If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals

[DKW 86 7,431]

Posting this for the last two paragraphs mainly. I DO NOT support much of the author's statements here. I find fault with his methodologies. I do not prescribe to his points about the Democrat Party running Left. As a Prog, we see just the opposite. We see the DNC as Republican Lite, or the DLC founded by Bill Clinton, which flat role modeled the GOP.

 

If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals

On Thursday I posted a series of charts that all documented a similar theme: Since roughly the year 2000, according to survey data, Democrats have moved significantly to the left on most hot button social issues while Republicans have moved only slightly right.

This wasn't meant to be a rigorous scholarly analysis. And you can argue about margins of error, question wording, choice of topics, and so forth. Still, the gaps are too big and the trend too consistent to ignore the obvious conclusion that over the past two decades Democrats have moved left far more than Republicans have moved right:

I've made this point many times before, and I want to make it again more loudly and more plainly today. It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle. It is liberals. And this shouldn't come as a surprise: Almost by definition, liberals are the ones pushing for change while conservatives are merely responding to whatever liberals do. More specifically, progressives have been bragging publicly about pushing the Democratic Party leftward since at least 2004—and they've succeeded.

I see the GOP EGGREGIOUSLY OVERREACTING to simple, long overdue moves to more Liberal Policies.  

Now, I'm personally happy about most of this. But that doesn't blind me to the fact that "personally happy" means nothing in politics. What matters is what the median voter feels, and Democrats have been moving further and further away from the median voter for years:

I've added a scale of 0-10 to these charts to make them easier to interpret. As you can see, in 1994 the average Democrat was at 5 and the average Republican was at 6. In 2004, that had changed slightly: the average Democrat was at 4 and the average Republican was just under 5. In other words, both parties had gotten a little bit more liberal.

But by 2017 that had changed completely. The average Democrat was at 2 while the average Republican was at 6.5. In other words, between 1994 and 2017, Democrats had gotten three points more liberal while Republicans had gotten about half a point more conservative.

I do not believe this. Maybe some elements of the Dems have, but not the majority of the party.

That takes us up to 2017, by which time Democrats were quite obviously farther from the median voter than they had been in 1994 or 2004. And it showed: Our election victory in 2020 was razor thin even though (a) the economy sucked, (b) we were in the middle of a pandemic, (c) voters had had four years to see just what Donald Trump was really like, and (d) our candidate was bland, amiable, white, male Joe Biden. This should scare the hell out of liberals.

I do see this.

The best explanation for how 2020 played out comes from David Shor, a data geek who identifies as socialist but is rigorously honest about what the numbers tell us. Here's a long excerpt from an interview he did with New York's Eric Levitz a few months ago:

At the subgroup level, Democrats gained somewhere between half a percent to one percent among non-college whites and roughly 7 percent among white college graduates (which is kind of crazy). Our support among African Americans declined by something like one to 2 percent. And then Hispanic support dropped by 8 to 9 percent....One implication of these shifts is that education polarization went up and racial polarization went down.

....What happened in 2020 is that nonwhite conservatives voted for Republicans at higher rates; they started voting more like white conservatives....Clinton voters with conservative views on crime, policing, and public safety were far more likely to switch to Trump than voters with less conservative views on those issues. And having conservative views on those issues was more predictive of switching from Clinton to Trump than having conservative views on any other issue-set was.

....This lines up pretty well with trends we saw during the campaign. In the summer, following the emergence of “defund the police” as a nationally salient issue, support for Biden among Hispanic voters declined. So I think you can tell this microstory: We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on. And then, as a result, these conservative Hispanic voters who’d been voting for us despite their ideological inclinations started voting more like conservative whites.

....Over the last four years, white liberals have become a larger and larger share of the Democratic Party....And since white voters are sorting on ideology more than nonwhite voters, we’ve ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing, and even on racial issues or various measures of “racial resentment.” So as white liberals increasingly define the party’s image and messaging, that’s going to turn off nonwhite conservative Democrats and push them against us.

