My life as a white person embedded in the white culture, privy to unvarnished discussion of the plans and thinking of the individuals in that culture. Well, that - plus the weight of all scholarship in political science and history, which tells us that the reason civic like looks like it does in US is primarily because of our issues around race.
I think it is striking, though not surprising, how utterly lacking in context is this analysis. The Dems 2020 platform was in large part a reaction to the countless ways in which Trump blew up all of the “median” norms that the two parties were essentially working within.
The Republican platform, you may recall, was precisely: “Whatever our dear leader says it is.” The Republican Party had officially embraced a relatively complete pivot away from democracy towards a thuggish autocracy. How does this look in your charting framework? It doesn’t because it’s completely off the charts.
The Dems, in their 2020 platform, were scrambling to put new meat on the bones of previously generic commitments and also to capture and highlight the ways in which the Dem party is about protecting and expanding many specific rights that Trump’s tenure showed us were easily and routinely abrogated. That’s because our civil rights and our public commons were suddenly being overrun by the whims of COVID lies and so many other egregious actions and policies of Trump, DeSantis, MTG, and all of the other right-wing lunatics who have taken over the Republican Party.
So, while Dems might be construed as “moving left” by more directly and broadly standing-up for rights and justice that Trump and the Republicans (and the now right-wing “gerrymandered” SCOTUS, had been just trampling, the Republicans had moved, and continue to move, from a party committed to Democracy, to an authoritarian party committed to Trump and the Trumpian disdain for democratic norms and equal justice under the law. Off the charts altogether.
SO don’t think it isn’t easy to see what all of this analysis in this post amounts to. This sort of analysis is simply an exercise in providing cover for an ongoing insurrection against our country, blaming Democrats trying to stand-up for justice for causing “polarization” that is hurting our nation. Bulls!*T! Trump and Trumpism (with a huge assist from Mitch McConnell) has trampled both Republican and Democratic norms and is leading an authoritarian movement. ANd that’s what is making our politics so nasty, brutish, and full of lies, lies, lies.
Thank goodness were have at least one party willing to stand up for democracy, willing to set high aspirations for liberty, equality, and justice for all -- and act on behalf of other core, shared America values. We are fighting a party that has been captured by extreme elements that act by sowing chaos and disunity, designed to have us devolve into a corrupt, Trumpian dystopia. That’s why Trump wanted the insurrection: He wanted to be able to declare martial law and impose his will.
Well, it ain’t gonna happen. There are more of us than of them and Democracy still has a future that we are willing to fight like hell to achieve.
Two problems with the Democratic Party that come up a lot here are that (a) they are biased toward the preferences of young-ish, college-educated liberals; and (b) the political leaders don't set priorities and fall in line. I would love to talk more about how that can be solved at an institutional level, i.e. what changes in leadership and organizations would be necessary.
One thing I see is that there's a lot of foundation money controlled by program officers who are accountable to a narrow set of folks at their organization, and a lot of that money then goes to nonprofits that are accountable to the foundations and, to some extent, the liberal activists who are very plugged in and engaged. I wonder whether one change that could help is making sure a lot of that money gets distributed to organizations that are measured by their ability to bring in new members or some other metric that involves appeal to a wider population.
Really. What is wrong with you? One party (of now almost exclusively white people) just elected Donald F-ing Trump president, defends storming the Capitol building, has given up on representative democracy all together, is about to throw a woman's right to choose abortion into this anti-democratic shit show of freaked out white people... And you take a -mildly- stronger recognition that race has defined our politics forever - a recognition that many people in the party run from anyway - all in the context of an overall political philosophy of the country that has shifted right - as a shift in the (D) party? Again, I ask. What is wrong with you? You have taken this 'anti-woke' schtick WAY past performance into hateful, callous cartoon.
Yet, 'Democrats have moved left' is the article you chose to write at this moment in history. I'm not sure what your awareness consists of, but at a minimum it lacks perspective, context, proportion, and priority.
oh Dear Lord, they really do start the 2020 platform with a land acknowledgement. It's a good thing no one reads or remembers these things, or they'd be doing that much more to alienate the median voter. <smh>
The share of Democrats who are conservative is declining, but 12% still far exceeds the share of Republicans who call themselves liberal (4%).
