Re: Sun beams from billionaire’s behind
On Jun 21, 2007, at 12:06 AM, Michael Smith wrote:
- 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