![]() It is hostile to social and economic equality. It rejects the basic social consensus among post-war democracies and seeks to return to a pre-New Deal form of governance. ![]() The national Republican Party, by contrast, has now been almost entirely absorbed by the far right. Socially, its proposals tend to be center to center-left. Economically its proposals tend to be center to center-right. Here’s the way I’d put it: Today, the national Democratic Party contains everything from the center-right to the far-left. When Democrats are in the majority, their greater ideological diversity combined with the unified opposition of Republicans induces the party to negotiate within its ranks, producing policies that not long ago would have attracted the support of a dozen Senate Republicans. Bush pushed through his signature tax cuts and Iraq war authorization with substantial Democratic support, while unwavering Republican opposition nearly torpedoed Barack Obama’s health-reform legislation. It is far easier for congressional Republicans to forge and maintain a united front than it is for Democrats. Put simply: More than 70 percent of Republicans in the electorate identify themselves as conservative or very conservative, while only 40 percent of rank-and-file Democrats call themselves liberal or very liberal. We have, instead, asymmetrical polarization. Hese developments have not produced two mirror-image political parties. Here’s how William Galston and Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution describe the consequences: It is now considerably more conservative than the Democratic Party is liberal.Īnyway, so that’s the nerdy political-science version. Starting in the mid-’70s, Southern (read: conservative) Democrats started bailing and going Republican - thanks in no small part to Nixon’s “ southern strategy” - and the GOP started getting more and more conservative. Republicans have moved farther right than Democrats have left. They do not behave in the same way or share the same attitude toward established social and political norms. The parties have not become equally ideologically homogenous or moved equally far toward their extremes. What is much, much less well-understood is that the process of polarization is not symmetrical. Politics is becoming one of those things that you don’t mention in mixed company lest feelings get bruised. Americans are also sorting geographically, so personal exposure to other points of view is declining. ![]() There’s just a lot more fighting now, a lot more heated tempers, petty sniping and point-scoring, hacks on TV yelling at each other. This is well-understood by political types and even, I think, by the Average Joe and Jane. What’s more, the process appears to be inexorable and irreversible. Those idiosyncrasies are being ironed out and the parties are becoming more internally homogenous. Cooperation across party lines used to be more possible because there were regional idiosyncrasies in the U.S., conservative Democrats in the South and liberal Republicans in the Northeast. This process - not any decline in “civility” or whatever - explains the passing of the supposed Golden Age of Bipartisanship. ***Help Us Take Down The Liberal Media With Our FREE News App!*** The company said its mission encourages “all children and families with messages of hope, inspiration, inclusion, and friendship.To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. Seuss Enterprises’s catalog represents and supports all communities and families.” “Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. “These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” Dr. Seuss “racist,” which led to the company announcing that they would stop selling six of the revered children’s author and illustrator’s books for racist and offensive imagery, according to Insider. This comes as liberals have been raging over calling Dr. However, it’s difficult to definitively disprove the claim because the term’s entry into the English language is downright murky.” Even left-wing Snopes, a fact-checking website, says “No valid reason exists to suppose that ‘jimmies’ carries a racist meaning or had a racially-charged origin.
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