What happened to the center right? Has it always been a numerical minority, or did it actually shrink recently?

I was catching up on the Boebert thread and started to ponder a hypothesis suggested by two of the posts in that thread.

What is this hypothesis? It’s that the spectrum of voters from left to right isn’t a bell curve. Rather, if 0 is far left, 50 the center, and 100 the far right, what we have is a double hump, one with a peak around 40 or so (the mainstream Obama and Biden Democrats) and another at the far right with a peak around 95 or so (the MAGAs). The success of the MAGAs seems to come at the expense of the disappearance of the voters in the 65 to 85 range ( the old school Bush / Cheney / Romney type Republican).

We now have those that fell just to the left of that having moved to the left to support mainstream Democrats, and those to the right having moved in further to the right to support MAGA candidates. Assuming this hypothesis is correct, the question is why? What happened to all the Bush / Cheney / Romney voters?

I’m not asking about the politicians. What happened to them is obvious. They’re out of office because they no longer have a base of support. What’s not obvious to me is what happened to that base. Did it disappear, or was it never there to begin with?

I think a lot of the Bush/Cheney/Romney voters are still around and they’re voting Republican out of habit. You had a few people, like me, who turned away from the GOP when they embraced Trump, but it’s only relatively recently that more of them have either fled the party or stopped supporting Trump. I suspect it’s less Trump himself and more the dysfunction of the party as a whole that’s driving them away.

Something to remember is that MAGA attracted a lot of people who weren’t really Republicans. Ashli Babbitt voted for Obama. My own MAGA mother was apolitical most of her life, believing both parties to be equally bad, and while she still claims independent status, pretty much toes the MAGA line. Seriously, it’s like she transformed into a new person and I actually told her how upset it was to see the woman who taught to be fair and respectful abandon those values.

One of the advantages of a two party system, in theory, is that each party needed to have broad appeal to attract voters. i.e. They needed to be big tent organizations where many people felt welcome. For the Republicans, the opposit is true. If you aren’t a MAGA extremist, you’ll lose the primary to someone who is. So instead of being a big tent, the Republican party is squeezing everyone out who isn’t a MAGA extremist.

This is pretty much it. And it’s not just a US phenomenon, either. Right-wing parties all over the world have been seeing the same thing.

Here in Canada, I used to identify as a “Red Tory”. But with the rise of the Reform Party, its take-over of the Conservative Party, and Stephen Harper becoming Prime Minister, Red Tories had to ask ourselves: Which side do we really want the most, the Red, or the Tory? The new leaders of the Conservative Party made it pretty clear that “Red” was out the door, and you’d have to choose.

I chose Red, others chose Tory. The GOP has gone the same way. It started in earnest with the Tea Party guys, and MAGA has only made it worse.

The spectrum of political beliefs has never been a Gaussian (normal) distribution; it has always been centered around poles of political tenets with ‘inner’ tails that merge somewhere in the middle (i.e. the ‘fence-sitters’) and extremes at the ‘outer’ tails that often function to ‘swing’ the vote by being a polity with outsized influence just by garnering more attention about some issue that pulls one or multiple poles in their direction, a trend that has been occurring in the United States since the Reagan era.

What happened to that base was concerted propaganda deliberately engineered around fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) on issues such as immigration or rights (fear of others, firearms laws), economic instability (uncertainty from offshoring of manufacturing, skilled immigrant labor), and doubt (‘death boards’ controlling medical access, reduction or elimination of Social Security, doubt in basic science). That the party spewing this ideology has actually been responsible for much of the issues feeding it is ignored, just as they blame ‘the Democrats’ for government shutdowns or high pharmaceutical prices even as they gleefully vote against continuing resolutions (much less an actual budget) and accept campaign support from lobbyists while blocking every effort to force the disclosure of ‘dark money’.

