is racism. Black Lives Matter constitutes the entire right wing tirade over violence, but that represents pushback against efforts to stop killing Black people. Fox News and other Republican efforts try to cover the real issue of White Supremacy by developing phony issues and dog whistles to distract from the fundamental fact they are trying to stop Black voters from voting and becoming prominent economically. Fox News is just a White Supremacist operation, period. Call it that, don't fall for the distractions.
Exactly
Not quite. BLM is hypocrisy. Stop killing black people themselves???? That is who does it, in spades.
I’m guessing you just happened to choose that cute little phrase when discussing black people for no good reason? You’re a racist and a fool.
'But my argument was pretty straightforward: survey data over the past 20 years makes it clear that liberals have moved to the left more than conservatives have moved to the right. '
This is a perfect example of the limitations of "survey data", Kevin. For starters, the "partisan" quotient in that survey was pseudo-scientific at best. For the rest: where is the rise of right-wing violence, sedition, domestic terrorism, unapologetic corruption and white supremacist racism, insurrection, neo-fascism, and radicalism "measured"??
Or is all that just in my imagination?
I look at Drum's "blame the left for the culture war" post as his variation on Hillbilly Elegy.
Yeah, the fundamental premise of these posts is based on faulty survey data. I just don't accept that the median Democratic voter has moved farther left that the median Republican voter has moved right. Kevin needs to show me the left equivalent of the Oklahoma City bombing before I buy this.
Speaking only for myself… I was one of those social liberal / fiscal conservatives back in the 1980s to probably 2006 or so. But then why bother? Republicans had become increasingly evil.
Bush had failed in iraq. The war on terror was a joke. They hated the gays. Compassionate conservatism was a scam.
I didn’t move left really, but I got tired of right wing nonsense. Democrats tried centrism. Clinton balanced the budget. He kept up the bush attacks in Iraq and opened up to China. Gore promised more of the same with centrist 😂 Lieberman and did republican moderates vote for them? Oh heck no. So what’s the point?
I don’t really care about social issues because the country has gone nuts. If a pollster asked me I’d say repeal second amendment and put the trumpists in detention camps. It’s time to own the freaks… for real.
KD: Instead of speaking in broad platitudes I wish you got to the weeds of the actual issues and then apply your theory. Of course there are issues where people have moved right and left. But when I see the polls regarding the issues I don’t see much of a variance the last 20-30 years except for drugs and homosexuality. If anything I see the population moving slightly left on some issues like taxes, abortion and guns and stagnant on others like immigration. I don’t see any rightwards movement on any issue but I could be wrong. Please elucidate.
I’d say there has been a really hard right turn towards science denial and that has come mostly from the GOP but also from some Democrats and nominally “leftish” people.
When I started reading what became the liberal blogosphere back in 2002, the hard left was completely out of the picture. Common wisdom was that Democrats needed a male candidate from a southern state to win an election. There was lots of triangulation. Most liberals had rhetorically given up on the War on Poverty as hopeless (except for some nibbles around the edges) and the best that we would even advocate for was some public-private partnership, for example on healthcare. Even though I am personally a pretty conventional liberal, I didn't think it was good that the political spectrum started to my right and just kept going.
That's definitely changed. There are stronger left politicians and advocacy groups that are having more success in the media and are pushing for some fairly substantial changes to the status quo. So yes, things have moved to the left in the liberal sphere. I think that's made our politics more balanced, not less. And for all the attention that Bernie and his supporters have gotten, it was still moderate Joe Biden who handily won the nomination, just like moderate Hillary Clinton won it in 2016, and moderate Barack Obama won it in 2008. I don't think I have to clamor just to get ideas like UBI to get a hearing, but the Democratic Party has not been taken over by socialists.
After Trump's corruption, abuses, Russian election interference (which always deserved bipartisan condemnation). the return of outright white nationalism to national politics (Charlottesville), a poorly handled and overly politicized pandemic, an attempted coup at the behest of the President, and a proliferation of bizarre and unsettling QAnon conspiracies, Trump still managed to get 74 million votes and almost 47%.
I get that some of the leftist rhetoric and positions aren't popular and make things difficult for mainstream Democrats. But it's still hard to see Democrats as the source of extremism in the country right now. A majority of Republicans think that Trump is the rightful President. I know I'm a liberal, but if it's Democrats that are too far from the mainstream, our mainstream is horribly broken.
Obviously, we have to win voters in swing states, and that includes moderates. But the right has been barking mad now since Clinton and still keeps doing OK. I don't see how capitulating to that helps anyone.