Among independent voters, conservatives outnumber liberals 30% to 20%. Nationwide, conservatives outnumber liberals 37% to 25%.
Assuming conservative Democrats are low-hanging fruit to be brought over to the Republican side, while liberal Republicans are low-hanging fruit to be brought over to the Democratic side, Democrats are in big trouble, because the former group far outnumbers the latter.
Looking at racial breakdowns in the 2021 Gallup poll, things get even more telling. Simply treating all conservatives as Republicans, all liberals as Democrats, and moderates split 50/50 between two parties, we can use the liberal/moderate/conservative stats to crudely estimate how each racial group splits between the two parties. For white voters, it produces a 59/41 split in favor of Republicans, almost exactly matching the results of recent elections. Among Hispanic voters, this calculation produces a 50/50 split, right down the middle. Among blacks voters, the calculation favors Democrats, but only by 55/45, not the 88/12 margins among them Democrats are used to.
In other words, Democrat's ability to have a majority at all lies on the backs, not of liberal voters, but of conservative nonwhite voters siding with Democrats because of their race, even if they disagree with their politics. Recent trends have started to show a shift of black and Hispanic voters towards the GOP. If these trends are the result of people voting their ideology, rather than their race (as election data show white voters have been doing all along), the long term future for Democrats is losing white voters 60/40, breaking even 50/50 among Hispanic voters, and winning black voters by just 55/45. Even if blacks and Hispanics make up an increasingly larger percentage of the electorate going forward, these numbers still point to a large Republican majority looming in the future.
Without either increasing the number of liberals in this country to match conservatives, or winning a large supermajority of the moderate votes, Democrats simply cannot win (long term) even the popular vote, let alone institutions such as the Senate or electorate college, which have further Republican biases due to population distribution. And, this should be scaring Democratic operatives stiff.
The share of Democrats who are conservative is declining, but 12% still far exceeds the share of Republicans who call themselves liberal (4%).
Among independent voters, conservatives outnumber liberals 30% to 20%. Nationwide, conservatives outnumber liberals 37% to 25%.
Assuming conservative Democrats are low-hanging fruit to be brought over to the Republican side, while liberal Republicans are low-hanging fruit to be brought over to the Democratic side, Democrats are in big trouble, because the former group far outnumbers the latter.
Looking at racial breakdowns in the 2021 Gallup poll, things get even more telling. Simply treating all conservatives as Republicans, all liberals as Democrats, and moderates split 50/50 between two parties, we can use the liberal/moderate/conservative stats to crudely estimate how each racial group splits between the two parties. For white voters, it produces a 59/41 split in favor of Republicans, almost exactly matching the results of recent elections. Among Hispanic voters, this calculation produces a 50/50 split, right down the middle. Among blacks voters, the calculation favors Democrats, but only by 55/45, not the 88/12 margins among them Democrats are used to.
In other words, Democrat's ability to have a majority at all lies on the backs, not of liberal voters, but of conservative nonwhite voters siding with Democrats because of their race, even if they disagree with their politics. Recent trends have started to show a shift of black and Hispanic voters towards the GOP. If these trends are the result of people voting their ideology, rather than their race (as election data show white voters have been doing all along), the long term future for Democrats is losing white voters 60/40, breaking even 50/50 among Hispanic voters, and winning black voters by just 55/45. Even if blacks and Hispanics make up an increasingly larger percentage of the electorate going forward, these numbers still point to a large Republican majority looming in the future.
Without either increasing the number of liberals in this country to match conservatives, or winning a large supermajority of the moderate votes, Democrats simply cannot win (long term) even the popular vote, let alone institutions such as the Senate or electorate college, which have further Republican biases due to population distribution.
And, all this should be scaring Democratic operatives stiff.
"In “Republicans have changed a lot since 2008,” Matt argued that the Elon Musk/Colin Wright meme depicting a leftward-moving left versus a steady-state right underrated the extent of change in the Republican Party. But contrary to many of the takes online, the Democratic Party has changed, too."