....If Democrats elevate issues or theories that a large minority of nonwhite voters reject, it’s going to be hard to keep those margins....Black conservatives and Hispanic conservatives don’t actually buy into a lot of these intellectual theories of racism. They often have a very different conception of how to help the Black or Hispanic community than liberals do. And I don’t think we can buy our way out of this trade-off. Most voters are not liberals. If we polarize the electorate on ideology — or if nationally prominent Democrats raise the salience of issues that polarize the electorate on ideology — we’re going to lose a lot of votes.

Now: maybe you're personally delighted by the Democratic Party's leftward march and maybe you're not. It doesn't matter. Despite endless hopeful invocations of "but polls show that people like our positions," the truth is that the Democratic Party has been pulled far enough left that even lots of non-crazy people find us just plain scary—something that Fox News takes vigorous advantage of. From an electoral point of view, the story here is consistent: Democrats have stoked the culture wars by getting more extreme on social issues and Republicans have used this to successfully cleave away a segment of both the non-college white vote and, more recently, the non-college nonwhite vote.

I, and most Progs I know and follow, completely separate from the author here. Many believe that America does agree with us on the policies. I feel that America is rejecting the Egregious Elitism of the party leadership and American Media. They like our policies, BUT HATE OUR MESSENGERS.  

So why is it conventional wisdom to point to conservatives as "culture war mongers"? As I've mentioned before, it's a straightforward consequence of behavioral economics. For most people, losing something is far more painful than the pleasure of gaining something of equivalent value. And since conservatives are "losing" the customs and hierarchies that they've long lived with, their reaction is far more intense than the liberal reaction toward winning the changes they desire. This produces more outrageous behavior from conservatives even though liberals are actually the ur-source of polarization.

Maybe buy some of this

Here's the nickel summary of all this:

• Since 1994, Democrats have moved left far more than Republicans have moved right.
• This has produced lots of safe states in liberal places like California and Massachusetts but has steadily pulled Democrats farther and farther away from median states like Iowa and Ohio.
• Recently, white academic theories of racism—and probably the whole woke movement in general—have turned off many moderate Black and Hispanic voters.¹ Ditto for liberal dismissal of crime and safety issues. Hispanics in particular moved in Trump's direction despite—or maybe because of—his position on immigration and the wall.
• Democrats will remain on an electoral knife edge forever unless they can pull themselves back toward the center.

This is obviously not a popular proposal among the white activist class. But a dispassionate look at voting patterns hardly allows any other conclusion. Moving to the left may help galvanize the progressive base—which is good!—but if it's not done with empathy and tact it risks outrunning the vast middle part of the country, which progressive activists seem completely uninterested in talking to.

It is well within our power to break our two-decade 50-50 deadlock and become routine winners in national politics. All it takes is a moderation of our positions from "pretty far left" to "pretty liberal." That's all. But who's got the courage to say so?

¹And for God's sake, please don't insult my intelligence by pretending that wokeness and cancel culture are all just figments of the conservative imagination. Sure, they overreact to this stuff, but it really exists, it really is a liberal invention, and it really does make even moderate conservatives feel like their entire lives are being held up to a spotlight and found wanting.

I believe that most do support our policies but literally hate the Elitist Snobs we have leading us. Pelosi polls worst among active leaders in the US. HRC lost because SHE REPELLED VOTERS even though she out spent trump by $544M. The Elitist Leadership in the primaries tanked early. VPKH polled almost nothing. PB actually won Iowa. It really is a personality problem. PJB won because he had no real negatives in the public mind. He can be a jerk, but a more lovable, forgivable jerk.

[CoffeeTiger 5,135]

Even if we assume the data is correct (very big assumption), It would make sense that the Democratic Party is moving farther left than the Republicans are moving Right because for a long time the United States as a whole has been a very Conservative, right wing country. It's a pretty popular, common joke among people in other countries, particularly in Canada and Western Europe, that the U.S doesn't even have a liberal political party. That the U.S. Democratic Part is = to the Right wing, conservative party's in their own Countries and that the US Republicans are equivalent to their fringe, extremist-right party. 

 

I'd argue that a bigger shift in the Democratic Party is simply a self correction to what an actual liberal party should be and that we don't see as much movement by Republicans to the right, because frankly they can't go much further right than they already are without becoming blatantly authoritarian. 

[auskip07 930]

On 7/26/2021 at 10:12 AM, CoffeeTiger said:

Republicans to the right, because frankly they can't go much further right than they already are without becoming blatantly authoritarian. 

