Can You Split the Two Party System?

[John B]

I don't vote for extremist nutjobs. I vote against more extremist nutjobs on the other side of the fence.

[Marshall]

It's not letting me post a picture.

[Cornflake]

I don't agree that the term "moderate" is subjective and biased in favor of Democrats. This snippet from the Times, citing a left-of-center think tank, accords with what I think I've seen:

Lee Drutman, a political scientist and senior fellow at New America, published a piece on Oct. 20 on his Substack, “The U.S. House Has Sailed Into Dangerously Uncharted Territory. There’s No Going Back.”

“Republicans have moved far to the right and polarization is at record highs,” Druckman wrote, citing a measure of ideological polarization between House Democrats and Republicans known as DWNominate which shows House Republicans moving steadily to the right, starting in 1968, reaching a level in 2022 substantially higher than at any point in time since 1880.

House Democrats, in contrast, moved very slightly to the left over the same 1968-2022 period.

I asked Drutman whether he thought House Republicans could move further right. He replied by email:

Hard to say. We keep thinking the G.O.P. can’t move any further to the right and still win nationally, and yet, when more than 90 percent of districts are safe, and the Democratic Party is equally unpopular, and there are only two parties. the G.O.P. can win in too many places just by not being the Democrats.

The left wing of the Democratic Party is small and has little influence. The right wing of the Republican Party dominates the party.

[aquaduct]

Oct 25, 2023 10:30:22 GMT -5 Cornflake said:

I don't agree that the term "moderate" is subjective and biased in favor of Democrats. This snippet from the Times, citing a left-of-center think tank, accords with what I think I've seen:

Lee Drutman, a political scientist and senior fellow at New America, published a piece on Oct. 20 on his Substack, “The U.S. House Has Sailed Into Dangerously Uncharted Territory. There’s No Going Back.”

“Republicans have moved far to the right and polarization is at record highs,” Druckman wrote, citing a measure of ideological polarization between House Democrats and Republicans known as DWNominate which shows House Republicans moving steadily to the right, starting in 1968, reaching a level in 2022 substantially higher than at any point in time since 1880.

House Democrats, in contrast, moved very slightly to the left over the same 1968-2022 period.

I asked Drutman whether he thought House Republicans could move further right. He replied by email:

Hard to say. We keep thinking the G.O.P. can’t move any further to the right and still win nationally, and yet, when more than 90 percent of districts are safe, and the Democratic Party is equally unpopular, and there are only two parties. the G.O.P. can win in too many places just by not being the Democrats.

The left wing of the Democratic Party is small and has little influence. The right wing of the Republican Party dominates the party.

I personally think that is the exact problem although nobody involved seems to get their own absurdity.

I think Congress's great compromise of the 60s has finally caught up with them. They can't do anything because they stopped really doing anything 40 or so years ago. They simply threw the responsibility for legislating to the Executive agencies they created.

The only thing left that they can do is spend money which they gladly do in a bipartisan fashion.

Until we're bankrupt and the system collapses.

Notice how passing another bunch of spending is literally the only thing at stake here. And anyone who thinks that may not be a good idea is "extremist" and bad and must be eliminated. But out here in the real world, nobody gives a rip- ever.

I continue to hold out hope though, based on Trump's greatest accomplishment- his Supreme Court.

Looks promising that by June the whole Supreme Court two step of the last 40 years could crater, forcing Congress back to actually working for a living.

If not, we'll probably have to learn to speak Chinese as the country falls.

Oh well, I'm too old for it to matter much anymore.

[millring]

The progressive left has won every meaningful battle and moved the entire culture so far to the left that now the definition of moderate would appear extreme to the moderate of even 20 years ago. The left is the one deciding the definition of moderate. Of course they think it is real.

[millring]

When "moderate" is perceived by everyone as synonymous with "reasonable", don't you think everyone believes themselves to be moderate? And when every divergent point of view is labeled "extreme" and publicly ridiculed, don't you think everyone wants to believe they are moderate?

"Moderate" is a useless term -- or one overused for political advantage. It's nonsense.

[John B]

Oct 25, 2023 12:05:50 GMT -5 millring said:

The progressive left has won ever meaningful battle and moved the entire culture so far to the left that now the definition of moderate would appear extreme to the moderate of even 20 years ago. The left is the one deciding the definition of moderate. Of course they think it is real.