I don't doubt that the formal platform positions of the Democratic party have shifted left from 2012 (although I think the right-leaning nadir of the Dems would've been seen in the 1996-2004 platforms). The key here is the shift in the R party platform between say, 1964 and 2004 and thereafter, which puts the R party over there with the authoritarian populist populist parties such as FN (LePen) and Fidesz (Victor Orban). (Another, minor kick here, is that you guys left out that the R parties platform for 2020 didn't because they refused to to admit what their political positions WERE. The actual platform amounted to a collection of Donald Trump's tweet.)
"The table below summarizes the 2012 and 2020 platforms’ economic planks. The shift on corporate taxes arguably just reflects a change in the underlying policy status quo, but in other areas, you see clear ideological and policy movements in a more ambitiously progressive direction."
Almost all of those shifts are pretty small potatoes. 'Raise the minimum wage to 15$/hr' versus 'Raise the minimum wage and index it to inflation' is a trivial difference, and mooted by our current recovery. Likewise, health care/medical care is a minor shift, completely in line with various ideas that had some support during ACA passage. The shift in positions on union is piddly, same with social security, China, Wall Street reform (you could say there is major difference in attitude rather than official position here), etc. The big shifts are on childcare/pre-K, the corporate tax rate and deficit reduction (the latter two positions represented the last stand of the Atari Democrats).
So we're in rough agreement on that. I just don't see that as representing a big shift or a small shift to the left given that national health care/universal pre-school/stiffer financial regulation were all positions presented *in* *previous* *Democratic* *platforms* that have appeared since the New Deal. The big difference is the hard shift to the right that the D's underwent starting in the late 80's and 90's. No large embrace of socialism, unless you are the sort of person who sees anything to the left of Hoover 1929 as all-encompassing socialism. (And then one would ask how someone like that manages to discern any real differences between Obama 2012 (or 2008!) and Biden 2020.)
"But the shift on criminal justice issues is much broader than that, with the 2020 platform not just expressing awareness that police officers sometimes do bad things but adopting a thoroughgoing skepticism of punishment. Today’s Democrats say that people under 21 should not be sentenced to life without parole and that juvenile records should be automatically sealed and expunged."
Um. People under 21 not being sentenced to life without parole and juvenile records being sealed and expunged was the rough standard for the legal system up to 1985-1995. (Specifically, demanding life without parole for juvies (and the death penalty for juvies) was part of an ongoing panic among the media and cable TV type in the late 80ś and the first half of the 90's. Opposing that is a shift to the left compared to 2012, but that's in the context of how there was a massive shift to the right on those issues during 1985-1995. Essentially the left-leaning position here is return incarceration and policing back to the AHEM 'moderate' standards that prevailed in say, 1985.
If the D's took a position supporting the repeal and/or demolition of the FISA Act of 2008, dismemberment of Patriot Act-related provisions and otherwise opposing the legal regime built during the War on Terror that would be a shift to the left, but said shift would be merely reversing the hard right shift represented by the War on Terror.
"There’s lots of room for debate about whether this was a good idea. But the people who yelled at Elon Musk that he was imagining this leftward transformation are being silly. The fact that DW-NOMINATE scores don’t pick up on it is a limitation of that metric — not to say that it’s wrong, but just that analysis of roll call votes only tells you so much."
Well, yes, the Democrats have shifted left on how they treat, think and talk about race to a position much more aware of the treatment handed out to African-Americans for, oh, I dunno, the entire history of this country. The main effects of this have been in the form of appointing a lot of minorities.
And Musk and a number of Slow Boring commentors (read: 'upper-class and upper-middle class white guys') have reacted by descending into a gibbering racial panic that tap-dances around the minefield of racially-panicked verbiage used during say, the late 60's through the 1980's.
Which manages to range between disgusting, pathetic and hilarious.
"It’s very hard to reason clearly about the world if you don’t start by acknowledging the reality."
Same to you, Matthew: it's very hard to talk about the impact of the discussion of race if you don't acknowledge that was a huge anti-black backlash that started in 1954 and has kept on motoring along the entire time. It's impossible to talk intelligently about it if you cannot acknowledge that political repression, economic deprivation and violent vigilante racial policing was the 'moderate' right-wing standard in the Jim Crow era, and that the legal regime changed massively between 1954 and 1968 or so, and currently various parties are trying to represent a massive shift back in the other direction would represent a hard right shift back in the other direction as some kind of 'moderation'.