In short, it is nascent fascism, which has found its base in Fundamentalist Christian nationalism and its iconic ‘leader’ in Donald Trump, but has been long fomented by GOP far-right elements being coached by Newt Gingrich, that bastion of ‘family values’ who abandoned his wife during cancer treatment and is generally an odious, hypocritical, lying cockroach who nonetheless gets all the press he could ask for not just from Fox News but CNN and even an occasional turn on MSNBC just so they can claim to be ‘fair’.

Read The Fascism This Time, How Fascism Works, or American Fascists if you want to get a deeper understanding of what underlays the extreme polarization of the political right, which hasn’t so much created a divide as pulled the American political left to right-of-center while still creating an undeniable gulf and a polity of people willing to believe and reiterate the most absurd claims without a shred of evidence.

Stranger

As often the case, I’m mostly in agreement with @Stranger_On_A_Train, in that I track a LOT of the polarization and abandonment of the middle to the Republican embrace of the Religious Right. That was a huge point where for Republicans (some limited similarities on certain issues with Democrats, but far less so) it stopped being a disagreement on priorities and parties, but became a literally religious Good vs Evil polar diversion. And from a religious POV, you don’t compromise with evil, you eliminate it. Internally (moderates that “compromise”) and externally, with the demonification of Democrats.

I do believe that for the first generation of these politicians (Reagan through Newt) it was a cynical power grab of now easily motivated mobs to garner their money and votes, but in the Trump era, the mobs believe it to the extent that now the politicians themselves must play ever more to the rabid crowds less they be the next target (see Trump being boo’d on his COVID vax efforts and backpedaling).

As for what literally happened to the center right? They’re A) as upthread, holding their noses and voting (R) on whatever their motivating desires are (often low taxes in my experience), B) eager new converts to the MAGA religion C) waiting for the craze to pass and not voting at all or D) have become reluctant moderate Democrats because they figure it’ll take some sharp loses if the (R) team is ever going to wake up.

There never was such a thing. Most people fall to the left or right. There might be a few people that have a strong opinion on one thing, which matches with the right, say abortion. Then they have another strong opinion on the left on say…the environment. Those are the centrists.

I wonder how much of it is actually “reluctant”. When I look at how rabid the people I used to vote alongside of have become, I start to wonder how much of what I believed about my party at the time was just lies that I didn’t see at the time. Were they always this racist, this stupid, this short-sighted?

I’ve voted against them for the last decade, at least, and haven’t really looked back. Even if they finally un-fucked themselves, I think it would take at least that long before I started to even think about trusting them again.

Eh, I say reluctant, I didn’t say hypocritical. Most of the ones I throw in this group (my father, one or two close friends) would STILL prefer a traditional Republican, and would vote for one in the general. For example, in each case those two voted for McCain.

But they HATE the Christian Nationalists (duh for my father, he’s more observant than I am as a secular Jew and while he wants to support Israel, the rest of the baggage is RIGHT OUT), support abortion, and figure who people have sex with and marry is none of their business.

The reluctance is generally more on the (from their POV) desire for a robust economy, reduction in national debt, and (especially for my father) securing their rights to pass down / accumulate their earnings with minimal interference.

But this all means they were historically not single issue voters, and increasingly you buy into the Republican/MAGA party for that single issue, and as you fall into the propaganda hole, all of the other issues become linked to your single issue.

I have a former friend who prior to MAGA (during the Bush Jr years) became a born-again Christian. He was always Right leaning (his primary issue there was firearms), but after being born again he became enamored with all of the increasingly conspiratorial tinged “facts” of the right and how it tied into end-times Biblical prophecy.

In the early days, it was enough to not talk about politics, by the time we decided to no longer reply to one another, they felt they couldn’t do anything but preach of the coming of the End Days and the need for a new Savior. Last I heard they were strong Trump supporters and a rabid anti-vaxxer despite working in the medical field.