I respectfully disagree.

[Cornflake]

John, I cordially disagree.

For one thing, I really don't care how I'm labelled. I have grounds for using the shorthand terms "centrist" or "moderate" because I think they're accurate, not because I like them. They actually sound kind of wishy-washy to me. But from time to time I've seen polls regarding how people feel about specific public issues. I've mostly aligned with the majority in those polls. That suggests to me that my views are pretty centrist.

I'll trot out Eisenhower as a baseline. When he was president, most of the New Deal measures were still in effect and he supported them. Elizabeth Warren was probably the second most liberal candidate in 2020. I read one of her books and found that she basically wants to go back to the New Deal (with a few loopy things thrown in, like reparations). Echoing Eisenhower doesn't sound like an extreme lurch to the left to me. Neither Eisenhower nor Goldwater could win a Republican primary today. They'd both be castigated as RINOs.

A friend has been a major political consultant in Arizona for many years. He ran at least one gubernatorial campaign. As a favor he agreed to advise me when I made a kamikaze run for state senate in 1996. (Rs outnumbered us 2-1 and I was recruited by the state party.) I remember visiting him with drafts of proposed election signs that identified me as a moderate. He advised me to get rid of the word "moderate" because moderation didn't sell. I don't think it's any more marketable today. So no, I don't think everyone wants to believe they're moderate.

[Marshall]

Oct 25, 2023 12:05:50 GMT -5 millring said:

The progressive left has won ever meaningful battle and moved the entire culture so far to the left that now the definition of moderate would appear extreme to the moderate of even 20 years ago.

I do get a sense that the minority in this country feels "overruled" by the majority on a regular basis and thus feels disenfranchised. So, they then lean towards a tear-the-whole-thing-down attitude. But I don't often hear a viable alternative. And also feel the majority should have some rights in a democratic society.

For a good while now, the Republican Party has been held hostage by a minority in their own ranks. Are party members outside of the Freedom Caucus not moderates? Or are they just Democrats in elephant clothing.

Seems like a minority of the minority is trying to drive the bus. I realize they don't like the road they perceive the bus is on. But there's plenty of hypocrisy in their ranks to question the validity of their stranglehold. I'm reminded that when Trump was POTUS, Congress bumped up the debt limit 3 times without much of a whisper from Republicans. Now with a Democrat in office, they again get religion about the deficit.

[RickW]

Oct 25, 2023 13:27:39 GMT -5 millring said:

The only person (besides me) on this forum who I think of as a true moderate -- and mean it as the compliment most believe it to be -- is probably epaul. I'm on my phone so it's too hard to explain why, but he can, better than anyone, argue both/all sides as they might argue it themselves.

This is because, being a lonely famer type in the wilds of the Dakotas, he often has only himself to argue with, which forces him to see all sides, to keep from punching himself. If he was in an urban hotbed like Warsaw, he’d be a bit more opinionated.

[Cornflake]

I read a lot of history. I think I'm seeing some echoes of past events in current events.

Between the Revolution and the Civil War, the North became larger, more urban and more industrialized. The South remained agrarian. Gradually political power shifted to the North. Eventually the South's only way to exercise power was by collaborating with Northern Democrats.

In 1860, the alliance with the Northern Democrats fell apart. At the national convention of the Democrats, a few of the more extreme Southern states insisted that the platform embrace and approve of slavery. That was never going to happen. The hotheads couldn't be dissuaded by moderates who tried their best. So the national party split. The Southern Democrats and Northern Democrats nominated competing candidates. (And there was a third but I don't want to get too complicated.) Lincoln won with something like 42 percent of the vote. Lincoln repeatedly said that he couldn't and wouldn't interfere with slavery where it then existed. States started seceding anyway. The result was a bloody war.

Today it's the red states that see a future where they'll be relatively powerless. Some of the more hotheaded conservatives in the House wanted McCarthy to insist that conditions be attached to the agreement to keep the government running. These were measures that would never have become law. They wouldn't have made it through the Senate and they wouldn't have survived the veto power. McCarthy agreed to a more practical compromise. He'd made himself a captive of the hotheads and he got ousted.

What I'm waiting to see is whether Johnson will be a captive of his extreme wing. Will he allow a minority of his own party to block any compromises? If so, we'll have a mess that won't be in the country's interests. I'm hoping he cares enough about the country to get real.

Of course, I could be wrong.