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Except. Hillary Clinton was regarded as a centrist by even those on the right for a long time.
It honestly doesnt matter who leads the party or even if there is a more rightward shift, you will still call it the far left
Exactly. The right was even more exposed as being full of **** when suddenly "Clinton is more to the left than Obama!"
What a joke. The liberal boogeyman is on the way out, to the next one suddenly had to be painted as being even worse, even if eight years prior she was painted as being more moderate than Obama. These idiots don't ever realize that the nonsense they say and the stances they take are documented. Unfortunately the echo chamber does seem to influence the center in this country. That's why some of them buy into "liberal ideas haven't worked", when the truth is that liberal ideas haven't been tested.
Exactly. The right was even more exposed as being full of **** when suddenly "Clinton is more to the left than Obama!"
What a joke. The liberal boogeyman is on the way out, to the next one suddenly had to be painted as being even worse, even if eight years prior she was painted as being more moderate than Obama. These idiots don't ever realize that the nonsense they say and the stances they take are documented. Unfortunately the echo chamber does seem to influence the center in this country. That's why some of them buy into "liberal ideas haven't worked", when the truth is that liberal ideas haven't been tested.
It must have worked. America soundly rejected Liberalism.
It must have worked. America soundly rejected Liberalism.
What was? The big claim is the healthcare bill, but despite all the delusional claims, a health insurance mandate has never ever been anywhere close to the preferred "solution" to the health care issue in this country
Also, for the 100th time, the right you can never truly make the claim that America rejected any liberal ideas, as the majority of the country voted for the candidate that came closest to representing them. The GOP candidate has only won the actual vote one time since 1988, and it was by the same margin that Clinton won by, in a time they were using the deaths of 3000 people as an endless crutch.
What was? The big claim is the healthcare bill, but despite all the delusional claims, a health insurance mandate has never ever been anywhere close to the preferred "solution" to the health care issue in this country
Also, for the 100th time, the right you can never truly make the claim that America rejected any liberal ideas, as the majority of the country voted for the candidate that came closest to representing them. The GOP candidate has only won the actual vote one time since 1988.
You realize that the popular vote was racked up in one very Liberal state, correct? Democrats would not have been decimated at the state and federal level if Americans supported their policies and objectives.
I'm someone who identifies as a moderate Libertarian on some days and a moderate Democrat on others. I don't think the Democrats are out in the wilderness, they just put up a candidate who was untrustworthy and whom the public had qualms with. I would like to see Dems and Libertarians take a more moderate, and realistic tone, and align together to oppose Republicans. At the end of the day, I think the biggest challenge that America faces is the right wing nut jobs that have taken over the Republican party and they much be stopped.
What happened the next night shocked even the most pessimistic Democrats. But in another sense, it was the reckoning the party had been expecting for years. They were counting on a Clinton win to paper over a deeper rot they’ve been worrying about—and to buy them some time to start coming up with answers. In other words, it wasn’t just Donald Trump. Or the Russians. Or James Comey. Or all the problems with how Clinton and her aides ran the campaign. Win or lose, Democrats were facing an existential crisis in the years ahead—the result of years of complacency, ignoring the withering of the grass roots and the state parties, sitting by as Republicans racked up local win after local win.
Like to the Republican party. The Democratic party is also in civil war within Itself. So far the Trumpites are trying to weed out the establishment from the Republican party. I'm not sure if it will work, or they may find some common ground. Democrats are divided by 3 factions. You have the Bernie faction, than you have the Schumer/Pelosi/Clinton corporate faction, than you have the Obama moderate faction. This is only within the Democratic party at federal, state and even in local levels as well. Also the corporate/moderate establishment lost plenty of disenfranchised voters such as blue collar white men, African American men, hispanics, Muslim Americans, millennial who did not turn out to voter for Hillary in large numbers. Democrats are going to have to drain their own swamp very soon, but the establishment controls the very essence of the party.
the Democrats problem is that they are now being overshadowed by the crazy rioters and social justice warriors. Until they can kick them all out and become more moderate, they will have trouble.