What return of white nationalism to "politics"???? Most of them are political conservatives on the fringe. Much like racists on the left ie ecofascists, national socialism, degrowthers are hidden, you are just micro targeting. Russian control over these groups is more then you think. The media is scared to drudge there, due to progtards.
Literally the biggest name in conservative media pushes white nationalism in everything but name. But yeah, that’s “fringe”. You are consistently the most wrong poster on this blog.
On please, they push what ever they think can gain them a buck. You keep on falling for it. Much like liberal activists creating messes like Charlottesville. Don't attend, no news, no tragedies. Same with George Floyd mess, though at least that one was not interfering with a licensed rally.
So they won’t put on white supremacists if only “liberals” quit complaining about it?
Sorry that’s not how that works but you already know that.
All you do here is post disingenuous garbage, just like all other GOP
Again dude, those kind of "conservative" white nationalists are not new. They had a licensed rally which liberal activists attacked. I am impressed it went that smooth. I went to a degrowther rally 2 weeks ago in Montana which was about 80% white and 20% Indian. Plenty of old school left wing propaganda, whiny Indians crying racism(yet, they were there lol), nazi imaging, neopagan indo European romance. If it were attacked by Republican activists, it would not be pretty.
You just don't get it and why it's even news.
John Edwards plowed so Barack Obama could reap.
The implosion of the Two Americas Guy put paid to the idea, born of Carter & Clinton, that only by playing the #identitypolitics of the Nashville Network could a Democrat win the White House. In its place, the post-Boomer age of a plural party, non-homogenous, came forth under Obama.
Dude, left wing policies traditional wise are anti-lbtg and immigration. They have not moved left, but libertarian. It's the illiberal nonsense of forcing people to accept "the minoity" that is confusing.
To me the New Left was a contradiction and not really left to begin with.
Libertarians tend towards liberal beliefs in social issues. But again you know this. Disingenuous troll.
I disagree. Liberals lean toward libertarian positions on social issues. A consistent libertarian believes in minimum government; that means no social programs, but it also means no drug prohibitions, no gun control, and no restrictions on abortion.
Libertarians do not fit on the one dimensional left/right political spectrum. It works much better to use the two dimensional Pournelle diagram, where the horizontal axis runs from communism on the left to laissez-faire capitalism on the right, while the vertical axis runs from anarchy at the top to autocracy at the bottom. Conventional "leftists" who tend to be libertarian on social issues, will be found in the upper left quadrant of the diagram, libertarians in the upper right, Stalinist types in the lower left, and conventional conservatives in the lower right.
Oh dear Lord. Pournelle and his "World's smallest political quiz". Well, that explains a lot.
Don't forget the woke corporatism movement that really got going in the 2000's. Capitalism is the real power behind woke junk. Many conservatives forget that.
You keep saying that for Democrats to win they need to appeal to the middle. Bruh, have you not seen how the voters in "the middle" have shifted leftward?
In Arizona, Conservatives failed at their war against teaching about Mexican-American history. CRT is going to end up being taught in schools all across the country, in spite and despite whatever Conservatives try to do to block it.
Fox News' contribution to the culture wars isn't effective at stopping this leftward drift, but it is creating the necessary foundations towards political violence -- this is what you should be focused on, more than anything else.
Is this April 1? Where is this alleged leftward movement? Maybe there are some issues I am missing, but:
1. The tax code has never, in the three decades I have been following it, been more tilted towards capital and against wages. The estate tax is virtually non-existent. The fact that some Democrats are floating trial balloons about a higher tax on capital is hardly some leftward move. Its just not.
2. Up until the end of the Trump administration, the US pulled out of even a voluntary climate accord. The US government is among the least environmentally conscious in the first world. Hardly some victory for liberal environmentalists.
3. Build a wall you say? Actual immigration laws are hardly liberal. And I am unaware of any massive program towards documenting undocumenteds other than DACA.
4. I will grant you that culturally the country is more liberal, but that isn't because liberals have "moved left" - there is no leftward movement in the liberal position that minorities ought not to be discriminated against, there is leftward victory but not movement.
5. The US social safety net is still nowhere near the European average, let alone Scandanavian liberal comprehensiveness. Obamacare is about a minimal a step towards a single payor plan that you could take without doing anything.
So how in the world can Kevin say the left has moved leftward without falling completely for conservative propaganda? I don't know. I don't get it.
The left has not moved an inch. What has happened is various policies once seen as "leftist" are now more acceptable. I can understand, if I was writing conservative propaganda, how it would be good to "spin this" as leftward movement, but I do not understand why we have to fall for their spin.
