Clinton’s less liberal than Wilson? :dubious:
Hey Sam Stone, you wrote a reasonable and civilly-toned post, so I’m not going to jump all over you. But I think you’re a little misinformed if you think that the base of the Republican party is still the small-government fiscal responsibility wing. Wesley Clark said it in his post - the base of the Republican party is the social-conservative, evangelical, authoritarian one.
Or at least, they’re the ones who are out carrying the flag for y’all, right now. For better or worse, the face of your party is Rush Limbaugh, and that’s sad, because he - and Hannity and Beck and Coulter - are entertainers, not statesmen.
Barry Goldwater is a firm supporter of gay rights; it flows logically from his libertarian ideology, that what citizens do in private is no business of the government. (I belive he also might have a gay child.) How many other Republicans of prominence support gay rights?
I think Der Trihs called it - back in the eighties, the GOP sold its soul to the Religious Right, and now they’re the ones calling the tune.
Dick Chaeny.
Clinton was more conservative than JFK and Truman? I think they get more credit than they deserve for Civil Rights legislation (the real landmarks happened in Eisenhower and Johnson’s terms, although Truman did desegregate the military), but JFK was a tax-cutting Cold Warrior.
There’ s another way to look at this:
In 1960, John Kennedy ran on a platform of tax cuts and increased defense spending.
NEITHER party publicly supported abortion, gay rights, or the abolition of school prayer, and would have been horrified by the suggestion that they did.
When you say “the Republicans have shifted to the far right,” what you’re really saying is, they still support postures that EVERYBODY endorsed as recently as 1960.
I think it would be more accurate to say, the Democrats (and much of the world) has shifted so far to the left so quickly that the America of 1960 looks like a fascistic theocracy to some people.
From my vantage point in the 1st term of the elder Bush, I heard Ralph Reed (head of the Christian Coalation at that time) on a Sunday morning talk show saying, that the religious right was going to begin to be involved in the political system and get as many anti abortion people as possible to move to the right. They intended to get all religious people who were anti- choice to join with them. They backed the elder Bush, and that was the last time I voted for a Republican president because the Religious right backed him. I did not feel we need a Christian Taliban in this country. Our Constitution is intended to have a secular government, and sepration of Church and State. The Christian Right Agenda seems to want to push their beliefs on others by having only what they consider right, the law of the land.
McCain catered to the RR when he chose Palin to be his Vice President. His appeal to the radicals didn’t work then, and I doubt it will work for him now in his bid for a return to the Senate.
As an answer to the OP, In my opinion Radicals make more noise and will go out to vote, when other more mainstream people stay home. It is almost shameful that so few people voted in the last elections, then wonder why the Radicals take over!
Irrelevant. By this “argument”, secession was not at all radical, because the secessionists were upholding a position that was mainstream considerably less than fifty years previously.
There’s an excellent book on this phenomenon called “What’s The Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America” By Thomas Frank.
In a nut shell, the corporate faction of the GOP cynically figured out that they could use the “culture war” issues that can’t ever be won to advance their economic agenda.
“Why have Republicans shifted so far to the right?”
Asked in the context of what Democrats have done, that question really does induce a laugh-out-loud.
The party that put its most liberal member of the Senateinto the presidency.
The party that installed a San Francisco liberal as its speaker.
The party that puts some of its very most liberal members as committee chairs, controlling the agenda.
But hey, bravo to the “progressives.” In terms of pure Machiavellian politics, you’ve marginalized if not destroyed the centrist, hawkish, fiscally conservative Democrat. JFK must be spinning.
Far from moving “so far to the right,” Republicans gave up control of Congress and the White House in large part because voters considered them as having spent too much like – wait for it – Democrats. If there’s a correction going on right now back to fiscal conservatism, it perhaps only seems extreme in the context of the way the Republicans acted under Bush and Clinton, and where the Democratic Party is today, letting its fringes run the show, ignoring the will of “Flyover Country” and being cheered on by the Daily Kos, Internet Left minority.
Only if you believe your own spin. Everyone outside of this board is acknowledging that the religious right is losing its influence in the Republican party. The Tea Party people are not the religious right, but the lefties on this board can’t see it because they’re always looking at the right through their caricature glasses.
The current center of gravity on the right has shifted away from the old party - the religious, big-government, ‘compassionate conservative’ party. Now, it’s more Libertarian, more focused on small government and fiscal responsibility.
Dick Cheney is exactly the model for this type of Republican - if we leave aside his positions on the war on terror (there is significant split over Iraq and other issues on the right now). But in terms of domestic policy, Cheney is not religious, he’s in favor of gay marriage (which makes him more progressive on the issue than Barack Obama), he’s from the midwest, and he falls on the libertarian side of the right.
The old Republican party is full of southern bible belt populists. Mike Huckabee is one of their ilk. The Tea Party’s geographical center is in the heart of the midwest. You are not seeing the rise of the social conservatives at all.
