Am I right? And does it even matter? I have been thinking about what the two parties now stand for, and what the candidates talked about during the campaigns:
Kamala Harris - Her policies would run up far less debt than Trump. More free and open trade. More belief in democracy. Still belief in alliances with other democratic nations. Policies targeted assisting small business. Policies to help home-buyers. We believe in vaccines. We have strengthened the ACA, which is at its core a private-insurance based system. Keeping government out of people’s bedrooms and out of women’s doctor’s offices.
Look at what Biden did…he inherited a country in a freefall, and is building it back up. We are adding jobs We are drilling for a shitload of oil/gas. We’ve provided more money for policies and we’ve seen a large drop in crime. We’re expanding renewable energy via tax credits for businesses.
Now look at Trump: Massive tariffs. Trying to target big media. Talking about invading friendly nations in our hemisphere. Gigantic deficits. Oligarchs run amuk. Spitting on our allies and on democracies. Befriending dictators. Plotting revenge on political enemies. Courting anti-vaxx kooks. Appointing known sexual predators to huge government jobs. Courting racists.
The Democratic Party is now a more conservative party than the Republicans. And I don’t think it’s because we’ve moved to the right. It’s because the Republicans have gone crazy. But they still use the “conservative” moniker. They still claim “conservative” like it’s a trophy or something. We need to flip the script on them and take that word away from them. They don’t deserve it. Our propaganda needs to somehow take that word away from them.
I’ve got a better idea - Democrats should stop trying to pretend to be Republicans and should be Democrats instead. “Hey, remember the Dubya years? Those were good, right?” wasn’t a winning strategy in 2024 and it’s going to be even less of one in 2028.
On social issues, the Dems have always been further left and always will be. There’s no way the Rs would ever be more pro-LGBT than the D’s, for instance.
On many other issues, they’ve shifted right, yes, while the GOP has moved left. Even just twelve years ago it would have been unthinkable for Republicans to take Russia’s side or favor appeasement.
Republicans are now the party of Trump. They support whatever Trump proposes on any given day. It changes from day to day. If Trump opposes all new wars then Republicans support that. If Trump wants to invade another country then they support that too or at the minimum they are too scared to oppose him.
Trump could come out for Medicare for all tomorrow and somehow Republicans will reverve engineer themselves into convincing themselves that not only do they agree with this position but they in fact always agreed it.
I don’t think we’ve “shifted right” at all really. I just think the GOP has gone crazy, and if you look at our overall worldview, it’s a more conservative worldview.
One other issue I forgot to mention where we’re more conservative: We believe in election results and they don’t.
And that’s of course not at all what I was saying. As Democrats, I’d say we’re more conservative than Republicans because we don’t believe in sending our troops into stupid optional wars on false pretenses. You’ve completely mis-read my post.
As Democrats, I’d say that if any part of our platform can be described as “conservative” then we’ve lost the plot. I don’t want to be a member of a conservative party, and if Democrats embrace that label it’s just going to hasten their decline into powerlessness.
The current GOP literally has no logic, no mission, no reason to exist except to stay in power. Be all things to all dumb people and keep them as dumb as possible. I agree with OP, although the reason is just that the GOP has turned radical, and actually even worse. They have no intrinsic consistency. On just the economy alone, they have across-the-board conflicts with both monetary and fiscal policy. Literally make no sense. While these are dark days for Democrats, I’ve recently become more optimistic about America’s future once Trump is out of the picture. The GOP is being kept aloft by Trump’s “cult of personality”, but that won’t last forever.
I can agree with the OP in one sense that if we take “conservatism” to mean “status quo,” the Ds are now generally the much more predictable, much more “don’t rock the boat” party than the Rs.
Bringing Liz Cheney—who is just as odious of a person in her own way as Trump—on stage with Kamala Harris so they could cosplay as gal pals was such a bizarre exhibition of intellectual and moral bankruptcy it is difficult to imagine how that conversation got started. “Hey, let’s bring on the Republic who unabashed promotes her father’s legacy as an unprincipled warmonger and would do the same if given a chance because Trump doesn’t like her.” It is like bringing on Megyn Kelly as the campaign’s communication director
This is not even remotely true. Barely sixty-five years ago, the Democratic party was a protectionist, anti-immigration, anti-labor, pro-war polity which was significantly under the influence of the ‘Dixiecrat’ contingent which was pro-segregationist and anti-civil rights. The ‘socially conscious’ Democratic party is a creature of ‘Sixties protests and nearly being torn asunder by its inability to represent diverse voices and find a wining platform, thus handing Dick Nixon of all people a decisive Electoral College win in that election and a landslide election in 1972 (both popular vote and Electoral College) despite open questions about corruption in the Nixon White House. The Democratic party has certainly moved ‘left’ (as defined as more progressive) on social issues, but until recently so had the Republican party, while the Democratic party under Clinton moved distinctly right on fiscal issues, social welfare, et cetera. In part, this just demonstrates the inadequacy of defining parties on a left-right spectrum of principles, and even more regarding policy because there is not a lot of distinction in policy between Clinton, W Bush, and Obama; they’re all pretty conservative in most of the ways that matter in terms of governance.
The GOP has certainly “gone crazy”, although it is difficult to define that as ‘conservative’ in any conventional sense. They’ve dove head first into a proto-fascist MAGA cult of personality and they’re mostly happy to adopt any policy or position that their leader demands even if it is at total odds to previous Republican stances (like reforming legal immigration to make it easier to bring workers into the country, a position that the GOP mostly supported through the W. Bush era). The Republicans, or more properly, the MAGA party operating in the guise of the former GOP, is completely on board with autocracy, punitive action against political opponents, bald-faced lies that even a child could not believe, and general all-around fuckery with a White Christian Nationalist bent.