And I think its important that we get this straight. The now about 25 year old Clinton health plan was an expansion of Medicare down to age 40 from 65 over a long time. The ACA, which got passed over a decade later, was much, much farther to the right than the Clinton plan, not left of it.
Anyone who argues that Sanders' Medicare for all is somehow more left that the Clinton plan is not paying attention or is engaging in propaganda. What would constitute a 'move left?" Nationalizing the US healthcare system to turn it into the British NHS. But that proposal is non-existant.
But what is happening, especially on cultural issues, is the electorate is accepting positions which used to be considered "left" as acceptable. The Washington Redskins are no more. Less and less participation in organized religion. Acceptance by mainstream corporations of envioronmental responsibility.
And, acceptance, never more obvious than during the pandemic that when it really hits the fan its the Gov who bails everyone out.
What is happening, and is new, is the Republican party is made up of a coalition of groups pressing losing positions. People don't like losing. It makes them act irrationally and violently. This loser minority has the ability to affect policy through the structure of our system. The non-loser majority needs to stay mobilized.
It doesn't help when otherwise intelligent people like Kevin talk about "moving left."
You’re exactly right.
It really helps to look at things as objectively as possible especially when listening to anything the right has to say. Objectivity and the GOP are no bedfellows.
Nonsense. Just a few years ago almost every democrat (including Obama, Hillary, and Biden) was against gay marriage. There was virtually no talk of dropping the Hyde Amendment among dems and most dem candidates reiterated that abortion should be "rare". Enforcing immigration laws and reducing illegal immigrants was part of the Democratic platform. Pulling down statues and monuments was not acceptable.
There's no question liberals have jumped left on a variety of issues.
Republican politicians, including some who switched from Democrat to Republican, made the deliberate decision starting about 1964 to exploit racism - they deliberately took over from Southern Democrats as the party of racism. Republicans had always been somewhat evangelical as abolitionists, but Republicans deliberately aligned with Southern evangelicals, who are deeply racist. Republican politicians have continued to support racism in order to get support for their plutocratic economic policies. Who are the leaders and who are the followers in this? What if Republicans had not made the switch to racism? Maybe the racists would have continued to form ineffectual third parties and racism would have declined more rapidly. Of course there is some reaction on the right to the continued push for equality on the left, but is the struggle for racial equality supposed to be given up because of that? Exactly what is done on the left is not really important - whatever action the left takes will be made the basis of outrage on the right.
Fox News is important in keeping up the barrage of outrage. Their nut-case opinionators are able to go further than most politicians are willing to go. But Fox News has not created the situation. If leftists did not say and do what they are now, Fox News would spend as much time and effort on generating outrage over something less leftist. Where Democrats have to be careful is looking fairly moderate to swing voters who aren't locked in to right-wing media. The latter are basically hopeless. Biden and most Democrats are doing a pretty good job of this. If there weren't people to the left of Biden, it would be Biden himself who is being characterized as a Socialist - although this goes on to some extent anyway.
Not quite. Republicans got into the South via post war industrialist expansion. This drew their numbers up in the south in urban/suburban areas, while Democrats continued strong in rural areas. The landmark Hill vs Martin really showed Republicans making gains in the south with "Rockefeller" Republicans immigrants from the North. Even before WW2. Cleveland Democrats had been leaving the party since Wilson. But they were also a small cohort. Today's south is not 1900. It is a heavily mongrelized creation. Democrats don't do well down there because the Suburbs are still heavy Republican.
Goldwater got the South to vote solidly for him because he opposed the Civil Right Bill of 1965. Strom Thurmond went Republican because of racism before that. This is unequivocal, and central to understanding politics since WWII. National Democrats abandoned racism and the white racists in the South turned to Republicans. Economics had nothing to do with it.
I missed the earlier round of "blame the liberals for extremism," but whatever methodology you use to get to that conclusion is deeply flawed if you think today's liberal Democrats are the extremists in our politics.
There was a time you could argue that conservatives had majorities in the electorate. Nixon and Reagan were popular and won landslide reelections. Carter's single term was the only Dem admin between the '60s and the '90s.
But with Dems winning the pop vote in 7 of the past 8 presidential elections, it's not just liberals that have changed: it's the country that has changed. That's the undeniable political reality. The electorate is no longer mostly conservative and fighting against change; the electorate is mostly frustrated that we have not seen enough change.
