That’s not a very substantive rejoinder. May I suggest you start by trying to refute the existence (or at least the influence) of the Democratic Leadership Council:
It was an appropriate response. At first I thought you were joking. After all you did say:
“the Dem party is much more ‘right’ than it was back in the day.”
John Kennedy lowered taxes FOR ALL AMERICANS. And he also built up the military. And of course Harry Truman needs no defense relative to his more conservative behavior.
So you really need to retract the above statement. Obama took your party so far left it’s starting to look like the democrat socialist party. As a matter of fact Hillary was almost defeated by a Socialist. And old Lizzy Warren and other “promising” Presidential candidates don’t look too much like Kennedy or Truman either…
So…just take that statement back and we will forget you ever said it. Hey…you are probably drinking right now it is Saturday night after all.
I am not inclined to think that being a pushover for allowing: government funded abortion on demand, same sex marriage, deficit spending to a point of building a debt of 1 year of GNP, proactively forcing democracy on sovereigns through leadership assassination, war, and nation building, and any number of other items are truly conservative philosophies. I do not equate the Neo Con leadership that has run the GOP as conservative.
Although I consider myself conservative, it is because of my Christian faith that my viewpoint is filtered through those lenses (unlike yours above hehe).
I’m not against Unions (except their use of member dues to support candidates often opposed to rank and file), believe in social safety nets (workfare mainly), am against laissez faire economics. Again, these are influenced by my desire (although commanded, at odds with my base desire) to treat my neighbor as myself.
Anyway I don’t want to contend about it, as you and I see the fundamentals differently. Here is a joke.
God was once approached by a scientist who said, “Listen God, we’ve decided we don’t need you anymore. These days we can clone people, transplant organs and do all sorts of things that used to be considered miraculous.”
God replied, “Don’t need me huh? Why don’t we have a competition to see who can make a human being.
“Fine” says the scientist as he bends down to scoop up a handful of dirt.”
“Whoa!” says God, "Get your own dirt.”
You ans @treco are both right - both parties have moved more to the partisan extreme. The vote trends in Congress bear this out over the years.
And it’s most obvious at the lack of moderates in both parties. Obama a Rockefeller Republican? If that were so, legions of moderate Democrats wouldn’t have paid for Obama’s career with their political lives.
Partly though, it all depends on how you define Left and Right. Yes, the Democratic elite fell in love with high capitalist finance on both coasts and moved that way, but that isn’t categorically a move to the Right, any more than Republicans passing Medicare Part D was categorically a move to the Left.
On balance, we’ve lost conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, and we’re worse off for it.
4 Likes
So, you got nothing on the DLC, then?
Let’s imagine that the families moved here when those three kids were preschoolers, since we’re assuming that they have the English fluency and academic chops to knock my kid out of the running? If that’s the case, then we’ve already invested in educating them from K-12, and we have some really bright kids on our hands, right? It would be best for CA to give them citizenship right along with their high school diplomas and hope that they stay in the state, pay taxes, start businesses etc… If I were the President, I’d do that. I would be angry if we were lowering standards for the undocumented kids.
If you want to get mad, you could focus on the fact that the UC system is admitting fewer CA residents, and higher numbers of out-of-state and international students, because they need the higher tuition. FYI, in state tuition and fees are around $13,000 to go to a UC school, where the international students are paying closer to $36,000 per year. Unlike the hypothetical Mexican undocumented kids who graduated from CA high schools, the international students will likely take their UC educations back to their home countries, so the benefit to CA is temporary. There was a scandal after an audit about the UC system lowering standards for out of state students, so they were admitting LESS qualified kids from out of state. Not good.
You could look at all the bloat within the UC system, and people like the UC President making over $500,000 per year. Some of the campuses have nearly as many employees as students. That includes part-time people like grad students, but it’s still a big bureaucracy. Pouring indirect federal money on our universities in the form of grants and loans has drive college costs up across the board.
Anyway, my kid might be pushed out because UCLA needs a bassoon player, so it would be hard to be ticked about some undocumented kids who graduated from CA high schools and have the academics to knock my kid out of the running. BTW, I have some really beautiful and bright children, so this is unlikely. wink.
2 Likes
Sorry, but I consider that a false equivalency. The shift in the Republican party has been vastly greater than that of the Dems. (Again, you have to account for the DLC and the profound shift to the right it engendered in the Democratic Party.)
I’ve posted this before (not on this thread, I hope), but it bears repeating in the current context:
"The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.
It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.
The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post."
2 Likes
Fixed that for you.
Yes, I got that they are spreading propaganda and you apparently believe it. Now go back and study the previous democrat Presidents two of which I gave you. They were ALL…ALL more conservative than Obama.
I actually still think you are joking
PBS Host haha Cornel West who is a Socialist feels that Obama is a Rockefeller republican.
ED you have to stop this.
