On Jun 21, 2007, at 12:06 AM, Michael Smith wrote:
>> 1. The Democrats will not go away, wither away,
>> disappear, or otherwise do our work for us if they
>> lose the next election....They will just shift further right again,
>
> Indeed. And what will they do if they win? Answer: the very same
> thing!
> Conclusion? Left as an exercise.
I know that "the Dems have moved to the right" is a standard line, but relative to what? Political scientists who code these things find more differences between the two parties now than they were several decades ago. Take this, for example, from a paper by Jeffrey Stonecash ("The Income Gap," PS: Political Science and Politics, July 2006 <http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/PSJuly06Stonecash.pdf>): "Figure 2 presents party differences using the DW-NOMINATE scores developed by Keith Poole. Differences were relatively great during the first half of the 20th century and then gradually declined from the 1940s through most of the 1970s. Then the differences began to increase, and they are now as great as they were a hundred years ago.... Voters have recognized these growing differences. As Figure 3 indicates, respondents in national surveys increasingly say they see differences between the two par ties and care about who wins the presidential election." It might be that the people most likely to say the Dems have moved right don't want to say the Reps have moved even further to the right, which has widened the relative difference between the two.
And what about absolutes? The Dem party of old may have given us the New Deal, but it also gave us the CIA, loyalty oaths, the Dixiecrats, and the Vietnam war.
Doug