The chart titled “A shift in Focus”, capitalized racial categories for all groups....except white people. This is a bad way to view the world. I am largely on board with Dem policies. I am not on board with this. Is there a good argument for doing this?
I was just copying the formatting used in the 2020 platform where white is used in lowercase to denote race and in uppercase as part of “White House.” I don’t have any real views on capitalizing identity/race-related terms.
When the preferred style moved from "black" to "Black", there was discussion among the left on whether to also capitalize "white". Some feel leaving "white" uncapitalized encourages readers to think of "white" as "generic". Others pointed out that white supremacist hate groups had been capitalizing "white" for years, and so it should be left uncapitalized. I don't think the left, at large, ever settled on a consensus; I've seen both styles from equally lefty writers.
Okay, maybe we capitalize Women but not men, Gay or Lesbian but not straight, Trans but not cis. Finding ways to politicize everything we do is great for our society. 🙃
With so many elections being close to 50/50 coin flips, it's confusing to me as someone who believed in a Hotelling/Downs model of trying to capture the median voter in a normally distributed population that both parties are racing toward more polarizing positions as fast as they can and possibly leaving the great center not being fought for. I think this post nails it for the Democratic side, and I'm sure we can show a similar thing for the Republicans.
And it's absolutely clear that the Republicans are becoming more radical. Talking about their moderation on Social Security and Medicare misses the point. Many issues come and go; it's not as if they want to resurrect the Fugitive Slave law and we're not fighting hammer and tongs over Hamilton's public improvement proposals. You aren't more moderate if you drop a lost cause when you take on equally (or more) radical new positions. And it's pretty clear that the Republicans have chosen those new battlefields: trust in institutions, ethnic nationalism, racial divisions, and many others.
My question is whether this highly polarized party approach is mapped onto a normally distributed population, or whether that population as a whole is in turn becoming more radicalized and shifting toward a bimodal distribution, with the center emptying out. If so, we're in big big trouble.
My theory of what's going on is that you imagine politics being some kind of a giant, slow-motion board game. Each time your side passes laws, you get victory points. But, not all laws are equal. In general, the more radical a law is (in either direction) and the more the other side hates it, the more victory points the law is worth. Of course, the laws which tend to be worth more VPs also tend to come with more backlash, which helps propel the other side to power, allowing them, rather than you a shot at earning VP's the next go around.
Meanwhile, laws with bipartisan support provide only minimal VP because they don't come at the expense of the other side; they are only beneficial to the extent that it makes your side look good with swing voters so you have the power to pass the more polarizing stuff later that actually wins you the victory points that eventually win you the game. And, of course, if you are able to gain enough power in the election process to guarantee yourself future wins in every election no matter what backlash your laws cause, it's checkmate.
Under the "board game" model, what the two parties are doing suddenly starts to make a lot of sense. The ultimate goal is not to win control of the country for two years or four years, it's to win The Game. And to win The Game you have to pass, not the boring stuff, but the stuff that makes the other side feel like abject failures for failing to stop it.
By the way, I am very curious if anyone knows of any actual board games like this. If designed correctly, it could be quite interesting.
Totally agree but no mention of immigration? Haven't checked what the two platforms said about it but the actual policy shift has been at least as big as on the cited issues--and it's so damaging politically that Dems up for reelection in swing states are, not surprisingly, rebelling.
Really, not much has changed since 1984 when (left of center) political comic Mark Russell said that the Democratic platform was just six words: “You want it? You got it!”
Dead link: "https://www.slowboring.com/p/%20republicans-have-changed-a-lot-since" in the first paragraph.
Contains an extra space.
Fixed.
My life as a white person embedded in the white culture, privy to unvarnished discussion of the plans and thinking of the individuals in that culture. Well, that - plus the weight of all scholarship in political science and history, which tells us that the reason civic like looks like it does in US is primarily because of our issues around race.
I think it is striking, though not surprising, how utterly lacking in context is this analysis. The Dems 2020 platform was in large part a reaction to the countless ways in which Trump blew up all of the “median” norms that the two parties were essentially working within.
The Republican platform, you may recall, was precisely: “Whatever our dear leader says it is.” The Republican Party had officially embraced a relatively complete pivot away from democracy towards a thuggish autocracy. How does this look in your charting framework? It doesn’t because it’s completely off the charts.
