You’re still missing the point. Let me try using a concrete example.
A half dozen times a day on this board, someone posts some variation on “The Democrats shouldn’t run on Medicare For All, because it will drive away moderate voters and they will lose”. All I am saying is that that, by itself, isn’t a valid argument. If you want to make that case, you need to provide specific cites showing that moderates are mostly opposed to Medicare For All.
Common sense says it’s ridiculous to ask for a cite that “moderates” would be opposed to a radical, ambitious, ultra-expensive policy proposal. What I am saying is that common sense is wrong, that we can’t safely assume that self-described “moderates” actually favor centrist policies, and we need to look at it on an issue by issue basis. A party that fails to do that and relies on lazy “common sense” assumptions will harm its chances.
I consider myself to be a political moderate. I do not consider myself to be uninformed or confused.
I feel that I can make a honest claim to being a moderate because there are politicians and partisans both to the right of me and to the left of me with whom I disagree.
I grew up in an era when the two big parties each had wings on the extreme; there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. I feel that the Republican party has been taken over by conservatives to the point where the two terms, conservative and Republican, have become synonymous. I feel the Democrats still have a moderate wing along with a liberal wing. So I vote for moderate Democrats.
Nothing in the non-bolded part of this paragraph has any relevance to anything that I said. You are obviously not reading very carefully, as I have already said twice that I am not advocating a “base turnout” strategy, yet you repeatedly imply that I am doing so.
And the whole point of the article is that those people WILL go for radical left or right wing positions, not “usually” but more often than you might expect. You don’t even have to read the article to get that, just look at the pretty pictures. Do you need me to tell you how to read a scattershot graph?
I think what several of us are trying to get at is that there aren’t really many real “moderate voters” in the sense of someone whose views on things are consistently in the middle. You can see that in the plots in your article- they’re fairly well distributed.
But using that two-axis graph, we’d see the party faithful cluster in opposite corners (the anti-immigration/pro-market and the pro-immigration/egalitarian corners).
So if you were to draw a circle taking up 1/3 of the people centered on where the axes cross, that would be your “moderate” or “centrist” position, even if there’s not really a cluster there to call “moderate” or “centrist”.
You’re trying to argue that because there’s no cluster right at the middle, that there’s no “moderate” or “centrist” position, and the rest of us are saying that that self-identified 1/3 does center, if not cluster around the middle, and politicians would be making a mistake to assume that because there’s no cluster there, that it can be safely ignored.
The observation that the “middle” is mostly a vacuous uninformed and unfocused batch of fools may be an accurate one, but the observers who made that observation are questionable.
I have long seen that any perspective that does not align with the conventional left or the conventional right is perceived as utterly incoherent by the partisans on both sides. And one of the reasons for that is that they actually believe there’s a political linear continuum such that anyone who isn’t “Them” and isn’t “Us” can only be somewhere in the middle.
A lot of times that’s about as sensible as trying to shoehorn-define Czech cuisine as halfway between Italian and Mexican.
I don’t get what you mean about there being no room for a fiscally conservative Democrat - while it’s hard to call either party truly fiscally conservative, there are far more fiscally conservative positions that Democrats embrace and/or tolerate than Republicans. Republicans favor huge military spending including foreign military ventures, corporate welfare and bailouts, huge tax cuts without corresponding spending cuts, and using office to make private profits (the Republican endorsement of Trump’s actions is the biggest example). And of course, the biggest domestic spending issue is healthcare, where Republicans explicitly and loudly oppose the cost and life saving measures that all other first world have embraced. While Republicans like to use the label ‘fiscally conservative’, I’ve never seen any evidence that they actually are anything remotely like that label, and they’ve gotten much worse in recent years.
Which in my opinion is why the media and anyone who purports to be a neutral observer should not use the term “fiscally conservative”. It’s not a neutral term. It suggests that conservatives are inherently more fiscally responsible than other political groups.
Some conservatives may be, in a certain political situation. In other political situations, the non-conservative party maybe more fiscally responsible.
We saw that in Canada in the early 90s, when all gouvernements were grappling with huge deficits. The socialist NDP government in Saskatchewan and the conservative PC gouvernement in next-door Alberta both engaged in major fiscal restraint. The choices they made to get to balanced budgets reflected their ideologies, but both governments were successful in eliminating their structural deficits.
Use a term like “fiscally responsible” or something that isn’t linked to any party, and then judge the parties by their fiscal policies.
