Are we going to argue about precise timeframes now? What I showed is that four decades ago the kinds of legislation that today’s Republicans would vociferously condemn in no uncertain terms, as they have with the ACA, were part of mainstream Republican thought. QED.
Tracing these changes year by year is obviously more difficult, though the previously linked cites make some effort to do so; as with all gradual changes, they’re characterized by the cumulative effect of small changes that often pass unnoticed. I would argue that the most dramatic change in recent years occurred as a conservative backlash to the election of Obama, symbolized by the rise of the so-called Tea Party and the prominence of lunatics like Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, Michelle Bachmann, Rand Paul, and others. That this has occurred despite the fact that Obama is arguably the most conservative Democrat in living memory speaks volumes about the present political climate.
Not really. I guess we can ask septimus what he meant by “recent decades”, but I’m assuming it means “since the 1980s”. Would anyone say “in recent decades, we’ve seen the US end it’s involvement in the Vietnam War”.
But also keep in mind that one party often opposes proposals made by the other party’s president simply for partisan reasons. Is that not the meme concerning the current GOP— oppose anything Obama proposes, just because he proposes it? That is not to say the same GOP would oppose a similar policy if proposed by President Romney. It’s also unclear to me that the proposal Nixon made was equivalent to the ~ 2,000 page ACA, with all it’s rules and regulations. Or, that it would have passed a Republican Controlled Congress (or a Democratic controlled Congress, for that matter).
Like I said earlier, you need to focus on party platform or actual legislation if you want to prove one party has moved in one direction or another.
Party platforms may be their “official” stance but has either party really adhered to their platform in practice?
In short the platform is a showpiece that neither side comes close to implementing. As such I do not think it is something you can hang you hat on and use as an indication of either party’s goals. It is marketing.
You’re right. I should have suggesting using “actual legislation” also.
But I think party platforms can be useful, in that they do change over time, and when they do, they can indicate a shift. They’re not perfect, but they are good data points.
Very interesting, although I find the original analysis to be quite a stretch. Still, when filtered thru the paper’s fact checking process, there does seem to be some truth to the claim, even if the chief person quoted put a pretty big caveat on the analysis:
But I can do the same comparison to the GOP platform of 1964 and reach pretty much the same conclusion. That Platform looks oddly “modern”, in the sense of looking a lot like the GOP of today. Here’s the opening themes:
I think one weakness we can see in these platforms is that, as political statements, their content depends to some degree on whether there is a Republican or Democrat in the WH. With a Democrat in the WH, they focus on the 'bad" things the president has done, but with a Republican in the WH, the focus in on the “good” things the president has done.
It’s silly to argue about whether we should be measuring from the 80s rather than from the 70s as in my example, or from the 50s or from the 90s. Increasing conservatism on many issues can be seen using almost any of those times as starting points, though the contrast between the present and the 60s and 70s is probably the most dramatic.
Are you still trying to argue that an ongoing shift to the right has not been happening over the past 5 decades or so despite all the evidence, and despite the particularly visible changes during the Obama era, and the prominence of some of the hard-right extremists that currently infest American politics? That someone like Ted Cruz is seriously contemplating a presidential run is just mind boggling to any sane moderate on either side of the aisle.
As for Romney, you may recall that he was desperately trying to distance himself from Romneycare – the health care reform policy that Republicans wanted from President Romney was a complete repeal of the ACA, which is just what he promised them. And as for Nixon’s plan, you don’t have to take the cited article’s interpretation to understand that it was much like the ACA – you can read Nixon’s own words. Any Republican who dared say anything like that today would be run out of town!
Back to the money in politics issue… from the POV of someone who is not in either big tent party, the money is a bad thing. As a liberal, yes, I am more annoyed by the koch contributions than the Bloomberg contributions, but only marginally. I am highly annoyed that some people get to hsve more influence in a democracy because they have more money.
While I am an idealist at heart, I am also a pragmatist. In our current situation, I have the options of my vote being ignored (voting 3rd party) or voting for the party that openly panders to the rich-white-straight-Christians, or voting for the party that still pretends to like the little guy, given those choices I will vote for the more reasonable side.
Do I dislike the current dems? Hell yes! Do I like everything that Obama has done? No, but I do think that he has done things that McCain and Romney would not have done. I think Obama has minimized our involvement in ME wars - McCain would have tried to get us in a ground war in Iran by now. Would I prefer someone who was even more of a peacenik? Yes, but given the options in the last few elections, I voted for the dem. I am also convinced that a Gore presidency would have taken the threat of AQ seriously and had a much better chance of stopping 9/11. And even if 9/11 had still happened under Gore, I seriously doubt he would have gone to war in Iraq.
Ideally I would like to make the law so that only real people who can vote in a given election can contribute to it, and make that limited to around $500 to $1,000 total political contributions per person, per year, fully refundable on taxes for those that make less than median income. I would also like some form of proportional representation for legislators in multiple position races (get rid of districts for Representatives in states), and instant runoff for executives and other single position elections (like the single seat senate elections) - I think that would give 3rd parties a chance and allow those of us on the fringes to be heard. There is about zero chance that any reforms in my preferred direction will take place while we have unlimited campaign contributions.
So, given that the “other” side is taking big money, I am ok with the people closer to “my” side taking money for reasons of balance, but I would prefer it if there were much less money in politics over all.