The Dems, in their 2020 platform, were scrambling to put new meat on the bones of previously generic commitments and also to capture and highlight the ways in which the Dem party is about protecting and expanding many specific rights that Trump’s tenure showed us were easily and routinely abrogated. That’s because our civil rights and our public commons were suddenly being overrun by the whims of COVID lies and so many other egregious actions and policies of Trump, DeSantis, MTG, and all of the other right-wing lunatics who have taken over the Republican Party.
So, while Dems might be construed as “moving left” by more directly and broadly standing-up for rights and justice that Trump and the Republicans (and the now right-wing “gerrymandered” SCOTUS, had been just trampling, the Republicans had moved, and continue to move, from a party committed to Democracy, to an authoritarian party committed to Trump and the Trumpian disdain for democratic norms and equal justice under the law. Off the charts altogether.
SO don’t think it isn’t easy to see what all of this analysis in this post amounts to. This sort of analysis is simply an exercise in providing cover for an ongoing insurrection against our country, blaming Democrats trying to stand-up for justice for causing “polarization” that is hurting our nation. Bulls!*T! Trump and Trumpism (with a huge assist from Mitch McConnell) has trampled both Republican and Democratic norms and is leading an authoritarian movement. ANd that’s what is making our politics so nasty, brutish, and full of lies, lies, lies.
Thank goodness were have at least one party willing to stand up for democracy, willing to set high aspirations for liberty, equality, and justice for all -- and act on behalf of other core, shared America values. We are fighting a party that has been captured by extreme elements that act by sowing chaos and disunity, designed to have us devolve into a corrupt, Trumpian dystopia. That’s why Trump wanted the insurrection: He wanted to be able to declare martial law and impose his will.
Well, it ain’t gonna happen. There are more of us than of them and Democracy still has a future that we are willing to fight like hell to achieve.
Two problems with the Democratic Party that come up a lot here are that (a) they are biased toward the preferences of young-ish, college-educated liberals; and (b) the political leaders don't set priorities and fall in line. I would love to talk more about how that can be solved at an institutional level, i.e. what changes in leadership and organizations would be necessary.
One thing I see is that there's a lot of foundation money controlled by program officers who are accountable to a narrow set of folks at their organization, and a lot of that money then goes to nonprofits that are accountable to the foundations and, to some extent, the liberal activists who are very plugged in and engaged. I wonder whether one change that could help is making sure a lot of that money gets distributed to organizations that are measured by their ability to bring in new members or some other metric that involves appeal to a wider population.
Really. What is wrong with you? One party (of now almost exclusively white people) just elected Donald F-ing Trump president, defends storming the Capitol building, has given up on representative democracy all together, is about to throw a woman's right to choose abortion into this anti-democratic shit show of freaked out white people... And you take a -mildly- stronger recognition that race has defined our politics forever - a recognition that many people in the party run from anyway - all in the context of an overall political philosophy of the country that has shifted right - as a shift in the (D) party? Again, I ask. What is wrong with you? You have taken this 'anti-woke' schtick WAY past performance into hateful, callous cartoon.
I wrote most of the article. I am very much aware of the role of race in America.
Yet, 'Democrats have moved left' is the article you chose to write at this moment in history. I'm not sure what your awareness consists of, but at a minimum it lacks perspective, context, proportion, and priority.
It consists of my life as a nonwhite American, among other things. What does yours consist of?
oh Dear Lord, they really do start the 2020 platform with a land acknowledgement. It's a good thing no one reads or remembers these things, or they'd be doing that much more to alienate the median voter. <smh>
It is infuriating to constantly tell Democrats (or Progressives) that, no, the Democratic Party isn't a 'conservative' party.
I dug up the source of the conservative/moderate/liberal chart here: https://news.gallup.com/poll/388988/political-ideology-steady-conservatives-moderates-tie.aspx
The share of Democrats who are conservative is declining, but 12% still far exceeds the share of Republicans who call themselves liberal (4%).
Among independent voters, conservatives outnumber liberals 30% to 20%. Nationwide, conservatives outnumber liberals 37% to 25%.
