>The point about the Democrats pushing public discourse to the right is a
>damn good one, no matter what they do if elected.
Stonecash's book on class and party in the U.S. is interesting in many ways, but several points from it deserve emphasis: the Democratic party of the 1950s was heavily southern and rather conservative, and the ideological differences between the two parties were fairly minimal. What changed was that the Reps started moving massively to the right, starting with Goldwater. If your base of comparison is the McGovern campaign, then the Dems have moved to the right, but if your base is the 1950s and 1960s, they haven't really - and they've pretty much shed their southern reactionary wing. You could read this as saying that the Dems have pretty much always sucked, but the trope of their rightward move needs some closer scrutiny.
Doug