Democrats are realizing they must become more moderate

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2022/07/14/democrats-in-america-are-realising-they-must-moderate-or-die

by crhulls • 4 years ago

21 76 4 years ago

economist.com

nazgulsenpai• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/Ewax6

hanniabu2• 4 years ago

So we'll have a right party and a far-right party. This is looking more gloom every year.

shrimp_emoji• 4 years ago

Just recalibrate your scale.

hanniabu2• 4 years ago

That's exactly what's happening and why a portion of the country no longer sees any issues with changes being made to to create an authoritarian government

akomtu3• 4 years ago

To be precise, the blue camp is also a right/far-right party because it wants the gov to control more and more things. I don't even know if we have a party or a faction with the mission "more rights to the people".

IndoorPatio3• 4 years ago

The democratic party in the US spans center-left to center-right and is expressly in favor of more rights to the people for common concerns like who a person is allowed to have sex with, marry, and choose to reproduce with (or not).

michaelmrose17• 4 years ago

That isn't what "right" means in the context of American politics. Furthermore although both actions are or can be coercive we tend to distinguish between actions that establish positive rights like keeping your employer from firing you for being gay and actions that take them away like preventing one from terminating their pregnancy.

mberning• 4 years ago

This will get flagged to death. But in the meantime, surveys have shown that the right and left have shifted further from the center over the last 20 years. The left has had a much more dramatic swing than the right. I think the left could easily adopt a few of the issues that the right is currently championing and take full control of the government.

michaelmrose17• 4 years ago

On the morning after the insurrection around 45% of Republicans were supportive of the violent attempt to overthrow our government. We have courts and politicians not only wanting to kill abortion rights in states they control but prevent people from crossing state lines to get abortions and removing opposing exceptions for rape or even the life of the mother. Secession is a fairly mainstream position among republicans, held by 2/3 of southern republicans. 4 in 10 support violence to put the other side down or achieve independence.

A conservative court has found that there is no right to privacy in the constitution and affirmed that stare decisis is dead while opining that the court went too far not only in affirming abortion rights but in protecting gay and even interracial marriage laws, and even gay sex. This means that basically any prior case that was decided in a way that deviates from present conservative thinking is on the menu. Before it was merely abhorrent that a minority among the supreme court believes Texas has a right to criminalize gay sex in Lawrence v Texas. Now they can if they choose merely redo that one.

So that's whats going on with the red team now please do explicate how the left has undergone a more radical swing. I don't see an idea more radical than tax the rich and give everyone health care with more than single digit support.

happytoexplain4• 4 years ago

You're right, but taken literally, the parent is describing a relative measure (the size of a swing), and one could make an argument that, on a ten point extremity scale, Republicans have swung from 7 to 9 and Democrats have swung from 2 to 6 (to choose arbitrary numbers).

throwoutway• 4 years ago

You put too much stock in polls. The average (or even intelligent) person does not have time for polls. Trusting these numbers is to believe in FUD.

Barrera• 4 years ago

... Given the sorry state of Mr Biden’s approval ratings—by some measures, the worst at this point of a first term of any president since the 1950s—and woeful perceptions of the economy, it is unlikely that the tentative steps that Democrats are taking back towards the median voter will be enough to avert the serious electoral losses that they are facing. It is only after a serious drubbing that the descent from peak progressive will gain speed. Better it be in 2022 than in 2024.

In this entire article, just one mention of the word "inflation."

In 1992 Democratic strategist James Carville coined the expression "It's the economy, stupid." He was talking about then-incumbent George HW Bush's inability to do anything substantive to relieve the economic pain the country was going through.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid

Looks like Dems will be on the receiving end of "It's the economy, stupid" this time.

voisin• 4 years ago

I am not sure what Biden could have done to fix the economy based on what he inherited. Interest rates should have risen a long time prior to his inauguration. The costly War on Terror should have ended with Bush’s presidency. Trump shouldn’t have moved so aggressively to alienate trading partners and exit free trade agreements.

frumper• 4 years ago

He asked the American people to vote for him knowing he was walking into a mess. I don’t think these problems are his fault and he had been hampered by both parties in implementing any of his plans to fix it. At the end of the day though, how is giving him 4 more years a good idea? He’s ineffective. He should let another Democrat run so they can at least claim they have the right plan to fix things.

kcplate7• 4 years ago

This is always the line I hear when a democrat is in office and the economy is bad, to the point where I simply don’t buy it anymore.