Assuming conservative Democrats are low-hanging fruit to be brought over to the Republican side, while liberal Republicans are low-hanging fruit to be brought over to the Democratic side, Democrats are in big trouble, because the former group far outnumbers the latter.
Looking at racial breakdowns in the 2021 Gallup poll, things get even more telling. Simply treating all conservatives as Republicans, all liberals as Democrats, and moderates split 50/50 between two parties, we can use the liberal/moderate/conservative stats to crudely estimate how each racial group splits between the two parties. For white voters, it produces a 59/41 split in favor of Republicans, almost exactly matching the results of recent elections. Among Hispanic voters, this calculation produces a 50/50 split, right down the middle. Among blacks voters, the calculation favors Democrats, but only by 55/45, not the 88/12 margins among them Democrats are used to.
In other words, Democrat's ability to have a majority at all lies on the backs, not of liberal voters, but of conservative nonwhite voters siding with Democrats because of their race, even if they disagree with their politics. Recent trends have started to show a shift of black and Hispanic voters towards the GOP. If these trends are the result of people voting their ideology, rather than their race (as election data show white voters have been doing all along), the long term future for Democrats is losing white voters 60/40, breaking even 50/50 among Hispanic voters, and winning black voters by just 55/45. Even if blacks and Hispanics make up an increasingly larger percentage of the electorate going forward, these numbers still point to a large Republican majority looming in the future.
Without either increasing the number of liberals in this country to match conservatives, or winning a large supermajority of the moderate votes, Democrats simply cannot win (long term) even the popular vote, let alone institutions such as the Senate or electorate college, which have further Republican biases due to population distribution. And, this should be scaring Democratic operatives stiff.
I dug up the source of the conservative/moderate/liberal chart here: https://news.gallup.com/poll/388988/political-ideology-steady-conservatives-moderates-tie.aspx
The share of Democrats who are conservative is declining, but 12% still far exceeds the share of Republicans who call themselves liberal (4%).
Among independent voters, conservatives outnumber liberals 30% to 20%. Nationwide, conservatives outnumber liberals 37% to 25%.
Assuming conservative Democrats are low-hanging fruit to be brought over to the Republican side, while liberal Republicans are low-hanging fruit to be brought over to the Democratic side, Democrats are in big trouble, because the former group far outnumbers the latter.
Looking at racial breakdowns in the 2021 Gallup poll, things get even more telling. Simply treating all conservatives as Republicans, all liberals as Democrats, and moderates split 50/50 between two parties, we can use the liberal/moderate/conservative stats to crudely estimate how each racial group splits between the two parties. For white voters, it produces a 59/41 split in favor of Republicans, almost exactly matching the results of recent elections. Among Hispanic voters, this calculation produces a 50/50 split, right down the middle. Among blacks voters, the calculation favors Democrats, but only by 55/45, not the 88/12 margins among them Democrats are used to.
In other words, Democrat's ability to have a majority at all lies on the backs, not of liberal voters, but of conservative nonwhite voters siding with Democrats because of their race, even if they disagree with their politics. Recent trends have started to show a shift of black and Hispanic voters towards the GOP. If these trends are the result of people voting their ideology, rather than their race (as election data show white voters have been doing all along), the long term future for Democrats is losing white voters 60/40, breaking even 50/50 among Hispanic voters, and winning black voters by just 55/45. Even if blacks and Hispanics make up an increasingly larger percentage of the electorate going forward, these numbers still point to a large Republican majority looming in the future.
Without either increasing the number of liberals in this country to match conservatives, or winning a large supermajority of the moderate votes, Democrats simply cannot win (long term) even the popular vote, let alone institutions such as the Senate or electorate college, which have further Republican biases due to population distribution.
And, all this should be scaring Democratic operatives stiff.
"In “Republicans have changed a lot since 2008,” Matt argued that the Elon Musk/Colin Wright meme depicting a leftward-moving left versus a steady-state right underrated the extent of change in the Republican Party. But contrary to many of the takes online, the Democratic Party has changed, too."
