Radical divergence
Keith Poole of the University of Georgia, with his collaborator Howard Rosenthal of New York University, has spent decades charting the ideological shifts and polarization of the political parties in Congress from the 18th century until now to get the view of how the political landscape has changed from 30,000 feet up. What they have found is that the Republican Party is the most conservative it has been a century.
In a recent conversation Poole, who’s viewed by other political scientists as the go-to expert on this issue, explained that the data are very clear:
“This is an entirely objective statistical procedure. The graphs just reflect what comes out of the computer. Howard Rosenthal and I, we’ve been working on something called Nominate. This does all the Congresses simultaneously, which allows you to study change over time.
“The short version would be since the late 1970s starting with the 1976 election in the House the Republican caucus has steadily moved to the right ever since. It’s been a little more uneven in the Senate. The Senate caucuses have also moved to the right. Republicans are now furtherest to the right that they’ve been in 100 years.
Well at least we aren’t hallucinating. I suspect that the slight “liberalizing” of the Democrats during this period can be attributable to the fact that the socially conservative Southern poohbahs have finally all converted or retired. It certainly can’t be because it’s gotten more economically liberal.
But this is bizarre:
Of course some, and not just conservative activists, will be quick to point out that Democrats also have their take-no-prisoner liberals who aren’t prone to compromise on their core issues, either.
Well, I’d say they haven’t done it enough. Look how much more conservative the Republicans have become in comparison to the Democrats. If more Democrats had held fast, I doubt the GOP would have felt as free to keep pushing the edge of the envelope. Indeed, if I were to point to one specific reason this happened was that the DLC was formed and the Party decided to turn itself into a corporate friendly, softcore version of the GOP on economic issues. It may have seemed like a winner at the time but that graph shows just how well it worked out for them.
These people are radical. And the Democrats have been complicit — if not outright eager — in enabling them. We’ve seen this movie before. It may have ended ok in the long run but it was a ghastly horror show for many years. This isn’t good.
Update: Thanks to Paul Rosenberg for this:
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