I agree. Calling someone “fiscally conservative” - as if that’s a virtue - sorta cedes the issue to self-identified conservatives and Republicans in the US, and is misleading. In reality, I think the Democratic Party is more fiscally responsible than Republicans overall.
As an aside - I would argue that after the 2008 financial crash, it would have been fiscally irresponsible to balance the budget. The economy needed stimulus, and therefore higher deficits were the right thing. As growth has returned, and the Great Recession faded, I think now is the time for lower deficits or closer to balanced budgets. But we had self-identified “fiscal conservatives” who passed the Trump tax cut, which will increase the debt by trillions over the next decade.
If we defined “fiscally responsible” as having a governmental net balance of 0, you can get there by being “fiscally conservative” (low taxes and low spending) or “fiscally liberal” (high taxes and high spending). That’s a legitimate distinction, and most conversations I’ve seen that use the term are genuinely talking about “low taxes and low spending”. Although somehow when it comes to implementation both sides do the popular bits of their plan only, so you get low taxes and high spending (hey, a compromise! :smack:).
It’s all well and good to claim that you are for low spending without a plan. Back during one of the government shutdown crises awhile ago, there was at least one person who was for the debt ceiling as if this will force a reasonable chopping of spending by the executive, so I asked which programs should be cut and by how much , and the only response was some mealy mouthed version of “Not my problem! We just spend too much! Debt ceiling!”
I read an interesting article by a former high-ranking civil service in the federal public service, who was involved in the budget-balancing by Finance Minister Martin.
He said there were two ways to get spending down : the stupid way and the reasonable way.
The stupid way consisted of the federal cabinet setting an arbitrary budge cut :“All ministries will cut their budget by 5% next fiscal year. No exceptions.” He stalked it the stupid way because of the lack of discretion, lack of considering the value of affected programs, and so on.
The smart way was to set a global spending target, and then require each ministry to come up with a plan, allocating the budget cuts within their operations, showing why certain programmes should not be affected, etc.
His conclusion was that the stupid way was the only way that worked. Pretty much every government program is there for a purpose, and arguments can be advanced why a programme should not be affected. And the public servants responsible for programme A would advance all those sound policy reasons, and suggest programmes B and C were more apt for cutting. And the public servants responsible for programme abuse would argue that A and C were more ripe for cutting. And Ca of course would argue it was essential.
The former top level civil servant’s conclusion was that you can’t build programme reviews into a cost-cutting exercise. Just say a 5% crooks that he board cut, and let it work.
And that is what PM Chrétien did. They implemented across-the-board cuts, with one of xception ,the Ministry of Indian Affairs had its budget frozen, but no cuts. Chrétien said that as a group, indigenous people were generally at the lowest rung in Canadian society and he was not prepared to make any cuts to their programmes.
And within a few years, the “stupid way” had balanced the budget.
There may or may not actually be a moderate middle, but functionally there might as well be. It may well be a convenient fiction, like centrifugal force.
I can see that the “stupid way” probably works, because you don’t give people a chance to “save” their area from cuts. I think you see similar dynamics with large corporations.
Beyond that, I’d wager that almost all programs/departments in governments and private enterprise probably have 5% worth of wiggle room in their budgets somewhere, and can still get their jobs done at 95% the previous budget.
There would need to be a review process at some point though- while most can work with a 5% cut, a 10% cut might be the sort of thing that cuts services or impacts readiness, etc…
Interesting graphs, which do indeed rebut that myth.
There is also a group of “centrists” — I don’t know where they fit in the fivethirtyeight diagram — whose guiding philosophy is “divided government.” If they vote for a D President, they’ll vote for R Congressmen and vice versa, hoping to hobble government and force legislative stalemates. Trying to prevent changes, even for the better, doesn’t strike me as “moderation.”
Absurd! How can you feel that 31 is your favorite prime number. Mine is 9,999,999,967.
It is the largest prime using 10 decimal digits. Around 1980, I wrote a program for the HP-97 programmable calculator with a 10 digit display that found it.
I consider myself moderate in the sense that I like most of Bernie’s proposals but I would like to get to them slowly by a kind of tacking. Try something and continually modify it to improve it. I think Obamacare had and has such a potential. Put back the tax, make a public option for everybody, gradually improve it until private insurance cannot compete and we evolve to medicare for all. A different proposal I like is to lower the age of eligibility by one year every year. After all, we in Canada have medicare for all at 60% of the cost of US care. Yes, life is thinner for doctors and hospitals–all non-profit–but it works.
That said, I have to admit I have never voted for a Republican and likely never will.