Like forced vaccination? Vaccination passport?  Forcing restaurants and businesses to close for their safety?  

 

Edited July 28, 2021 by auskip07

[homersapien 11,393]

1 hour ago, auskip07 said:

Like forced vaccination? Vaccination passport?  Forcing restaurants and businesses to close for their safety?  

 

What "forced" vaccinations?   People can always quit their jobs.

Businesses have a right to require vaccinations before allowing you inside.  Hell, they can deny you entrance if you aren't wearing shoes and a shirt.  Would you deprive them of that right?

I don't know of any restauranteurs or business owners who have been arrested for not closing when asked to do so.     

You may be anti-science but if so, the rest of society will leave you behind.

Edited July 28, 2021 by homersapien

[CoffeeTiger 5,135]

29 minutes ago, auskip07 said:

Like forced vaccination? Vaccination passport?  Forcing restaurants and businesses to close for their safety?  

 

Next thing you know we'll be requiring all men to sign up for some kind military draft system with the authority to force them into war if the government ever feels the need. 

literally 1984. 

[auskip07 930]

17 hours ago, CoffeeTiger said:

Next thing you know we'll be requiring all men to sign up for some kind military draft system with the authority to force them into war if the government ever feels the need. 

literally 1984. 

Just because you agree with the measures doesnt make them any less authoritarian.    It was ironic how you characterized one political party as Authoritarian while being silent on authoritarian measures proposed by another party.   Could you exercise a little intellectual consistency? 

 

Edited July 29, 2021 by auskip07

[auskip07 930]

18 hours ago, homersapien said:

What "forced" vaccinations?   People can always quit their jobs.

Businesses have a right to require vaccinations before allowing you inside.  Hell, they can deny you entrance if you aren't wearing shoes and a shirt.  Would you deprive them of that right?

I don't know of any restauranteurs or business owners who have been arrested for not closing when asked to do so.     

You may be anti-science but if so, the rest of society will leave you behind.

You can google restaurant owner arrested.   Just because you dont "know" of any doesnt mean thats the reality.   There is a world that exist outside of your bubble you should try to experience it sometimes. 
https://www.google.com/search?q=restaurant+owner+arrested+covid&rlz=1C1VDKB_enUS962US962&oq=restaurant+owner+arrested&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0i512l3j0i457i512j0i22i30l5.5448j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Im anti mandatory vaccination   not anti science.  Do you understand the difference? 

 

 

[CoffeeTiger 5,135]

43 minutes ago, auskip07 said:

Just because you agree with the measures doesnt make them any less authoritarian.    It was ironic how you characterized one political party as Authoritarian while being silent on authoritarian measures proposed by another party.   Could you exercise a little intellectual consistency? 

 

Sometimes authoritarian measures are needed to protect people in times of trouble. In time of war we've had forced drafts, rationing of everyday essentials. For other illnesses we already have mandatory vaccines. We have thousands of laws in place that place limits on everything we can and cant do in almost every area of life based on what our people and government deem necessary to protect people's health and safety and keep society functioning. 

 

Democratic authoritarianism is designed to protect life and try to eradicate a disease. This is why conservatives keep having to make up conspiracies about Liberal authoritarianism like "Microchips" "or "a trial run for REAL authoritarianism"...or STOLEN Election. Because the reality isn't near as bad or threatening as what Conservatives can make up in their head

Republican Authoritarianism is designed to stop elections, and trying to turn the U.S. into a Theocracy. They've already had their supporters storm the Capitol to try and stop an election certification, and it's no secret that ALOT of Republicans claim to be guided by God and want to make laws that they say their God would want them to make. 

Edited July 29, 2021 by CoffeeTiger

[homersapien 11,393]

1 hour ago, auskip07 said:

You can google restaurant owner arrested.   Just because you dont "know" of any doesnt mean thats the reality.   There is a world that exist outside of your bubble you should try to experience it sometimes. 
https://www.google.com/search?q=restaurant+owner+arrested+covid&rlz=1C1VDKB_enUS962US962&oq=restaurant+owner+arrested&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0i512l3j0i457i512j0i22i30l5.5448j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
 

Im anti mandatory vaccination   not anti science.  Do you understand the difference? 

