04-19-2018, 02:39 PM
(04-19-2018, 11:34 AM)David Horn Wrote:(04-11-2018, 12:54 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:(04-09-2018, 01:38 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(04-08-2018, 11:31 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: FDR would be a Republican today. I'm surprised blues aren't calling for the removal of his monument too like their doing with Jefferson.
No, FDR would be a radical green or democratic socialist today. He would probably be to the left of Bernie Sanders. We have regressed so far backward that FDR would be on the far left today.
I have heard that Eisenhower and Jerry Ford both are to the left of most Democrats these days. Do you feel that the latter was the last moderate Republican to get anywhere?
The concept of Left and Right has so thoroughly changed over the last several decades that it's hard to use those terms to compare historical and current politicians with one another. Worse, neither party is even vaguely united. The GOP has a Trumpian-Populist wing and a Pro-business-small government wing. The Dems have a wing consisting of a disconnected coalition of mostly disadvantaged social groups, a Neo-Liberal wing and one that can be called liberal-populist. Neither party has a coherent message, with the Dems the least coherent of the two.
If the Dems win big in November, it may be a Pyrrhic victory. With politicians representing all three wings (and a few standing outside the mainstream entirely), show me how they will accomplish anything more productive than fighting amongst themselves.
So far, the Trump wing continues to support the actual Trump, who has pretty much deferred to the pro-business small government wing. Trump's recent tariff tough talk and a few actions have satisfied the so-called populist wing's aspirations, which is populist ONLY in its anti-free-trade positions. But even then, he is backtracking on this rather substantially, only just weeks after going there. The other big aspect of the Trump wing is not populist, but closet racist and openly xenophobic. That is not populist at all, but does appeal to popular fears and prejudices, which alarms some in the pro-business wing. The GOP has a third wing too, the religious right, which is somewhat dormant but not absent, though it has (Mormons excepted) mostly climbed into bed with the Trump wing.
The Democratic disadvantaged social groups wing, sometimes called left identity politics, is somewhat but not fully distinct from the populist liberal wing, which seeks the social services and regulations opposed by the pro-business anti-government wing. So these two wings are both polarized against the Trump and pro-business (libertarian economics) wings of the GOP. Democrats are not neo-liberals; that's the same as the pro-business wing of the GOP. But some Democrats are more moderate on the real populist or neo-socialist issues, and thus might incorrectly be called neo-liberal. These are just center-leftists or 1990s-style new democrats. The secular, pro-science wing of the Democrats, opposed to the religious right, are the Democratic practitioners of the culture wars, which could be lumped in with the identity politics populists that focus on disadvantaged groups, since they have the same opponents among the racists and the religious right adherents who are frequently the same prejudiced and fearful people, especially in the South.
Sure, the Democrats can work together, since they have the same opponents; those who represent the 1% and anti-government social action. The resentment of welfare given to disadvantaged groups cements the religious right and racist xenophobes together with the pro-business wing that hates social government and taxes. The Democrats then need to cement together the disadvantaged groups (a long but more accurate word than "minorities") with those who are only economically disadvantaged, because the policies for solution are the same for both, and the policies that are the problem are the same too. But just taking the House will not be enough to do anything more than put a few more roadblocks in the path of Trump's great america again. Nothing more can be expected from that.