Throughout the Obama presidency, the Republican Party has drifted further to the right, whether those tendencies were driven by the advent of the tea party, the Donald Trump-led birther movement, or the conspiratorial claims that Obama was a secretive, radical socialist. Or worse.
The past several years have generated greatly expanded individual gun rights, restricted access to abortion, blasts against newfound rights for gays and the overall LGBT community, blocking the Obamacare expansion of Medicaid, voicing crude xenophobic pronouncements against Mexican immigrants and Muslim refugees, and defunding Planned Parenthood (though the secret videos backfired in a big way).
Even Ronald Reagan’s ultraconservative son, commentator Michael Reagan, has often admitted that his father, an icon of conservatives nationwide, could not win the GOP presidential nomination in these times.
At the same time, Democrat Bernie Sanders has remarkably pushed a substantial segment of the Democratic Party far to the left in just a matter of months, particularly among idealistic/disgruntled millennial voters. Free college tuition. Free healthcare. A $15 minimun wage. These are the items at the top of every left-winger’s wish list.
Peter Beinart, an intellectual force within the punditry class, writes for The Atlantic that the implosion of Democratic moderates and centrists has led to an unexpected leftward shift among the party’s base. While the Obama presidency’s first term fell far short of devout liberal’s expectations, Beinart asserts that George W. Bush destroyed centrist Democrats intellectually, by making it impossible for them to credibly critique liberalism from the right.
Here’s more:
Before Bush, unapologetic liberalism was not the Democratic Party’s dominant creed. The party had a strong centrist wing, anchored in Congress by white southerners such as Tennessee Senator Al Gore, who had supported much of Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup, and Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, who had stymied Bill Clinton’s push for gays in the military. For intellectual guidance, centrist Democrats looked to the Democratic Leadership Council, which opposed raising the minimum wage; to The New Republic (a magazine I edited in the early 2000s), which attacked affirmative action and Roe v. Wade; and to the Washington Monthly, which proposed means-testing Social Security.
… With the (Howard) Dean campaign (in 2004) came an intellectual revolution inside the Democratic Party. His insurgency helped propel Daily Kos, a group blog dedicated to stiffening the liberal spine. It energized the progressive activist group MoveOn. It also coincided with Paul Krugman’s emergence as America’s most influential liberal columnist and Jon Stewart’s emergence as America’s most influential liberal television personality. In 2003, MSNBC hired Keith Olbermann and soon became a passionately liberal network. In 2004, The New Republic apologized for having supported the Iraq War. In 2005, The Huffington Post was born as a liberal alternative to the Drudge Report. In 2006, Joe Lieberman, the Democratic Party’s most outspoken hawk, lost his Democratic Senate primary and became an Independent. In 2011, the Democratic Leadership Council—having lost its influence years earlier—closed its doors.
Beinart adds that the Sanders campaign, which would have been savaged by party leaders in the 1980s and 1990s, is now accepted as a fiery ideological approach that is acceptable to many party leaders, activists and donors.
At the same time, recent research by James Stimson, an expert on public opinion, shows that the nation’s policy preferences overall have taken a definitive shift to the right. Stimson created a “policy mood” index derived from responses to a wide variety of opinion surveys involving hundreds of specific policy questions.
Though none of Sanders’, or Obama’s, policies meet the strict definition of socialism – government control of corporations and industries – the backlash within the GOP has been undeniable.
According to The Washington Post, when Stimson crunched his numbers a few years ago he found that the American public in 2012 was more conservative than at any point since 1952. (A more cautious conclusion would be that the current level of conservatism roughly equals the previous highs recorded in 1980 and 1952.) This new trend began as soon as Barack Obama moved into the White House.
Of course, this bipolar disorder in our electorate, fueled by craven politicians, has created a huge gap in the middle — consisting of centrists, moderates, pragmatists and independents – all fed up with the purist ideological loyalties of the two parties. The resulting candidates say and do just enough to get elected, while doing next to nothing once they get into office.
But the huge opening they have created may lead to a dramatic change in our politics, with a new independent party shredding their bases of support.
