I’ve only seen one interview with Tim Scott. He came across as an arrogant dick head, if you ask me. I can’t recall who it was he was interviewing with, but it was right after his announcement to run. He was so rude and condescending.
Did not like him at all.
Not that any republican would ever get my vote, but I was trying to see if he seemed like a reasonable one or not. Not.
It would be sad if all the moderates were always extinct. As long as there’s not some big crisis in their respective districts, I’d vote for the dullest candidates. They would have to be boring though like cabinet members or military department heads. But they are unknown. Eg i would’ve voted for Condi Rice, Janet Yellen, members of the Black Caucus or Rep AOC from Brooklyn, or even my sister a city council member. None would run now so I’ll have to vote for Trump/Biden instead, for Pete’s sake.
This doesn’t seem to match with this
Because (leaving aside Trump), Biden is the most moderate, boring candidate in years. That’s why he’s rather unpopular with the more activist members of the Democrat Party - he doesn’t push hard for a ‘liberal’ agenda, and has instead largely focused on unity, a return to norms of good government, and the like.
Admittedly, with Trump and his ilk pushing everything on their side to extremes, they’ve made the “moderates” look like radicals from a certain Kenobian POV. But perhaps I’m misunderstanding your point. Certainly, Biden would be far from my first choice in a perfect world, but finding him too energetic / exciting / non-dull doesn’t even come across my radar as a problem for him.
I think I get what you’re saying about the President’s unifying motivation and other purposes he has. I want to apologize for seeming disrespectful of the U.S. choice of presidential candidates. I know realistically I have to back Biden or else Trump will be ellected.
I just got frustrated because US candidates are a tight demographic tho it could easily be different if voters looked further afield. There are politicos of other ethnicities and genders who have political organizational skills, long term follow-through and other important presidential attributes. I know they have no support from PACs and donors.
Overall I was saying people like us can think of these other-ethnic and -gendered candidates and describe them to future voters so the new candidates can receive backing in the near future. I like that goal. I think we can subtly get there and have maybe even some newly moderate candidates 10, 15 or 20 yrs down the road.
It’s not all imaginary. I volunteer 8 hrs a week with political interns who waste their time doing the same in a lot of US states. I know it’s a waste of our lives and it’s dismissed of course. I’m not pushing it on anybody who wouldn’t care anyway.
If moderate means not trying to push legislation which is certain to be voted down in Congress, Biden is moderate. But he is no centrist, in the sense of advocating positions popular in his party a lot of the time, while often championing the GOP position.
In my view, a moderate Republican, who doesn’t introduce wacky legislation, and talks about the wonders of bipartisanship – while almost always voting with their party – is only slighly better than a winger. What I want are centrist Republicans. And not only are we far from centrist Republicans taking control, we are far from centrist Republicans even existing (except at the local level, where we do have, in Pennsylvania, some quietly centrist Republican judges on lower courts).
I know she didn’t vote centrist when representing her constituents in heavily conservative Wyoming, but I suspect that Liz Cheney is, at heart, a centrist. We see how far admitting to that, on just one significiant issue, got her.
I don’t think this is by any means a common definition of moderate. IMHO - moderates (of any side) generally favor the general policies of their own party, but may act in a more measured pace in terms of implementing change - a matter of degree and speed. They also tend to be more willing to embrace realpolitik in that they will compromise on some issues, to make a greater advance on others, or, as in the case of the debt ceiling, compromise in order to allow the system to continue to function.
There are also examples closer to your POV, in that they may side primarily with one party’s beliefs, but have a single issue or group of issues that they’re outsiders on. For example, socially liberal Republicans of the past who were pro LGBQT+ positive (or at least not actively hostile) while still being fiscally conservative. Although in some cases these individuals may also be also engaging in realpolitik (such as Democrats in rural areas / states who don’t push Gun Control).
As for Cheney, I strongly disagree, she’s not a centrist by any stretch of the imagination. What she can and has done, was a respect for the basic rule of law. IE she wanted to punish Trump who actively and repeatedly set about to destroy the structure of the nation in order to preserve his own personal power and pride. That’s not centrist, that’s being a realist. But in the current GQP, reality is something to be scorned, over loyalty and a religious-style faith in their own infallibility and righteousness. And thus the purge.
