You asked and I answered about a Gore re-election scenario. What part of it do you disagree with?
As to the OP, I originally placed it in IMHO because it was primarily my opinion and analysis. My general point is that liberalism is becoming an albatross to the democratic party. What facts are you disputing?
If that’s true, it is a stealth litmus test. To my knowledge candidates for the federal bench who express the opinion during Senate hearings that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided never make it to a judgeship. Factual citations to the contrary, naming names and preferably quoting chapter and verse of Senate testimony or published opinions or judge’s speeches to the contrary, will be cheerfully acknowledged. The fact of the matter is that Judicial nominees dance around the Roe issue as they do not want to set off a firestorm in the Senate. That’s some litmus test. They dare not risk openly debating the issue because they know they lack the support to openly overturn it.
The “This American Life” radio show previously quoted, which I urge everyone to listen to, makes that point that the big tent GOP is approximately 30% pro-choice and that while the nation is divided on the issue the Republicans are happy to include the pro-choicers in their tent. The only sacrilege to them is being anti-tax cut.
Perhaps you should try a lens of history instead – better magnification, less distortion.
Completely wrong. While there were some leftists concerned with what they called “social justice,” they were not a majority in the party. The Democratic party stood for rural populism in the South (farmers united against the railroads and corporations), and controlled machine politics in the North (also a sort of anti-Big-Business populism); union labor, race relations, Communism, and government reform all have a VERY complicated history with the Democratic party. Franklin Roosevelt laid the groundwork for the modern Democratic party when he created all those relief acts. The specter of a welfare state made the Democrats appealing to a lot of people who weren’t aligned with either party before.
Wallace was a perfectly typical Southern populist. Racism was not a mainstream political issue – it was the way things were. And both parties were pretty vehemently anti-communist, and the Vietnam war started under Democratic administrations; Nixon, in fact, was elected because he had a “secret plan” to END the war. The different strains of internationalism, interventionism, imperialism, and isolationism that various factions in both parties subscribed to is too complicated for me to explain – maybe there’s someone here who knows it better and has it sorted out.
That’s socialism – I subscribe to it, but most Democrats have (and had) no such grand vision. Present liberals want to adequately fund social projects with taxes, thinking that it’s worth the cost. Republicans want to cut the programs to meet what they think is a reasonable tax burden. Both have costs and benefits, and the positions are separated by values, not opinions or different analyses.
I hope it’s now clear why this is wrong.
Liberalism in post-9/11 America is about the same as it was before. The Republicans aren’t going to do away with Social Security, Medicare, welfare, or school lunches, and the majority of Democrats never wanted to do much more than we do now.
First, let me point outthat pre-emption needs no special doctrine. It has been recognized as a legitimate casus belli for centuries. What the WH was intentionally mislabelling as pre-emption for propaganda purposes was actual preventive war. Preventive war has a history of being a dodgily justified war.
As Rush Limbaugh says, “Words mean things.” To continue using this intentionally obfuscatorial bit of agitprop newspeak is to Humpty Dumpty the words into meaning so much that they lmean not much of anything at all.
Iraq was a preventive war, not a preemptive one.
Second, IIRC, acquiring an ‘international consensus’ for attacking the Taliban was readily forthcoming. Not much of a wait needed.
Third, the Taliban were not attacked under the guise of pre-emption. They were attacked as retaliation for attacks on the US. It was Iraq that was attacked under the guise of pre-emption.
Every Democrat worth worrying about in recent memory has been a moderate. One of the jokes about Clinton went “he was the best Republican president the US ever had” due to his fiscal conservatism. If anything the Democrats suffer for their centrism rather than liberalism, since hard core liberals voted for Nader in the last election. The idea that the Democrats are dying a slow death by liberalism is fatuous. They’re dying a slow death because they’re not different enough from Republicans to satisfy discriminating left-wing voters. As pointed out above, right-wing voters are more herdish and loyal, so Republican candidates suffer less from centrism. The only exception to this rule I can think of was Ross Perot’s candidacy, in which an even more effective and folksy social centrist with an extremely conservative fiscal agenda outdid the pubs at their own game. The OP is a big lie, and a dumb one at that.
It depends what you mean by “want”. I think in some universe where they were King, they would want the programs to disappear or be reduced and they do want to try to make it inevitable that someone will have to cut the programs. But, they don’t really want to do it themselves. Why should they? So far, the public seems content to let them having a win-win situation: cut taxes, increase spending and let the Democrats clean up the mess.
Its irrelevancy. Your thesis is the unfashionability of liberalism, particularly in domestic policy, not 9/11. Perhaps I wasn’t clear, but Gore’s choice by the people certainly does not support your thesis, nor would there be anything for you to “analyze” in such a way as to support it if he were in office right now. The facts do not support your statements; it’s that simple.
Which statements in the OP are belied by the facts?
Malodorous:
Good point you have there. Giving the difficulty of getting just two people to agree on anything, any ruling party must be a coalition whose internal inconsistancies will eventually blow it apart. (Not that I’m sure I can last another twenty years before the conservatives claw each other to shreads. Come to think of it, Republican rule should end about the time Social Security implodes. Make of that what you will.)
Welcome to Doperdom! So fork over the money already!
[It is indeed Bullwinkle. When I joined I presumed (correctly) that someone had latched onto that name, and so I settled on this variant (of course, the initials have launched a thousand jokes, mostly having to do with Moosehead Beer. . .).]