Democrats' lock on the cities remains strong, and the party is now winning the suburbs too. Dems are now carrying states like Georgia and Arizona. This is not happening because these once-conservative strongholds are attracted to the Democrats' brand of extremism. These voters are turning out for Democrats in the battle against extremism.
The crisis in our politics is driven by anti-democratic institutional anomalies that give the GOP minority a powerful block on the progress that the majority of the electorate would favor if passed. Those anomalies include the Electoral College, Senate makeup, gerrymandered Congressional districts, filibuster, and more. The fear of conservatives losing their long-held advantage is what is driving the extremism in our politics. They, like the man they chose as their leader, are bonkers.
Any excesses you see on the Democratic side pale in comparison. They come from a frustrated electorate that has waited too long for the government to respond to the real and often dire needs of the people.
Whatever pretzel logic you use to blame liberals for extremism is nonsense.
Winning the pop vote by itself is irrelevant. There is a reason why the founders tried balancing population votes with land acreage vote.
The Founders did things worthy of complaint, but giving acres of land the right to vote was not one of them.
Nope. What you want leads to mob rule and inequality. Think guy.
So majority is “mob rule” and the minority leading is “fair”. You really show your ass here Mr. GOP
You must be retarded. Your majority rule is irrelevant if you don't own the land. Your Mr. GOP. I am Samuel Watson's lineage, supporter of the proletariat.
So, you hate Dio?
Acreage doesn't have votes. If it did, one of every six Senators would come from Alaska.
The conversation/article wasn't about "blame the liberals for extremism". It was blaming liberals for the culture wars.
You're splitting hairs.
From Kevin's post:
"Democrats have stoked the culture wars by getting more extreme on social issues..."
"...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."
KD clearly blames extremism on liberals -- even conservative extremism is apparently the liberals' fault. It's a ridiculous argument.
Shorter Kevin: Liberals ask for abuse, just like the women who wear "slutty" clothes or insist on walking home alone. "I want to make clear yet again that nothing I've said is meant to suggest that progressives" or women "are wrong" for doing anything they do. But, if they wouldn't taunt conservatives/men, they wouldn't be abused.
Kevin, just stop. Nobody who reads your blog is attracted to arguments like "liberals ask for the abuse they receive" even if you can "prove" it's true (which you can't).
Yes, liberals do like to bury their heads in the sand. When's the next BLM/Defund the Police rally?
"... by pushing so far left..."
[facepalm]
You people are channeling John D. Rockefeller. You have CNN, MSNBC, PBS, ABC, NBC, CBS, Reuters, Bloomberg, AP, NYT, WaPo, almost every (declining metro daily) -- but you piss and moan because you have a competitor or two.
By the way, Pew reports that 29% of Americans have any trust in your corrupt media, and only 8% have a great deal of trust. And that a majority of younger Democrats have mental health problems
You and your "progressive" friends are crazy, stupid, racist, and paranoid. LOL
Bud, CNN is a faux liberal group run by Republicans. Try harder.
"crazy, stupid, racist, and paranoid"
You shouldn't be so hard on yourself.
On second thought, yes you should.
Always good to hear from another violent, racist "progressive" who hates this country's guts. LOL
I am a violent racist who hates America when America is stupid white GOP. All of you idiots need to go, then maybe I’ll like it here.
Maybe you need to summon the courage to return to Venezuela to build socialism. Bring your own toilet paper. LOL
Your temper tantrum is duly noted.
Chuckle. Who cares what you think? You're a poorly educated incompetent rumdumb.
Always fun to hear from another "progressive" racist. LOL
Cordially,
The Latinx
On issues such as UBI or CRT, I can see how there might be legitimate disagreement between the right and left, but what stuns me is the right's fevered revolt against fairly objective facts, i.e.,:
- climate change is happening and is, in large part, caused by human activity
- covid is an actual health threat and the best response is the vaccine
- there is no evidence of large scale (or even moderate scale) voter fraud
- Biden won the election
- the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol was a bad thing
And Kevin, I'm genuinely curious; what is it that you see is dishonest in MSNBC coverage? Sure, MSNBC is biased is terms of what they feel is important and what is worth emphasizing, but I don't see where what they're saying is dishonest.
Your trying way too hard. Covid is a health threat to a extent. But the Spanish flu, it is not. Whining and crying about a bottom rung pandemic is lolz why populism needs to return to the Democratic party.
Moron
And the Spanish flu is no Black Death; so what? Covid is a deadly virus that has disrupted the world's economy and killed millions. Given that there are effective measures that can effectively prevent the spread of the virus, I hardly think that it's "whining and crying" to point out the idiocy of an anti-vax hysteria whose sole purpose seems to be to "own the libs." [lolz]
"your" not trying hard enough.
