That twitter user adopts it because it’s a snarl term. He notes that there’s a long history of that sort of re-appropriation.
Which is great for a twitter account. Not so much for general usage. The point remains though: there’s a huge ideological territory encompassing the Democrats, but excluding those who reject the scientific consensus on evolution and global warming, while embracing crackpot economic theories. This pro-scientific territory covered both parties prior to 1978: folks like the Know-nothings existed but were marginalized.
The three lawmakers in Kansas who have switched parties are by no means conservative, so perhaps this post doesn’t belong in this thread. But I think it’s telling that even in Very Red Kansas there are defectors from the right-wing ideology that is dominating the Republican party.
I can’t remember the last time a state legislator went from red to blue. Far more often than not in recent years it’s been the other way around, unfortunately.
The switches are consistent with the voting patterns we are seeing. Suburbs are increasingly becoming Democratic; rural areas are identifying as Republican, especially in the South, where it has taken this long for some old-line Democrats to accept that their ideology simply isn’t part of the Democratic Party’s views anymore.
If your thread title said that some liberal Republicans are leaving the party, I would agree. In what universe are the people you mentioned conservative? How are LBGTQ issues and ignoring ICE detainers conservative? How is hatred of Kavanaugh conservative?
Over the past 30 years, my views have gone from Moderate Left to Flaming Liberal. Thing is, my views haven’t changed that much.
What’s changed is how so-called Conservatives now frame the conversation. It has moved so far to the right, it puts rational, reasonable folks on both sides of the center much further to the left. I view most of the people in septimus’s list as being formerly Moderate Right (Steve Schmidt, David Jolly, e.g.) or just a bit further (Joe Scarborough, George Will, e.g.). But none of them ever swallowed the Bat Shit Crazy Alt Right perspective – which is now characterized as “Conservative.”
If John Kasich is the new definition of a “Moderate Conservative,” well, that’s crazy talk.
Since he is a regular op-ed columnist in the Times, I read David Brooks regularly. He fits into the David Frum mold pretty well and is probably less of a right winger than George Will. As much as he is a never-Trumper, he still does not seem to recognize, for example, that supply-side economics has never worked and likely never will work. He has described himself as a protege of Wm. Buckley. Buckley went to his grave claiming that McCarthy was a great American patriot and Brooks has, AFAIK, never said otherwise. I don’t know how Brooks feels about gay issues, but he is generally a perfect example of the intellectual poverty of the conservative movement.
[off-topic] David Brooks is a pretentious, irritating, low-IQ twit. He once wrote an article complaining that Universities hired too few “conservative professors.” (Creationists for the biology department? Climate deniers for geology? Austrian gold bugs for economics?). Uhhh, Brooksie: Teaching is a way of giving to society. Conservatives are takers.
Brooks complained when people insulted GWB, the dolt duped into a foolish war. Give Brooks a little credit — he was self-aware enough to recall that during the Clinton years he was unable to write a column without insulting Bill or his wife. Only now, he “realized that was wrong.”
On Martin Luther King’s birthday, Brooks wrote a column praising the GOP as the Party of Civil Rights. I read these columns while subscribed to the New York Times International Edition. They had a generous “vacation” policy —stop the paper for a week, and an extra week would be tacked on to extend the subscription. I told them I wanted to be on vacation whenever they published a David Brooks column.
The Republican Party continues to consist of the set of all "true conservatives. It’s just that the circle containing “true conservatives” is getting smaller and smaller and circles a different space than it used to.
Brooks has been writing a series of columns about how we need civility and why the parties should come together. He talks about the faulty ways Republicans look at the world … and never, ever, even once does bigotry and racism and intolerance get mentioned. Never. It’s an astounding high-wire performance. He’s the Philippe Petit of columnists.
) views, now encourages his readers to vote Democratic.