On Sun, 2 May 2004, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> The Democratic Party successfully harnessed the liberalization of
> social mores to the political and ideological power of economic
> neoliberalism during the Bill Clinton years.
That's not harnessing, Yoshie. When you harness something, it pulls you in the same direction. Here, social mores go progressively more left, while the governing discourse and policy goes more right.
With the Republic party, you have the opposite: the right pulls their party, and the country, to the right.
Clinton is of course the exemplar of souljahing -- of ridiculing the left to get votes to his right. That's something the Republicans never do.
What Clinton did is not harnessing. It's neutering. It's different.
The Repugs show that it's possible, at least in the abstract, to have the opposite relation between the radical margin and the broad middle. Where radicals pull on the string of party rather than push on it.
Of course the first step in realizing such a project would be to accept that such a thing is possible. Which, as you evidence, is a very long way off. Unlike the radical right, the radical left in America thinks of its corresponding party as the embrace of death. And is firmly convinced that it would be easier to invent and install an entirely new political system than to change their relation to that party.
Michael