Whither moderates?
by David Atkins
E.J. Dionne has a good piece in the Washington Post today, touching on the alarming rightward lurch of the last twenty years. After noting the remarkable conservative shift in conservative budgets and in SCOTUS arguments on the Affordable Care Act, Dionne points out the obvious:
A small hint of how this push to the right moves moderates away from moderation came in an effort last week to use an amendment on the House floor to force a vote on the deficit-reduction proposals offered by the commission headed by former Sen. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, former chief of staff to Bill Clinton.
You learned only in paragraphs buried deep in the news stories that the House was not even asked to consider the actual commission plan. To cobble together bipartisan support, sponsors of the ersatz Simpson-Bowles amendment kept all of the commission’s spending cuts but slashed the amount it prescribed for tax increases in half. See how relentless pressure from the right turns self-styled moderates into conservatives? If there’s a cave-in, it’s always to starboard.
Note how many deficit hawks regularly trash President Obama for not endorsing Simpson-Bowles while they continue to praise Ryan — even though Ryan voted to kill the initiative when he was a member of the commission. Here again is the double standard that benefits conservatives, proving that, contrary to establishment opinion, Obama was absolutely right not to embrace the Simpson-Bowles framework. If he had, a moderately conservative proposal would suddenly have defined the “left wing” of the debate, just because Obama endorsed it.
This is nuts. Yet mainstream journalism and mainstream moderates play right along.
Liberal bloggers have been pointing this out for almost a decade now. Just as with “he said she said” journalism, increasingly those complaints have started to become acknowledged in more “serious” traditional sources.
But what of so-called moderates? At some point even the devotees of the High Broderist church must realize that despite their self-satisfaction at avoiding nasty “partisanship” and “labels,” they’re going to boil in this pot just like the rest of us.
That’s part of why we’re seeing efforts like “No Labels” or candidacies like that of Linda Parks. There are a bunch of closet Eisenhower/Nixon Republicans and Reagan Democrats out there who refuse for variegated reasons to join with the progressive or even the Democratic cause, but know well that the Republicans have gone far off the deep end.
But rather than look introspectively at whether their own viewpoints might need some re-evaluation, their instinct is to put their fingers in their ears and scream “Both sides are so AWFUL! Can’t we stop the partisanship?” It’s the coping mechanism of a five-year-old child with cognitive dissonance.
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