A measure of how much the conservative movement has changed, at CPAC (conservative convention) this year, an organization of gay Republicans was one of the sponsors. When a speaker got up to criticize including a gay organization, he was booed off the stage by the crowd.
The whole event was powered by a turbine attached to Jerry Falwell’s coffin.
Wherever you’re getting your “information” about who the Teabaggers are (and where might that be?), it isn’t here. Your declamations about the nature of the current GOP are, well, interesting, but not based on much, ya know?
Cheney just did not do anything regarding that, and I still see more evidence that Teabaggers also do include social conservatives. Several commentaries from CNN reporting the recent Chaney remarks showed many conservatives hating him for showing more support for gay marriage now.
Also one should not forget the epithets thrown by teabaggers at Barney Frank.
Even George Will minimized the teabagger element at that convention as, well, the entertainment wing of the party.
The problem is that, those teabaggers are the ones showing lots of energy and the Republicans are trying feverishly to pander to them; unfortunately it seems that in the coming elections there is a fear even among Republicans that that pandering will remove even Republicans that one could say have not fallen to the deep end if you are a moderate, or remove supporters of the religious right if you are very conservative.
What I see then is not really good news at for the Republicans, the party is being split between a libertarian streak and the cultural conservatives.
I do not think that that will turn into a great number of victories for Republicans in November.
You’re confusing me, because that poll doesn’t contradict a single thing I said.
In terms of Demographics, the Tea Party is only slightly more religious than the population average, is only 68% protestant, and 9% of them admit to being non-religious. Again according to that poll, the average Tea Partier is more educated than the public at large, and the percentage that come from the south is less than the demographic average for the population at large. 57% of the tea party members are from the midwest or the west, while only 45% of the overall population is located there.
The average age in the Tea Parties is also lower than the average age for the entire population, whereas the Christian Right movement was always part of an older demographic.
Again: This is not a picture of the old southern bible-belt populist conservative party of George Bush, Trent Lott, Mike Huckabee, and the other old warhorses in bed with the Christian Right. It’s just not.
Let me guess - you didn’t actually bother to read the poll itself, did you?
I’m confused by what Sam Stone and Milossarian are trying to say. Sam seems to be saying that the Republicans used to be more to the left - but also seems to say they haven’t moved to the right. Milossarian seems to say the Democrats are on the left - but also seems to say the Republicans are not on the right.
The poll says they’re white, male, rural conservatives. So basically they are indeed, the racist, religionist, xenophobic, homophobic rednecks they appear to be. They’re also not “independent.” Almost 90% of them say they vote Republican. The rest probably don’t vote at at all or vote for fringe parties. None of the them vote for Democrats. None of them are liberals. bNone of them are moderates. It’s an extreme right wing movement, motivated almost entirely by an incoherent portmanteau of social and religious hostility. The “movement” such as it is, is shrinking, not growing, and never had any life or expansion outside of right wing talk radio listeners.
Qunnipiac’s latest demographic study. They’re the Bubbas, basically.
The motto is “Take our country back” - but from whom, if not the non-whites / non-males / non-straights? 
Right, they’ll never get anywhere without a coherent agenda or an actual leader not nicknamed “Caribou Barbie” of Fox News, who provides what organization they have.
On social liberalism/civil libertarianism, sure. But the “Conservative Movement” has benefited from the confusion between social conservatism & economic conservatism. In the 1950’s, the economic conservatives that are now oft applauded as the moderate mainstream were condemned by no less a figure than Ike himself as “stupid.”
The reason you’re confused is because the ‘right’ isn’t a single direction.
The new conservatives are more socially moderate than the old ones. They’re younger and more educated.
However, they’re more fiscally conservative than the old ones.
Or let me put it this way - in the past, all you had to do to get the support of the right was to pander to religious issues. Promise to restore prayer in school, fight against abortion and gay rights, and rile them up with talk about how Christmas was under assault and how the Democrats wanted to eliminate God from public discourse. So long as you did that, they didn’t really care if you spent money like a drunken sailor.
The current conservative movement wants the spending stopped. They want the size of government cut. As long as politicians promise to do that, they can support gay marriage and not say a word about abortion or other cultural issues.
The conservatives still have lots of religious people, just like the old party had lots of fiscal conservatives. It’s a matter of the center of gravity shifting.
So if you think of the right on a two dimensional axis, with the top right being social conservatism and the bottom right being libertarianism, then what has been happening is that conservatives are not moving right, they’re moving down.
It’s a losing battle for them. The non-white demographic is growing at a faster rate than whites.
Bingo.
As the non-whites, non-males, and non-straights have increased in influence, the neo-racist wing of the conservatives has become increasingly incensed and reactionary. Also, the GOP has a severe leadership vacuum, and has since Gingrich was disgraced (also partly because W. was so inept.) As a result, the wackos have their stage; they’re the angry white men scared of diminished power and the rise of the hated other.