 

 

Well, apparently the governors in those respective states ordered a shut down which had the rule of law.   I didn't know that, but considering the reasons, I am OK with it.  One of there primary responsibilities is to protect the safety of the people in their state. But thanks for correcting me on that.

But the fact remains, no one is being forced to get vaccinated.  It's a false assertion.

I am curious.  Have you been vaccinated?

Edited July 29, 2021 by homersapien

[auskip07 930]

20 hours ago, homersapien said:

 

I am curious.  Have you been vaccinated?

I made a choice based on my health and ability to calculate risks as everyone should do.     

[SLAG-91 1,483]

10 minutes ago, auskip07 said:

I made a choice based on my health and ability to calculate risks as everyone should do.     

That's not the correct answer, comrade. 

Revise and resubmit.

/sarc

[CoffeeTiger 5,135]

1 hour ago, auskip07 said:

I made a choice based on my health and ability to calculate risks as everyone should do.     

Dude, you don't even have to give him that much info. Just tell him that question violates your HIPAA Rights. 

Edited July 30, 2021 by CoffeeTiger

[homersapien 11,393]

4 hours ago, auskip07 said:

I made a choice based on my health and ability to calculate risks as everyone should do.     

I take that as a "no".

[auskip07 930]

2 hours ago, homersapien said:

I take that as a "no".

Hard to believe if someone got their vaccine that they wouldnt tell everyone about it and collect their virtue points,  right? 
 

 

[Leftfield 2,617]

7 hours ago, auskip07 said:

I made a choice based on my health and ability to calculate risks as everyone should do.     

Would you be willing to share the risks you calculated, and what data you used to calculate them?  

[homersapien 11,393]

22 hours ago, auskip07 said:

Hard to believe if someone got their vaccine that they wouldnt tell everyone about it and collect their virtue points,  right? 
 

 

Depends - their "virtue points" with the MAGA cult or virtue points as a responsible citizen?

Edited July 31, 2021 by homersapien

[homersapien 11,393]

BTW, there is SCOTUS precedent that allows a state to mandate vaccination:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts

Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the authority of states to enforce compulsory vaccination laws. The Court's decision articulated the view that individual liberty is not absolute and is subject to the police power of the state.

.

Edited July 31, 2021 by homersapien

[cole256 17,084]

On 7/29/2021 at 10:13 AM, auskip07 said:

Just because you agree with the measures doesnt make them any less authoritarian.    It was ironic how you characterized one political party as Authoritarian while being silent on authoritarian measures proposed by another party.   Could you exercise a little intellectual consistency? 

 

Oh look! I'm super surprised this came from you! Who'd have thunk it!?!

[Grumps 3,704]

On 7/29/2021 at 10:56 AM, CoffeeTiger said:

Sometimes authoritarian measures are needed to protect people in times of trouble. In time of war we've had forced drafts, rationing of everyday essentials. For other illnesses we already have mandatory vaccines. We have thousands of laws in place that place limits on everything we can and cant do in almost every area of life based on what our people and government deem necessary to protect people's health and safety and keep society functioning. 

 

Democratic authoritarianism is designed to protect life and try to eradicate a disease. This is why conservatives keep having to make up conspiracies about Liberal authoritarianism like "Microchips" "or "a trial run for REAL authoritarianism"...or STOLEN Election. Because the reality isn't near as bad or threatening as what Conservatives can make up in their head

Republican Authoritarianism is designed to stop elections, and trying to turn the U.S. into a Theocracy. They've already had their supporters storm the Capitol to try and stop an election certification, and it's no secret that ALOT of Republicans claim to be guided by God and want to make laws that they say their God would want them to make. 

Exactly! Democrat authoritarianism is for our good. Republican authoritarianism is evil!

[jj3jordan 2,056]

2 hours ago, Grumps said:

Exactly! Democrat authoritarianism is for our good. Republican authoritarianism is evil!

By Jove Grumps you have broken the code. Who knew it is so simple?

[homersapien 11,393]

On 7/30/2021 at 10:15 AM, CoffeeTiger said:

Dude, you don't even have to give him that much info. Just tell him that question violates your HIPAA Rights. 

Actually HIPPA is not relevant to volunteering information.