I don't doubt that the formal platform positions of the Democratic party have shifted left from 2012 (although I think the right-leaning nadir of the Dems would've been seen in the 1996-2004 platforms). The key here is the shift in the R party platform between say, 1964 and 2004 and thereafter, which puts the R party over there with the authoritarian populist populist parties such as FN (LePen) and Fidesz (Victor Orban). (Another, minor kick here, is that you guys left out that the R parties platform for 2020 didn't because they refused to to admit what their political positions WERE. The actual platform amounted to a collection of Donald Trump's tweet.)
"The table below summarizes the 2012 and 2020 platforms’ economic planks. The shift on corporate taxes arguably just reflects a change in the underlying policy status quo, but in other areas, you see clear ideological and policy movements in a more ambitiously progressive direction."
Almost all of those shifts are pretty small potatoes. 'Raise the minimum wage to 15$/hr' versus 'Raise the minimum wage and index it to inflation' is a trivial difference, and mooted by our current recovery. Likewise, health care/medical care is a minor shift, completely in line with various ideas that had some support during ACA passage. The shift in positions on union is piddly, same with social security, China, Wall Street reform (you could say there is major difference in attitude rather than official position here), etc. The big shifts are on childcare/pre-K, the corporate tax rate and deficit reduction (the latter two positions represented the last stand of the Atari Democrats).
So we're in rough agreement on that. I just don't see that as representing a big shift or a small shift to the left given that national health care/universal pre-school/stiffer financial regulation were all positions presented *in* *previous* *Democratic* *platforms* that have appeared since the New Deal. The big difference is the hard shift to the right that the D's underwent starting in the late 80's and 90's. No large embrace of socialism, unless you are the sort of person who sees anything to the left of Hoover 1929 as all-encompassing socialism. (And then one would ask how someone like that manages to discern any real differences between Obama 2012 (or 2008!) and Biden 2020.)
"But the shift on criminal justice issues is much broader than that, with the 2020 platform not just expressing awareness that police officers sometimes do bad things but adopting a thoroughgoing skepticism of punishment. Today’s Democrats say that people under 21 should not be sentenced to life without parole and that juvenile records should be automatically sealed and expunged."
Um. People under 21 not being sentenced to life without parole and juvenile records being sealed and expunged was the rough standard for the legal system up to 1985-1995. (Specifically, demanding life without parole for juvies (and the death penalty for juvies) was part of an ongoing panic among the media and cable TV type in the late 80ś and the first half of the 90's. Opposing that is a shift to the left compared to 2012, but that's in the context of how there was a massive shift to the right on those issues during 1985-1995. Essentially the left-leaning position here is return incarceration and policing back to the AHEM 'moderate' standards that prevailed in say, 1985.
If the D's took a position supporting the repeal and/or demolition of the FISA Act of 2008, dismemberment of Patriot Act-related provisions and otherwise opposing the legal regime built during the War on Terror that would be a shift to the left, but said shift would be merely reversing the hard right shift represented by the War on Terror.
"There’s lots of room for debate about whether this was a good idea. But the people who yelled at Elon Musk that he was imagining this leftward transformation are being silly. The fact that DW-NOMINATE scores don’t pick up on it is a limitation of that metric — not to say that it’s wrong, but just that analysis of roll call votes only tells you so much."
Well, yes, the Democrats have shifted left on how they treat, think and talk about race to a position much more aware of the treatment handed out to African-Americans for, oh, I dunno, the entire history of this country. The main effects of this have been in the form of appointing a lot of minorities.
And Musk and a number of Slow Boring commentors (read: 'upper-class and upper-middle class white guys') have reacted by descending into a gibbering racial panic that tap-dances around the minefield of racially-panicked verbiage used during say, the late 60's through the 1980's.
Which manages to range between disgusting, pathetic and hilarious.
"It’s very hard to reason clearly about the world if you don’t start by acknowledging the reality."
Same to you, Matthew: it's very hard to talk about the impact of the discussion of race if you don't acknowledge that was a huge anti-black backlash that started in 1954 and has kept on motoring along the entire time. It's impossible to talk intelligently about it if you cannot acknowledge that political repression, economic deprivation and violent vigilante racial policing was the 'moderate' right-wing standard in the Jim Crow era, and that the legal regime changed massively between 1954 and 1968 or so, and currently various parties are trying to represent a massive shift back in the other direction would represent a hard right shift back in the other direction as some kind of 'moderation'.
elm
really not sure what you're doing here
I agree in general, but a lot is just making explicit vaguer language, spelling out what common sense gun law reform means, for example.