I would note that Liz Cheney is not the same person as her father. And she, maybe more than anyone else in Congress in either party, took Trump to task for his criminality. Also, the Democrats are not the party that’s gotten us into optional wars on false pretenses. So, they can’t hang the warmonger label on us.
But moreover, arguing about campaigning with the Cheneys and their baggage misses my point.
I’m not talking about “who” we campaign with. I’m simply observing that the Republicans are less conservative than the Democrats now. We’ve fallen into this bucket almost by chance. The Dems are more “left-wing” than we used to be, but still find ourselves as the more conservative party than the Republicans. We find ourselves as the more lawful, responsible, careful, evidence-based, respectful of historic norms - yes, conservative - party at this point.
And we should try and make a point of this, as we re-tool our propaganda. There are millions of people in the US who are still voting with the GOP, who think they’re supporting conservatism…and they’re simply not doing that. We need to message to people about the choices they are making.
It’s been decades since “conservative” meant “against change”.
To the degree the Rs have gone batshit crazy and are simply echoing whatever insanity dribbles out of trump’s face today, they are in favor of wild uncontrolled change in 27 directions at once. So in some narrow 4th grade vocabulary test sense of the word anyone opposed to willy nilly deliberately destructive change could be described as “conservative”.
But the dictionary sense of the word has nothing to do with US politics since maybe the Nixon years. The word “conservative” is simply one of many labels applied to the right-leaning party. An increasingly mis-leading label as the RW party has morphed into every stranger places. But it just a label; it is not a definition or a description.
That’s a good question, and I don’t have a standard tight definition. I was simply looking at MAGA, and I decided that they were the opposite of “conservative” by reason of insanity. I guess I could say that “conservative” means more respectful of historic norms and tradition, and generally more responsible in governance. And by that definition, MAGA fails, and the Dems pass.
Trump is both the least conservative and least liberal President in history. Democrats are now the “more conservative” party, not because we’ve changed, but because the party we’re comparing ourselves to has.
In many ways, Liz Cheney is actually worse than her father, which is saying something for a guy who got us into two of our longest and most costly wars without a clear objective or exit strategy. She “took Trump to task for his criminality” because the thought it would distinguish her, not because she is some kind of highly principled dino-Republican cast from the mold of Eisenhower, which despite her rhetoric can be seen from her voting record where she basically cast down straight party line with Trump almost all the way to the point that he was served up for his second impeachment (she did not vote for impeachment on the first go-around).
If you start digging into her neocon policy positions (pro-corporate and anti-regulation, pro-interventionist, anti-LGBT, anti-environment, climate change denier supplicant to the oil and gas industry, and generally everything Dick Cheney wishes he could have been if he wasn’t constantly having heart attacks. She is a truly awful politician with the singular redeeming characteristic of (now) opposing Donald Trump. I sincerely doubt having her on stage with Kamala Harris didn’t convinced a single voter to switch sides or step up, and frankly it made it that much harder for some to accept Harris seriously. They might as well have dragged up the corpse of Henry Kissinger to put on display while they were at it.
The people calling themselves “conservative” aren’t. What’s calling itself the Republican party has abandoned nearly every position it ever held. The current Democratic party is trying to cover the entire remotely reasonable ground and not doing very well at it, possibly because that ground is too damn wide and a lot of the people standing on any one part of it object to a lot of the people standing on other parts of it.
But I very much doubt that trying to present as ‘the real conservatives’ would fix that problem; I think it would only narrow the ground to something the party has no chance of keeping its footing on.
Pointing out that the Republicans aren’t behaving like conservatives might work – if it were possible to get enough people to pay attention.
They hung it on Clinton. They hung it on Biden re Palestine. The hang the national debt on Democrats, even though it’s generally gone up worse under Republicans. Anything they do worse, they blame on the other guy. That’s who they are now.
How?
They’re low-information voters because they’re not paying attention to any information they don’t already agree with; or because they’re not paying attention to any information whatsoever except maybe who the people they happen to know say they’re voting for.
That’s because they have a right-wing bullshit propaganda machine that hammers low-information people constantly…which leads me to your question and my answer to that question below…
Very simply, we have to build a propaganda machine that rivals what the Right-Wing has done, except spouting the truth. Low-information voters in this country disproportionately are voting with MAGA because their co-worker tells that crap he saw on Newsmax or forwards them nonsense on Facebook. The Dems have been trying to live in the old media world, and millions of people are walled-off from hearing anything that remotely resembles the truth.
In order to survive in today’s world, you have to repeat stuff over and over and over and over until you’re sick of it…and only then do low-information voters hear it for the first time.
We’re not going to be able to get our worldview out into the public square in this country by relying on CNN and the New York Times and Rachel Maddow’s weekly show on MSNBC. We need something that WE control, and that relentlessly hammers people with our talking points. It has to get out into the ether via multiple means, and it must overwhelm the Righ-wing outrage machine.
It won’t be easy. But our problem has to first be identified before we can fix it. And our problem is “propaganda” and our lack thereof. Some of it should be low-hanging fruit. It shouldn’t be all that hard to convince people that Haitian immigrants don’t eat cats & dogs, for instance…
If segregation and racial discrimination was legalized again, Republicans and “centrist” Democrats would almost certainly push for much more liberal economic policies.