I see it as a large portion of the Republican Party intentionally moving toward the Christian Right, particularly anyone with deep pockets. Since the moderate republican candidates weren’t getting them what they wanted, the right-leaning members promised they would deliver, and slowly, over time, they did.

Add to that how Trump tipped the Supreme Court in their waiver, anti-abortion laws began being passed across the country. Any remaining moderate republicans were brusquely pushed aside as MAGA membership, or at least passive MAGA endorsement, was now required to stay in office. The moderate republican voters either stayed home or voted (R) out of habit.

Since the US is a Christian-majority country, the fundies poured their heart and soul (and money) into supporting republicans because they would do their bidding for them. 63% of the US identifies as Christian, and 20-30% of those are probably fundamentalist. That’s enough people to sway elections and elect like-minded legislators on both the local and national level.

I’m not quite ready to call it fascism, but based on what Trump is promising to do once he gets re-elected, such as pardoning the Jan 6 rioters, we’re getting dangerously close to it.

People above have done a good job of explaining how our polarized society has been created. They didn’t tackle the question of whether its always been a numerical minority. It hasn’t.

The MAGA takeover of the Republican Party is an extreme outlier. So is their redefinition of a centrist as being a despised member of the opposing party. As recently as the Eisenhower landslides, the Republican party was dominated by what were considered centrists then and probably still would be today. Most considered the Reaganites centrists, and the various Bushes drew on the center of the party, i.e. the majority. By that time, the far right had thoroughly infiltrated the leadership but the population lagged behind. Despite the Contract with America, Gingrich was defenestrated after the failed Clinton impeachment.

Most Americans are still centrists of one sort or another. Most care little about politics and couldn’t delineate policies or issues, except that they have firm convictions that some things are Wrong. The far right did an amazing job of redefining that vagueness into loud advocacy, but most people live comfortably with other people without regard to their stances.

Trump is a unique existential menace. Though there will be many contenders, I see nobody who can step into his shoes. His cult will dissipate if he loses in November. That may allow the return of the center right as the crazies eat their own. OTOH, if they can develop an underlying substance after the cult is gone, they may permanently redefine American politics into a neo-fascist nightmare. Right now we’re seeing the noisy bubbles on top of a pot of simmering water rather than the much large volume of calmness below.

I think the framing of the political debate as good vs. evil instead of a disagreement about policy is the single most divisive thing that happened. There’s no compromise with evil after all, you burn it out root and stem.

As for what happened to the more centrist Republicans, I think the ones who could, moved to the Democratic side of the spectrum. The ones who couldn’t, they split between silent GOP voters who don’t like the MAGA stuff but dislike the Democrat platform more, and those who basically embraced their inner MAGAt and are on board with it.

A lot of older politicians are in that silent(ish) category. Mitt Romney for example, or George W Bush. Neither seem to have any love for Trump or MAGA, but neither is quite willing to jump ship and forcefully denounce their own party or Trump specifically.

Really?. Really?

Stranger

I really don’t understand the reluctance to accept that MAGA is simply what the Republican base has been since the 60s. When the country was embroiled in the battle for Civil Rights, the Republican party decided that getting power was much more important than justice, and they courted the racists, the scared and angry, and the Christian Theocrats. They deliberately chose to make fear and anger of the other and the establishment of their un-Christ like “christianity” as the tentpoles of their party.

But they were smart enough to dress up that hate, fear, and superiority as “traditional family values” to sell it to the “moderates” and “fiscal conservatives”. But they knew what their bread and butter really was. So you get “welfare queens” instead of "lazy ______, ", “Christian values” instead of “Satanic gays”, and now “Make America Great Again” instead of “none of them filthy immigrants”.

The only thing Trump did was to say the quiet part aloud. He showed what the Republican party was really all about at its core. And he showed that the Republican party base is MAGA, and not “small government and fiscal conservatism”.