Still, this IS informative.
The chart titled “A shift in Focus”, capitalized racial categories for all groups....except white people. This is a bad way to view the world. I am largely on board with Dem policies. I am not on board with this. Is there a good argument for doing this?
I was just copying the formatting used in the 2020 platform where white is used in lowercase to denote race and in uppercase as part of “White House.” I don’t have any real views on capitalizing identity/race-related terms.
No worries. Those with real views have successfully imbedded this into the system.
When the preferred style moved from "black" to "Black", there was discussion among the left on whether to also capitalize "white". Some feel leaving "white" uncapitalized encourages readers to think of "white" as "generic". Others pointed out that white supremacist hate groups had been capitalizing "white" for years, and so it should be left uncapitalized. I don't think the left, at large, ever settled on a consensus; I've seen both styles from equally lefty writers.
Okay, maybe we capitalize Women but not men, Gay or Lesbian but not straight, Trans but not cis. Finding ways to politicize everything we do is great for our society. 🙃
Stop talking about Jesus unless you recognize that Jesus was interested in ALL the poor, not just those of color. So was MLK, in his last years.
With so many elections being close to 50/50 coin flips, it's confusing to me as someone who believed in a Hotelling/Downs model of trying to capture the median voter in a normally distributed population that both parties are racing toward more polarizing positions as fast as they can and possibly leaving the great center not being fought for. I think this post nails it for the Democratic side, and I'm sure we can show a similar thing for the Republicans.
And it's absolutely clear that the Republicans are becoming more radical. Talking about their moderation on Social Security and Medicare misses the point. Many issues come and go; it's not as if they want to resurrect the Fugitive Slave law and we're not fighting hammer and tongs over Hamilton's public improvement proposals. You aren't more moderate if you drop a lost cause when you take on equally (or more) radical new positions. And it's pretty clear that the Republicans have chosen those new battlefields: trust in institutions, ethnic nationalism, racial divisions, and many others.
My question is whether this highly polarized party approach is mapped onto a normally distributed population, or whether that population as a whole is in turn becoming more radicalized and shifting toward a bimodal distribution, with the center emptying out. If so, we're in big big trouble.
My theory of what's going on is that you imagine politics being some kind of a giant, slow-motion board game. Each time your side passes laws, you get victory points. But, not all laws are equal. In general, the more radical a law is (in either direction) and the more the other side hates it, the more victory points the law is worth. Of course, the laws which tend to be worth more VPs also tend to come with more backlash, which helps propel the other side to power, allowing them, rather than you a shot at earning VP's the next go around.
Meanwhile, laws with bipartisan support provide only minimal VP because they don't come at the expense of the other side; they are only beneficial to the extent that it makes your side look good with swing voters so you have the power to pass the more polarizing stuff later that actually wins you the victory points that eventually win you the game. And, of course, if you are able to gain enough power in the election process to guarantee yourself future wins in every election no matter what backlash your laws cause, it's checkmate.
Under the "board game" model, what the two parties are doing suddenly starts to make a lot of sense. The ultimate goal is not to win control of the country for two years or four years, it's to win The Game. And to win The Game you have to pass, not the boring stuff, but the stuff that makes the other side feel like abject failures for failing to stop it.
By the way, I am very curious if anyone knows of any actual board games like this. If designed correctly, it could be quite interesting.
I would also be interested in this game. The closest I can think of is Secret Hitler, but it's only vaguely in the same ballpark.
Rules:
https://www.secrethitler.com/assets/Secret_Hitler_Rules.pdf
Example of game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9Wb0sc5Ft8
Totally agree but no mention of immigration? Haven't checked what the two platforms said about it but the actual policy shift has been at least as big as on the cited issues--and it's so damaging politically that Dems up for reelection in swing states are, not surprisingly, rebelling.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/05/mayorkass-claim-that-undocumented-immigrants-are-promptly-removed/
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/22/biden-title-42-fallout-00027109
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/23/politics/democrats-biden-title-42-immigration-border/index.html
Really, not much has changed since 1984 when (left of center) political comic Mark Russell said that the Democratic platform was just six words: “You want it? You got it!”