Which brings us back to the OP. The moderates are retired, reduced to RINO status, or are below the national stage. The extreme loyalty tests (I’m just waiting to see how many of those who voted on the the debt issues get primaried) and fear of the rabid MAGA base have left those who aren’t true believers to be at best quiet enablers.
Fair enough.
When there really were long-serving congressional centrists — members who got close-to 50 percent ratings from both conservative and liberal interest groups — centrist = moderate. But now that there are no real centrists in congress, the least extreme are called moderates.
As for Cheney bring a centrist, I didn’t check as carefully as I might have before posting earlier. But I just checked her twitter feed, and she may now the very model of a centrist. On the one hand, she still says she’s a conservative. On the other, her excursion away from the GOP farm now goes beyond opposition to Trump:
There’s nothing there that’s a departure from hard right policies.
EVERY Republican in office will say we need to address gun violence in our society.
It’s just that when it comes time to vote or propose any bills that might, ya know, actually do anything, suddenly the votes dry up. See: Ted Cruz
Liz Cheney has always been pretty significantly to the right and I’ve yet to see anything to indicate that has changed or ever will. As above, her significant departure from the party was her basic respect for the rule of law and inability/lack of desire to worship at the altar of Trump.
She’s spent decades telling us who she is. It’s well past time to take her at her word rather than projecting our desires on her.
Without making a formal public announcement, moderate Republicans have left the party. A few remain, mostly out of cluelessness, some out of habit, some out of the deep-rooted shame in admitting that their lifetime-long voting patterns were at odds with what they believe, or any decent human being believes.
The vast majority of GOP voters over my lifetime, say the past sixty years, were in their hearts, racists and xenophobes, opposed to women’s rights, gay rights, and basic human rights–a good word for them might be “deplorables.” The decent ones, the self-aware GOP pols and voters, had to pander to this base in order to win elections, and they were successful at this magic act, gaining the votes of dunderheads, simpletons, yahoos, rednecks, and yokels while only sometimes giving them the political support they demanded. Sometimes the deplorables would triumph, but mostly they were frustrated with the elites who ran their party and who ran them.
Until Trump. He decided that since the deplorables were in the majority, he could break with traditional GOP leadership and actually give the deplorables what they wanted, an openly racist thug as POTUS, and they adore him for it. The moderates, a minority in their party, voted for him in 2016 because decades of reviling Democrats on principle left them without a viable choice, and slightly fewer voted for him in 2020 because they began to extract their heads from their netherregions.
The fact is that something like 30-40% of the voters in this country are irredeemable racist deplorables who longer have a GOP that pays them lip service but rather which espouses their deepest, foulest beliefs, and the other 10-20% that we call moderate Republicans or Independents are split between their old voting patterns and not voting at all, with some going as far as to hold their noses and vote for a Democrat on occasion.
But there is no going back for them, as far as the GOP is concerned. There is no longer a GOP that they can hope to control–there is only the party of deplorables, and the party of Democrats. They are not comfortable in either, and both parties are mistrustful of them.
I should have been clearer that I was referring to her opposition to book banning. This is in opposition to the current GOP near-obsession with trans issues. I can’t find any recent unambigous statements telling me whether or not she has evolved on guns.
As for taking her at her word, when you hold statewide office in Wyoming, you are going to tailor your views to those of your constituents on either every issue, or almost every issue. If you do it on almost every issue, then you are, like her, a courageous politician.
Think about Barack Obama’s unflinching oppostion to same-sex marriage as recently as 2008. He didn’t change his mind. His constituents changed their minds as to what was in range of acceptability.
As for the GOP, if they started to lose elections pretty consistently because of it, they would moderate on trans issues as well. But the problem is – they are still winning about half the time.
EDIT: Just found something on guns. She was one of fourteen GOP House members who voted yes for a Democratic gun control bill on June 24, 2022. This actually was before she lost her primary, although after it was obvious she would lose. It might not have been a strong gun control bill, and doesn’t make her a centrist on guns, but it’s going in that direction.