Probably because to many of us, we’ve seen at least some Republicans, who DID believe:

Was important, at least to them, and were, perhaps, blind to the other elements, and/or assumed (as I think we all did until the Obama and then Trump years to a greater or lesser extent) that the truly rabid bigots and Christian theocrats were a comparatively small part of the party.

Several such are on this board, and now voting against their prior side. What I think this thread is getting at, is that such elements as you, I and others point out were probably NOT ever minority positions in the party, but had been trained to never say the quiet part out loud. And that anyone who does cling to what may have always been an illusion of the Republican party are now all but outcast, retired, or leaving in droves.

So, again, the center right was probably often a self-supporting illusion on top, while the “silent majority” to use the Nixon’s terms were indeed Republicans guided more by hate and the desire to keep anyone who challenged them down by means fair and foul.

I don’t for a second believe a significant number of Republicans in 1992 would have been pleased to see George Bush, Sr. break the chain of peaceful transfers of power first established by George Washington. The Republicans have clearly changed quite a bit since the 1960s as have the Democrats.

What happens when there’s evil policies?

There’s Republicans in charge of making policy.

Not just that they were a small part of the party (or the larger conservative movement world-wide), but that portion was getting smaller over time.

I grew up in Canada in the 70s, when casual racism was pretty common and open. Never as bad as the US, but bad enough that if you acted like that today, you’d be denounced as a racist for sure. But then things started getting better. Less overt racism, sexism, whatever -ism you want to mention. I thought this reflected actual attitudes changing, but I was wrong. Obama getting elected turned up the heat on the simmering racism, and eventually blew the lid off the pot. And we haven’t looked back since.

Yeah, and this. I actually believed in democracy, even when my party lost, and I thought everyone else did as well. Again, not so much.

Bush won’t name him by name, and I hadn’t actually read that from Romney.

But I think that they’re essentially the voices in the wilderness at this point; there are more who still harbor future political ambitions, and won’t speak up for fear of being tarred with the RINO brush.

Sure, and that thing is power-hungry at all costs, and willing to cynically use people’s fear, racism, and religion as mechanisms to pull their levers. And more cleverly, they pulled the three together into one neat package such that they reinforce each other.

I’m not convinced that the Republican party or its voters are coming at all this stuff from some sort of inherent position of racism/hate, or that they’re all this extreme religiously. What I do know is that the GOP has got in bed with the religious extremists and they’re pulling each other’s strings to get what they want, and using whatever they can to do so, including whatever latent racism there is.

I keep thinking back to the 80s, when the general populace was more homophobic, more racist, and overall less tolerant, and more outspoken about it, and yet things were not nearly so hostile, hateful, or generally angry about the state of things. And I see a direct line from the early 90s start of Rush Limbaugh and Gingrich’s Contract with America to today’s GOP and current political climate.

That’s not to say that the GOP wasn’t always a bunch of smug assholes; go watch the Watergate news footage, and you’ll see that not much has changed. But prior to the 90s, they played ball within the system, and weren’t trying to subvert it like they seem to be today.

I was thinking about this earlier, and my thoughts mirror the “Good vs. Evil” things discussed above.

At that time, there wasn’t much disagreement about what was moral vs. immoral. Most people agreed that homosexuality was immoral, for example, so there wasn’t any great incentive to distinguish one party from another on this basis.

But starting in the 60-70s, some people started disagreeing with the common consensus on moral vs immoral. They started arguing that it was the oppression of minority groups that was actually immoral, and that as a consequence, any laws based on the older rules of morality should be overturned. This started out as a small minority opinion, but over time, gradually gained converts.

Eventually, the Democrats came to embrace the new notions of what was moral, while the Republicans held fast to the older rules. And that brought us to where we are today. If you’re pro-choice, pro-same sex marriage, pro-diversity, you can’t vote Republican, because they’re opposed to all that. And the same is true for Republicans. They can’t ever vote Democrat, because they’re convinced that the entire party is just wallowing in immorality.