He should be thinking of Joe Scarbourough & Mika Brzezinski, Kacie Hunt, Chuck Todd, Katy Tur, Chris Hayes, & Eddie Glaude, Jr., but he's likely referring to Rachel Maddow & Ari Melber, & maybe Chris Jansing.
Tennessee shuts down all child vaccination programs,
https://www.rawstory.com/vaccine-tennessee/
If it weren't for liberals these people would never have killed their kids to spite us and everyone would think they were sane and reasonable.
Have you ever moticed that conservatives get along a lot better among one another than liberals do?
To the degree tribalism exists it's failure, and it exists mostly for social conservatives.
Liberals are invested in social change because it acts against the failure.
The things that Kevin & others label as "left" are not "left' in any sense other than the fact that right-wingers hate them.
Medicare-for-all is left.
Free college is left.
UBI is left.
Supporting more progressive taxes is left.
Supporting higher corporate taxes is left.
Supporting a wealth tax is left.
Declaring America a White Supremacist society is left.
Affirmative action when deliberately discriminating on race or gender is left.
Limiting Asians in Ivy League colleges is left.
Blocking conservative speakers on campus is left.
Quickly leaving Afghanistan is left (and Trumpian).
Supporting historic record immigration for each new year is left.
Having no plan or interest in improving security on the southern border is left.
Banning right-to-work laws is left.
That is a lot of stuff that is left. You don't have to be a socialist to be left.
Because you say so, apparently. Once again you demonstrate why people don't care much about what you say. I'd suggest you discard your bad habits and acquire good ones ... but that's advice you're determined not to take, sigh.
Supporting higher corporate taxes is left.
Well, I guess 70% of the country is left then. Or do you want to re-think your list. Or think at all.
To me, its starts with the money. Viewers want to be feed toxic garbage and FN is happy to provide. Pols have paid attention and adapted the outrage message which feeds the machine, which keeps making more money. FN is a money making dynamo. Hannity is worth half a bill and Tucker is getting close. The whole place has sold its soul for more than just a few shackles.
You have fallen into the same trap as the people who denied Global Warming by starting in 1998 did
The last 20 years have seen the Dems move
But they have moved back towards their position 30 years before that!!
By "starting" at the extreme position it looks as if they have moved
I don't recall that the Democratic Party was enthusiastic about e.g. homosexual rights, much less gay marriage fifty years ago.
> progressives have made themselves into an easy target and Fox News is largely responsible for using that target
Trevor Noah has a good example of this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3No4gLPtw8
_The Worst Joe Biden Scandals of All-Time This Month: June | The Daily Show_
If Joe and Kamala weren't out there tweeting about having a good weekend, Fox News would stop attacking us.
"it's simply a fact that liberals have moved very far to the left in recent years. This has placed them a long way away from the median voter and made it very difficult to win in centrist states."
A fact that progressives and many liberals simply don't seem to understand or accept. It's getting a little exhausting.
Deregulated primary elections should change that. Dems can run like they want and that means campaigning against national "progressives" on single issues.
Trump Administration policy on immigration did ignore legal immigration in 2017-18 in favor of illegal immigration, but it ran into problems. 1, the administration itself reduced funding that reduced human trafficking and businesses from recruiting in foreign countries. Let Trump supporting evangelicals push and support trafficking. It's why Trump tactics changed from illegal to legal immigration restrictions. The problem is, the amount of legal immigration is much lower than illegal immigration and tightening more on it drove even more illegals into the US by 2020. The Wall is a hollow shell. Capitalism is to blame for immigration flows as leftists said 100-150 years ago.
Not sure what you mean by deregulated primary elections.
No more DNC control over picking state candidates over the preferred candidates the state party wants. This has been a major problem for awhile. 2ndly, DNC removed funding for candidates who campaigned on issues against DNC guidelines. 2020, several Democrats wanted to campaign against BLM and were threatened to not do it....or face the consequences. Something Obama wasn't happy with himself.
I totally agree that the DNC is a huge part of the problem.
Ah, I see Savushkina Street is reupping the rigged primary deza.
This whole discussion is tedious, not least because Kevin insists on conflating mainstream policy issues like gun control and taxation with a "culture war" manufactured by the right, which is all about "values".
Those things are what wingnuts claim are values.
The presence of escort services and strip clubs lowers incidence of sex crimes,
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-07/oupu-esa070721.php
and does not increase other types of crime.