I'm someone who identifies as a moderate Libertarian on some days and a moderate Democrat on others. I don't think the Democrats are out in the wilderness, they just put up a candidate who was untrustworthy and whom the public had qualms with. I would like to see Dems and Libertarians take a more moderate, and realistic tone, and align together to oppose Republicans. At the end of the day, I think the biggest challenge that America faces is the right wing nut jobs that have taken over the Republican party and they much be stopped.
yeah which was supposed to prevent the GOP from winning an election ever again according to libs. Also how are right wingers nut jobs? As of now, they are more realistic and moderate than the Democrats
Quote:
For one thing, the GOP has fundamentally offered the same ideas for the past six congresses, at least. So, by definition, this one isn’t an outlier. Although some of the specifics might change, the ideological consensus of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Congress — on both economic and social issues — are comparable with John Boehner’s Congress, and for that matter with Newt Gingrich’s Congress.
On the other hand, Barack Obama is arguably the most ideologically left-wing president in history. Who knows what the agenda would have looked like if he’d had benefitted from a Democratic Party majority for eight years. His major legislative achievement, a massive, federally run health-care law, was only tempered by the presence of Blue Dog Democrats – now an extinct tribe.
Republicans have been wildly successful winning elections recently — more than 1,000-plus seats in state and national races since Obama took office — arguing exactly what Bouie claims is fanaticism. These policies might not be popular at the Golden Globes Awards, but they are by definition mainstream.
Moreover, as Bouie sort of intimates, Donald Trump — hardly an ideological conservative — is, in some ways, likely to be a restraining force on the party’s reformist instincts. After all, one of the first agenda items Republicans will likely take up is Keynesian-style infrastructure plan. Hardly the work of Ayn Rand disciples.
This fact doesn’t stop Bouie from making the strange claim that Republicans are now “occupying an ideological space of strict libertarian conservatism.” I’m not exactly sure how “libertarian conservatism” is defined in the liberal glossary. Maybe it applies to anyone uninterested in endless government growth.
As far as I can tell, a lot of these congressmen are pushing traditional market-based ideas and tax cuts that aren’t always popular, but fall well within the parameters of American political discourse. The GOP wants to overturn an unpopular law that wasn’t even functioning before 2011. Some of us wish Republicans would be radical and truly reform Medicaid and create private options in Medicare and Social Security. Certainly, doing so would be no more “extreme” than reforming the entire health-care system with a slew of coercive and unprecedented mandates.
Now, whenever you need a Republican to back up the GOP-is-radicalizing theory, you’ll hear the name of Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Ornstein is the type of conservative who happens not to believe in any of the ideas associated with actual conservatism*, which all fine and well, until people start pretending he doesn’t have an agenda. Which is often.
Ornstein lays all the blame for DC’s gridlock on the reactionaries in the GOP. In this (in)famous graph proving his theory, Ornstein uses DW-NOMINATE, a scaling method to ideologically rank every member of Congress. Needless to say, it’s complicated. But as Sean Trende helpfully pointed out a few years ago, the scores “don’t really tell you how conservative or liberal a member of Congress is, at least not in the sense that most pundits use the term. It tells you how conservative or liberal a member of Congress is relative to other members of Congress.”
So think of it this way: there are Democrats who voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, like Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin, and for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, like Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, who would never vote for those same bills today because no Democrat would. So Ornstein’s study tells us little about the long-term ideological trends of Congress, much less long-term, ideological shift within a party.
What is evident is that Obama’s positions — and now the positions of his party — would have been politically untenable in 1990 or even 2000. There is no way Keith Ellison, a former Nation of Islam member and hard-left economic liberal, would even be in running for the head of the DNC. There would be no way that a socialist Bernie Sanders would have captured 40 percent of the Democratic Party’s primary voters, much less find praise from everyone in his party at the convention. Yet today polls consistently find majorities that of Democrats have positive views of socialism. If this is not a “radical shift to the left,” I’m not sure what is.
if a Dem politician said that today he would be shunned by the party and there would be cries of racism and protests
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