That bill was not a “gun control” bill, it was your typical “the real issue here is mental health” dodge. When given the chance the very next month to vote on an assault weapon ban, she voted no.
When 95 percent of House Republicans were on one side (first bill), she was with the Democrats.
When 99 percent of House Republicans were on one side (second bill), she was indeed with the Republicans. But even the second bill was being voted on before her primary, when she still representing super-conservative Wyoming.
I get that she is someone progressives, as well as conservatives, have made up their mind about:
So, in terms of the thread title question, it certainly gives NO as the answer. Not only are moderates unable to regain power, the very few possibly moderate national figures aren’t even able to be listened to – by either side.
They may need to show some better atoning for having enabled the rise of the deplorables, being only too happy to cheer them on just so they could use their votes to support their precious tax cuts, rollbacks of protective regulation, and judge appointments.
Is this both-sidesism?
Why should Dems pay attention to hardline GOPers, even after they’ve been turned out of their own party for excessive sanity? I don’t say to reject them entirely, but they seem to expect being put into leadership positions just for coming to their senses and recognizing that they were surrounded by maddened rattlesnakes who have no one’s best interests at heart. Goody for you, come join us, support our candidates, vote for us, but don’t expect us to treat you like a guru for abandoning the snakepit you occupied gladly for decades.
My first thought is that they then wouldn’t be moderate Republicans – they would be Democrats. Fine. Nothing wrong with an individual changing parties! However, I still want a multi-party system, and I don’t see either party going away.
My second thought was that Hillary Clinton, to her credit, atoned the next day:
If Cheney has directly insulted progressives, yes, it would be nice for her to apologize. But requiring Republicans to atone before they can be officially deemed moderate doen’t sit right with me. YMMV.
One might as well ask “Is now the time for moderate Republicans to try to flap their arms and fly to the moon?”
I doubt there’s a moderate Republican actually involved in politics who’s much under the age of 70.
The wackos have been breeding (inbreeding?) at the lower levels of the party for a very long time now. And working their way steadily up to the highest reaches of Federal office.
Gingrich’s Contract On America was issued 30 years(!) ago next year. And at the time represented the “new” = regressive thinking of the then-Young Turks at the Federal level. Who were in their 40s and 50s then. Damn near nobody of a less radical bent has been able to exist above the level of city dog-catcher in the R party since.
It took them 30-40 years to paint themselves this far into the Reactionary Wacko wilderness. It’ll take either a revolution or another 30 or 40 years of electoral failure to drag them back to the “center” as it was known in the 1980s. It seems implausible at least to me that the Reactionary Wacko party will peacefully accept 30 or 40 years in the electoral wilderness. They are certain enough their policies are correct and their cause is righteous that they will kick over the chess board before they will accept the need to change to win.
Joe Bidens gun control bill passed congress.The House of Representatives passed the bipartisan bill on gun safety 234-193. Which means some Republicans voted for it.
That;s the one.
Nope. It tightened up background checks, and increased enforcement vs strawman dealers. Sure, the mental health issues were included, but some solid gains were made.
And a “assault weapon ban” is not a bill that will, in your words “might, ya know, actually do anything”. Only around 2% of all murder in the USA are committed by all types of rifles. The best such a ban could do is reduce homicides rates by 1%, which really isnt significant. Mind you, I do not oppose such a ban, but dont get the idea it is some sort of effective murder/violence suppression law.
Many are just ignorant. And note that the left keeps moving the goalposts. Sure, for over a hundred years being a racist has been wrong. But then being bigoted vs gays was wrong. Then being old fashioned and saying “a woman is a woman” is wrong.
And the GOP kinda had to embrace the deplorables, since it was losing the war for voters. Their classic Vote straight Republican ticket" conservative voter is dying off.
Exactly.
Over a hundred years? That’s laughably false. Insultingly false in fact.
I suspect that the context was “considered to be wrong by a majority of society,” not “is morally wrong.”