He could have started by at least acknowledging inflation was a thing and started working to combat it. They spent a year BS’ing the country about it and ignoring until they just couldn’t anymore because everyone whole works for a living was seeing it first hand.

perfecthjrjth• 4 years ago

Indeed! Under Obama's second term, Janet Yellen did not want to raise interest rates to help Obama. However, during Trump's term, she wanted to raise interest rates, an event which Trump did not like; that's why Trump replaced her with Powell.

mturmon• 4 years ago

They are choosing to peg the article to the SF recall, where there were competency issues as well as political valence. Even more relevant are the elections in the East Bay that returned progressive candidates, and the mayoral election in LA where the business oriented faux Democrat lost heavily to Karen Bass, who is significantly to his left.

GenerocUsername• 4 years ago

In the replies: democrats who disagree

happytoexplain4• 4 years ago

Is there something wrong with being a Democrat and disagreeing with the article, or are you saying that the disagreement is a sign that that article is wrong?

yucky6• 4 years ago

Disagreeing is one thing, flagging an article from The Economist is something else, and really pulls the mask down..

fullshark• 4 years ago

I remember similar stories about the Republicans pre-Trump. Guys like Graham and Rubio tried pushing things like bipartisan immigration reform and it backfired spectacularly as the base revolted and the party became anti-globalist/populist. Current democratic leadership seems woefully out of touch with its base's concerns, and the coalition seems to basically be "anti-Trumpism" not pro anything. Seems like the democrats need a left-wing equivalent of a "revolution" to get the base back cause right now they are offering basically nothing accept "we aren't those republicans who you hate."

Basically Democrats need an actual leader since the only person who could unite the party right now: Obama, doesn't seem to care at all anymore and everyone else is just after career preservation.

bryanlarsen• 4 years ago

Democrats have always only stood for "anti-Republican". They're a big tent party held together only by their opposition to the Republicans.

This is less so now than it was in the past now that the Dixecrats have left the Democrats.

happytoexplain4• 4 years ago

I hear this description constantly about both sides, but I think I hear it more often about Republicans. Regardless, there may be truth to it, but it's basically useless in conversation.

nitwit0052• 4 years ago

A liberal party is impossible in the US political system at the moment. The rural areas are strongly advantaged by design, and have a strong conservative lean.

Unsurprisingly, the Democrats are already basically a moderate party.

IndoorPatio3• 4 years ago

Yes, democrats span center-left to center-right. If one is looking for a "centrist" or "moderate" political party in the US, it is the democratic party.

andy-x• 4 years ago

This is pure BS. The self-appointed progessives/wokes are not moderate or centrist in any way, but they have huge influence over Democrats' policy. And they will be responsible for the Democrats' losses in the following years.

salawat4• 4 years ago

One's "advantaged by design" is another's "what you want doesn't work here".

Different ways for different slices of life. Who'd'a thunk it?

nitwit0052• 4 years ago

No. They deliberately set up the constitution to favor the less populous states, and state constitutions largely did the same.

If you actually poll people on individual issues, rural people often agree with the Democrats. The parties aren't particularly representative of people's underlying opinions.

mtkhaos• 4 years ago

Horse shoe theory. If you go far enough right you have all the same concerns of an state ran communist state. Small group of people pulling the strings only difference is allotments vs rent/lease/mortage/debt.

The fear has been that if you go left, you won't own anything. But then introduce companies like Blockrock that take advantage of owned assets during inflation to leverage more debt to outpace the consumers ability to buy their own assets.

So becoming more moderate it to admit something. This isn't about having a well function economy that is based on innovation. This is just speculative meta game that has ursped innovation itself as a profit mode.

This doesn't include the impact of global trade and the ultimate effect on an economy that doesn't produce anything for itself. We need factories that can make goods to the exact needs of the user. Not arbitrary mass manufacturing that only winds up in the landfill on a couple years.

Want something endless to drive the economy that doesn't rely on making endless junk? Look at the mobile game industry, digital goods, entertainment, blueprints and simulated protypes.

Going "right," does not trend towards progress. The democrats must become more "conservative." The fundamental flaw of speculation is the reliance on previous investments and the inability to liquidate to switch towards renewables.. etc... etc...

mihaic• 4 years ago

Observing from Europe, US politics seems like an extreme case of identifying with the opposite of the enemy. Over several cycles of oversimplifaction, each party simply takes some position from the other, and vocally proclaims the opposite, regardless if there was some truth lost along the way.

What's surprising is the tone of the pro-Democrats responses here: vitriolic but without real substance except whataboutism aimed at republicans. HN is the highest quality online agora I know, which to me is hinting that even the upper ranks of US voters are caught in this process.

jaredcwhite• 4 years ago

Politics in this country have become upside down and backwards.

To my mind, AOC is a moderate. Joe Manchin is an extremist. And calls for Democrats to become "more moderate" must inevitably mean that actually-moderate Democrats would better align themselves with cynical political movements which provide thinly-veiled cover for alt-right/MAGA propaganda and unfettered crony capitalism.

Abso-f'n-lutely not.

Democrats are realizing they must become more moderate

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