Also, “Whack-a-mole” is the perfect screen name for this argument with goal-post-moving John Mace. I still think that the statement “the major parties have moved to the right over the last few decades” is consistent with pointing out more liberal platforms of the past 40 or 60 years and comparing them to the more conservative platforms of today, but I may be misunderstanding the terms “move” , “right”, and “decades”. Please post a cite that I am missing the meanings of those words.
The dilemma presented is imaginary. Your one vote is ignored no matter for whom you vote. And if you counter with “my one vote may be ignored, but in aggregate with other similar votes it isn’t”, then that is just as true if you voted for 3rd party and so did the others who think like you.
I’m not sure what you believe you’re refuting here since DagNation has a perfectly valid point, namely that third parties frequently cause vote splitting when there are two major close candidates, usually affecting one of them disproportionately, and it can affect the outcome of an election. Al Gore may well have been President if Ralph Nader had stayed home and written another book instead of meddling in the election.
My comment was badly phrased. I was adding to what he said about a third party vote being ignored, namely that it’s worse than just being ignored, it can skew the election by drawing votes away from the mainstream candidates in a disproportionate way.
Your statement was “The dilemma presented is imaginary. Your one vote is ignored no matter for whom you vote.” No, the dilemma is quite real. There is a good and valid reason for not voting for a dark horse third party. It’s an unfortunate Catch-22 in a two-party system, but it’s not “imaginary”.
A conservative is someone who believes that change must happen slowly, a reactionary is someone who believes change just be undone to a previous arrangement.
I don’t think there is or will be a GOP candidate in this cycle that doesn’t want to roll back plenty of laws in existence for decades.
You’re playing a ridiculous semantic game. I didn’t say anything about “winning by one vote”. In the real world of American politics as presently constituted, third-party candidates are almost always dark horses with zero chance of being elected. Voting for such a candidate is at best throwing away your vote. At worst, it might help elect the candidate farthest removed from your ideology. The two-party system is problematic that way. A dilemma, you might say. And not imaginary. Whatever it is you’re trying to rationalize is just argumentative nonsense.
What is problematic is the fact that a candidate could win by one vote. What would that even mean? It would mean that half the district/state voted against the winner, so half the voters are disappointed or pissed off, but fundamentally unrepresented. In my district, I might as well not even bother, because my rep, my state senator and my state reps will all be from the other party. Which basically means I get no direct representation. Taking the money out of the game is not going to fix that.
I did not say that, but I do happen to agree that Ralph Nader, along with out-of-state ballot counters, and other shenanigans, probably caused Gore to not win 2000. On the other hand, Perot voters in 92 handed that election to Clinton, and I am OK with that.
I agree, but getting the money out would be a good step toward making our representatives represent the voters and not the big money. Big money probably helped to create the worst of the gerrymandered districts in the 2010 cycle. So getting the big money influence out of gerrymandering is one way that you could see a real improvement in your representation.
I think that we could have much better representation with big money removed from politics, combined with a much larger House (and possibly Senate) that are elected through some combination of proportional representation and instant runoff. The first one is being discussed in the media and this thread, the rest is my fringe beliefs.
The discussion on the table is money, so I don’t want to hijack any more than I already have. Money is bad, m’kay?
In the short term, probably not. But let’s look at some interesting data from this article that I linked previously on the particular demographic that votes for a particular other party:
So let me cynically go out on a limb here and try to generalize the demographic that votes Republican, keeping in mind that, as the article is careful to point out, correlation doesn’t imply causation. A small part of this demographic is the wealthy, small in numbers but great in influence, who do so out of obvious self-interest. But what about the rest of the masses? The data seem to imply that they are:
(a) religious (willing to take things on faith, without evidence or critical thinking),
(b) less educated (less informed),
(c) less diverse (less exposed to to different cultures and ideas),
(d) more likely to be blue-collar than knowledge-based professionals (combining the attributes of less informed and less exposed to different ideas), and
(e) less affluent (yet their views inexplicably align with the wealthy patrons of the conservative ideology, directly against their own best interests).
Call me a cynic or call me devil’s advocate or just call me names – because this is not a kind view of Republicans – but this does seem to build a picture of gullible low-information voters being connived into supporting an ideology that favors a select few but not themselves, and is manifestly contrary to their own self-interest. They are, as Arthur Laffer might say, waiting for wealth and good fortune to “trickle down” on them. They’ve been waiting since the Reagan administration. During that time the gap between rich and poor has grown ever wider, the 1% ever wealthier, executive salaries have hit astronomical levels, and the middle class has stagnated. Many lost their homes during the housing fiasco. Millions still don’t have health care. Last I saw, Republicans were handing out new tax breaks to corporations while cutting food stamps.
Now here’s the $64,000 question in all this. Why? How did this bizarre situation come about where the members of a particular demographic characterized by poor education and low information have have aligned themselves with the wealthy, and most importantly, what has been the role of big money in politics and in shaping political discourse in creating this state of affairs? I maintain it has been absolutely front and center.
To be sure, there are certainly supportable conservative principles and certainly intelligent moderate conservatives who aren’t necessarily wealthy. But I challenge anyone to prove that there isn’t a fundamental truth in the above.