But there hasn’t been a profound shift to the right by Democrats, and the chart I posted bears that out. There’s no dispute that Republicans have lurched right, but Democrats have tracked leftward, not rightward.
The DLC is practically non-existent in the party today, as is the Blue Dog Coalition. The party moved left and they aren’t part of the conversation anymore.
Obama is largely to blame for that - and if you don’t believe me, ask a moderate Democrat who once served over beers.
And if you need further proof, in 2016, Jim Webb - a moderate Democrat who appeals to the flyover states and holds several conservative positions - couldn’t get a whiff of a hearing in the primary, but a geriatric socialist who isn’t even a Democrat challenged the (pre-ordained) frontrunner.
4 Likes
Take a listen to Truman Inaugural address. Doesn’t sound like anything whacky Lizzie Warren, or any of the current power elite dems would be saying
How about Republican POTUSes? Were they all more conservative than Obama too?
Agreed. But before they became nonexistent, they first shifted the Democratic party sharply to the right.
Well, Jim Webb’s peevishness made him a uniquely unappealing candidate. But you’re right, the base of the Dem party was shifting leftward throughout the 2016 election season. But this goes along with my thesis, in that the base was rebelling against what they perceived to be a party that was too far right, and had been that way for some time.
3 Likes
I’m beginning to believe a good portion of Americans see the US as a global resource that anyone has a right to tap.
Sure. And the chart I showed that during the 90s, when the DLC was at the peak of its powers, started moving left.[quote=“EyeDentist, post:3812, topic:223365”]
Well, Jim Webb’s peevishness made him a uniquely unappealing candidate. But you’re right, the base of the Dem party was shifting leftward throughout the 2016 election season. But this goes along with my thesis, in that the base was rebelling against what they perceived to be a party that was too far right, and had been that way for some time.
[/quote]
Webb’s “peevishness” did him in? In contrast to Sanders’ charisma and charm? In contrast with Clinton’s natural magnetism?
C’mon. You can’t avoid the data points that Democrats have moved left, not right - in fact, you haven’t even addressed them. And the culmination of all of this was a socialist making a serious challenge to the ultimate nominee, for whom the fix was in.
2 Likes
OK, let’s look at your data, because it’s pretty consistent with my argument as well.
Look at the distributions. Start with the Dems. For each Dem distribution, determine (by eyeballing it) its central tendency; ie, where the mean/median of the distribution is. Now compare the location of the mean from one time period to the next, ie, track the location of the House Dem mean from the top graph to the middle one to the bottom one, then do the same for the Dem Senate means. To my eye, the Dem means in both stay in almost exactly the same place from one time period to the next; the only change is that the distributions coalesce a little more tightly around those means. This indicates moderation in the Dem caucuses, ie, a loss of extremists on both ends of the ideological spectrum.
Now do the same for the GOP–identify the mean for each distribution, then track them over time. Without a doubt, the means trend rightward, for both the Senate and (especially) the House.
So while the data do not support my contention that the Dems shifted rightward, they do indicate the Dems coalesced around a center-left ideology, without evidence of a leftward shift. In contrast, the data do support my contention that the GOP has shifted sharply rightward. (In fact, extrapolating to the next set of data, the GOP House is shifting rightward so fast that its mean won’t even appear on the next graph, unless the axis is re-scaled.)
No it’s the other way round, especially in terms of human resources where the US is basically poaching intellectual resources of other countries…
If you ever came close (which I highly doubt) to one of the leading US universities you’d see a lot of non-white faces - from China, Iran and India (in that order).
After all, the human capital pushing the US technological development forward comes from guess who - immigrants. Elon Musk of Tesla was born in South Africa, Sergey Brin of Google in the USSR, Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) was born in Hyderabad and Twitter’s CEO Kordestani in Tehran, just to name a few.
There are countless more examples. one of the more famous being the Chobani yogurt brand (a Persian word denoting “shepherd”) created by one Hamdi Ulukaya, whose immigration status in the US used to be controversial.
Of course, such an exchange of resources (human, physical and technological) is not a one way street - it’s a byproduct of capitalism and whether it’s good or bad depends on one’s point of view and whether you’re a winner or a loser in this great game.
For example, my wife works for an US healthcare company, although she’s based thousands of miles away from their HQ. She’s taking up one of those jobs that have allegedly been “stolen” from the American people.
But if you look at the specific situation of that company, you’d see that it wasn’t a conscious decision by the Clintons/lizard people/Jews/whomever to move these jobs overseas. The company struggled in staffing certain positions in the US and then realized they could find PhD’s with perfect English abroad willing to work for smaller wages and all that without the hassle of US-related operational expenses. That’s capitalism in a nutshell.
Did my wife steal a job from a coal country voter in West Virginia? No. Can they be brought back to the US by the POTUS calling out the company on Twitter? I’m not so sure.
The point is, for better of for worse we cannot turn back time to the “good ol’ days” a major global catastrophe notwithstanding…
2 Likes