 powerful from accountability, and has been instrumental in providing cover for assaults on the social safety net. Is she “liberal” at all? Oh, well, maybe. But what matters more are the results achieved, and not votes made.
LOL. Oh, don’t be like that, John. Plenty of things many people say to me on your site matter to me. And if it didn’t matter, I wouldn’t comment.
You’re arguing with Grumpy McGrumpskin. Nothing you say, or prove, will matter. Just fyi.
I think we’re getting tangled in our own language re: polarization. Between a chunk of really conservative Southern Democrats leaving the party and the Democrats that remain voting more as a bloc/compromising less their DW-Nominate has drifted left. That’s really all I meant. You and Becca are both right in saying it would be silly to compare American Democrats with German Greens.
Aside from that one contentious line, though, the rest ok? It’d be a shame if one unclear line ruined the whole thing.
After the election Dean was out there selling the Affordable Care Act like his life depended on it… and he sure didn’t get much for his efforts. I’m not even really sure why they didn’t want him on board, but it seemed to be more personal rather than political.
And by the way….welcome author!
Vermonters are very loyal. I remember when Bernie would actually respond to personal letters. I completely agree with the last two sentences. I would also point how that Obama dumped Dean after Dean won the election for him. Obama has marginalized his left wing at every turn.
He has destroyed the progressive movement by making a fool out of it.
And what Obama has done for the working poor is created a system of useless profit bearing insurance and a command to buy profit bearing insurance.
We don’t have decent insurance or even catastrophic insurance under what Obama created.
We have, for the working poor, crap insurance with astronomically high deductibles and copays demanded through the private insurance system, creating a system of insurance that people making more than the federal poverty level both cannot afford, and cannot afford to use at all.
In other words, no decent insurance, no catastrophic insurance. Nothing. A command to pay insurance companies for a checkup at best. The seven thousand dollar checkup.
What this is, effectively, is a system that causes people who work for peanuts at fast food restaurants and at places like Walmart, to subsidize the upper middle class. That basically makes the poor pay for less poor to get better health care.
It does this by commanding low class workers to get insurance they cannot use because of the extreme deductibles and copays or pay a fine. They cannot afford the insurance. They cannot afford the copays, they cannot afford the deductibles. So they are fined and get nothing.
This, then, is funnelled into a corporate system which can wriggle out in any number of ways, most by cutting the number of worker hours and allowing corporates to keep people out of the system by cutting their hours.
Then this money, from fines and unusable insurance, is then funnelled into the laughingly named health care system, to pay for upper middle class people to get mammograms and surgeries, while lower class people making 7.50 an hour at walmart are let die, because the subsidies and everything else are deliberately calculated to make it so that for those people any kind of health care is out of reach.
This is the health care system, proposed first by the Heritage Foundation, Obama signed onto.
What Obama did wasn’t to cover Americans. He created a catastrophe.
Why is it accepted in a form applicable to the absolute statement “the Democrats have kinda moved left”?
If you agree with Becca, how can you say that Democrats have moved left?
Explain to me please exactly how DW Nominate scores amount to evidence of conservatism or liberalism. Because I see no evidence here.
I realize you’re a political science major, so help me out, because what I read is that the DW rankings indicated how liberal or conservative a person based on the district they came from and how they are expected to vote.
I am reading through a whole lot of results here, but what I am not getting is first causes. Perhaps you could explain this.
That is an argument from authority. What I am hoping for is a common sense explanation of how the liberal versus conservative scores are derived in the first place by this measure. I am reading and not finding. Maybe you could clarify.
Simple votes on issues before the Congress, even when paired with gender and district of origin, would be no evidence at all of conservatism or liberalism, especially in the here and now with Congressional tactics.
I think it’s a perfectly valid measure of quantization and polarization — but unfortunately, as I remarked below, it’s still a relative measure. Since the 1980s, the defined center of American politics has ratcheted steadily to the right, towards conservative policies.
Are the Dems to the left, politically, of the GOP? Absolutely. But those DW-Nominate scores are entirely relative and does not attempt to analyze the content of the positions taken by current politicians versus what went before. The measurements of ideology are relative to the aggregate perceived center — even if that center has moved from where it used to be.
Example? In the 1960s, the Democrats passed Medicare and many elements of the Great Society programs. In 2010, they passed a health insurance reform bill essentially identical to what was passed and signed into state law by a Republican governor six years previously. A liberal-left policy would have been a massive expansion of Medicare — full buy-in for anyone who wanted it and lowered eligibility.
In 2010, 63% of Republicans polled said they believed Obama was a socialist. He is essentially a neo-liberal conservative corporatist — yet he’s accused of being to the left of LBJ and FDR, which is patently absurd.
It’s like saying you define 5 as the center on a 1-10 scale, and let’s say Dems used to be 2.5. Now the scale runs from 5 to 15, and now Dem positions are 7 — which puts them further from the NEW center (10), but it doesn’t mean they’re more liberal than they were a generation or two ago. They’re now supporting positions even Reagan wouldn’t touch.
This is also math.
author here: I hyperlinked to my evidence; I used DW-Nominate scores to determine all relationships and rankings – it’s the accepted metric for quantifying ideology and polarization in the political science community.
Sorry, I’m not having it. Beyond that, it’s a blind assertion made without evidence.
Where does it come from? I’m talking to the article author here.
And there is a kind of extremism in the Democratic Party. I’d call it an extremism to find the non-existent center, no matter how ludicrous or insane it is to go with some middle position between the deliberate insanity of the Republicans and the passive right wing insanity of some Democrats.
Except both Dean and Sanders agree with Pelosi and Reid’s conniving far more than they disagree. Despite, in theory, their political philosophies should be quite oppositional. Don’t get me wrong, I’d jump on board with Bernie Sanders long before I’d ever support someone like Harry Reid, but it seems to me that he should be standing up and pointing out the absurdity of it all a lot more often. And making use of the powers granted individual Senators to make a difference. Especially when it comes to holding the Democrats to account for siding with the Republicans against the American people.
This pile-on Bernie is so typical of Demos with their heads up their compromising, slashing SS and Medicare a***s.
Let’s turn that around. “We can’t let the good be the enemy of the perfect.” Why not the perfect? If you had know Bernie or Howard Dean in Vermont you might be less hostile. Your description, I think, is more appropriately applied to Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid.
As always you nailed it. I simply believe there doesn’t exist a meaningful or effective left anymore. When it does appear, it is usually in isolation ( Bernie Sanders) or in academic ivory towers. I will probably carry my Marxist, socialist ID to my grave as an endangered species.
By international “socialist state” standards, even Bernie Sanders is barely off center. I don’t see him spending a lot of time trying to push the Democrats to a more left solution. He’ll complain loudly on talking head shows, but when it comes right down to the vote, he’s almost always right with them and making excuses why they can’t “let perfect be the enemy of good”.
Pretty much what I meant. The Democrats are really moderate conservatives or centrists, while the Republicans are a far-right nationalist party these days. Similar to the British BNP for example.
My main point is that those running the Democratic party — the DNC, their usual leaders, etc. — are all centrist-conservatives, and when controversial issues are negotiated, they always break further to the right to satisfy the rightist Dem-Cons. The GOP, on the other hand, has expelled nearly all of their moderates, and whenever they come up with their party’s official positions, they also break towards the right.
The GOP caters to the most conservative elements of its base. The Dems cater to their own more conservative elements as well. What’s left out is anything resembling a leftist or liberal position.
