Has the democratic party drifted to the right over the past 40 years?

[redqueen]

Yes or no?

I'm curious what most DUers think. Though I knew but now wondering.

43 votes, 1 pass | Time left: Unlimited
	Yes
	33 (77%)
	No
	10 (23%)
	Other (explain below pls)
	0 (0%)
	1 DU member did not wish to select any of the options provided.
Show usernames Disclaimer: This is an Internet poll

[aeromanKC]

1. Reagan and Eisenhower would be Dems today

But with that being said, the pendulum is swinging back and hopefully in the next decade we can kick Reagan back out of the Dem party!!!

[edhopper]

18. Eisenhower yes

Last edited Sat Dec 7, 2019, 02:49 PM - Edit history (1)

But how would Reagan be a Dem? Anti-environment, anti-labor, anti-abortion, anti-business regulation,hated Medicare, wanted to destroy Social Security, Tax cuts for the rich, increase for the middle-class, dog whistle racist agenda...
He was every bit a Republican.

[George II]

34. Reagan WAS a Democrat until 1962 and in fact he was a strong union advocate at one time:

https://thinkprogress.org/flashback-ronald-reagan-called-union-membership-one-of-the-most-elemental-human-rights-b92f0093d46e/

FLASHBACK: Ronald Reagan Called Union Membership ‘One Of The Most Elemental Human Rights’

.....conservatives may be shocked to learn that their idol Reagan was once a union boss himself. Reagan was the only president in American history to have belonged to a union, the AFL-CIO affiliated Screen Actors Guild. And he even served six terms as president of the organized labor group. Additionally, Reagan was a staunch advocate for the collective bargaining rights of one of the world’s most famous and most influential trade unions, Poland’s Solidarity movement.

[edhopper]

36. Yes, but

by the time he ran for Governor of CA, he had stabbed the Actor's Guild in the back and become a complete Rethug.

I am sure the poster was referring to him as Pres.

[Freddie]

55. Reagan turned R thanks to Nancy's father

A doctor who was hyper-conservative and thought the Dems were out to take his $$ and start the (horrors!) Socialized Medicine.

[Greybnk48]

54. Nixon would definitely be a democrat!

Roe v Wade, the E.P.A., Earth Day, Clean air act, Clean water act, Clean drinking water act, to name just a few things Nixon backed.

By the way, the environmental stuff I listed was largely the work of Gaylord Nelson from Wisconsin, back before we were reduced to a rigged-Republican/Teabagger/Evangelical wasteland that we are now trying to recover from.

[LiberalFighter]

2. Bull --- Check govtrack and see it is more liberal.

The population is more liberal too.

It has gone left even in the last 10 years.

[UniteFightBack]

3. +1000

[hedda_foil]

42. Certainly it is more socially liberal but in its heyday the party was economically liberal.

The Republicans have beaten economic liberalism to near death, calling it socialism and pushing the neoliberal economic hoax since Reagan. The Dems bought into neoliberal/corporatist/globalist/trickle down philosophy with the DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) which pushed corporate financing of the party when conservative union busting took away a large part of their funding. The corporate wing of the party, starting with Clinton and Gore, rebranded themselves as "progressive" and pushed social liberalism with barely a nod to economic fairness. The economically liberal wing of the party started fighting back in 2008, grew in strength during the recession, came close in 2016, and is now fighting for dominance.

[appalachiablue]

45. The decline of support for labor & workers rights has really

Last edited Mon Dec 9, 2019, 04:51 PM - Edit history (1)

hurt the party and nation. Fairness in economics is vitally important just like social liberalism. It can't all be about banks and corporations. Not a fan of MBA liberals.

[appalachiablue]

46. Kick for visibility

[redqueen]

48. Preach!

This is why we keep losing.

We are giving up what used to make us the party of the working class.

[Bradshaw3]

52. Well done synopsis n/t

[Atticus]

57. "How we got here" in a nutshell. Thanks. nt

[TheBlackAdder]

4. Any PoliSci 102 class will show that.

[redqueen]

7. Same with a US History 101 course (where I first learned it).

Thanks.

[Prosper]

5. After WWII there was a bonus. The Republican Party used

it introspectively to fortify themselves with laws to stream line money past the economy into the hands of the wealthy. The Democratic Party on the other hand supported any cause a wine glass could be lifted to. Consequently their constituency neglected began filling the rolls of the neglected forgotten. After 50 years of stagnant wages suffering silently but not forgetting they put a Democratic Socialist on the front page. They”ll probably I Hope elect him president. Ending the neglect. A country’s real wealth is its people. Bernie will move stagnant money back into the real economy.

[ehrnst]

50. Bernie is no FDR, and the country is a very different situation than it was during his

administration.

FDR was an establishment political insider - one of the .0005 %. He knew how the system worked, from the inside.

He also had the ability to work with other people.

So there's that.

[marble falls]

6. Yes, and we really need to track left.

[Recursion]

8. It's not a yes or no question

The party today is basically 100% pro-choice and fully supports marriage equality; that wasn't true even a decade ago. It's also more skeptical of direct government provisioning of services than it used to be. It's neither simply "further right" nor "further left".

[redqueen]

9. Interestingly, support for legal abortion wasn't always a partisan issue. nt

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

53. Yes, it was. Democrats weren't always solidly pro-choice.

I recall going to Dem caucuses and local party meetings in the '70s (after Roe v. Wade) where abortion was still a controversial topic among Democrats. Some of these meetings got very heated. The Dems' now-accepted pro-choice position wasn't solid at all until at least the '80s or later.

[stopdiggin]

39. got there first

there's a LOT that the Democratic party (and the general public) has moved left on. Gay marriage is one of the issues where the movement has been astonishingly swift, and deep. Decriminalization and over-incarceration are others. But you can certainly point to other issues where the reverse is true (gun control, charter schools, tax cuts, and more). And I think the result can be judged as nothing less than a truly mixed bag.

(This was a different country, and populous, after Reagan .. and I think anyone that fails to recognize that is has a spurious view of history.)

[WePurrsevere]

59. I agree that it's mostly a mixed bag within 40 yrs. Overall...

in this time I think our party's stances tend to run fairly parallel with average Americans. Now ask the same question using 60 or 100 years and my answer would be that we've moved more left but I think the majority of Americans have as well in that time.

[Garrett78]

10. No. For most of the last 40 years, it held fairly steady. Recently, it's shifted left a bit.

Last edited Sat Dec 7, 2019, 02:15 PM - Edit history (1)

I don't oppose constructive criticism of the Democratic Party, but this notion that the Democratic Party has moved rightward is a fallacy. People make nonsense statements such as, "The top marginal tax rate was 91% under Eisenhower, therefore today's Democratic Party is to the right of Eisenhower."

The party hasn't moved left as much as the electorate has, but that doesn't justify stating that the party has moved to the right. The party, as a whole, is constrained by what is really a terribly flawed tyranny of the minority political system.

Also, the Republican Party has gone off the deep end and successfully used the media to shift the Overton Window way rightward, which influences overall perceptions.

Edit:

[Fiendish Thingy]

31. Democrats moves significantly to the right economically

They embraced neoliberal free market economics at least as far back as Bill Clinton.

[Garrett78]

33. The Democratic Party, as a whole, has consistently...

...opposed deregulation, privatization and a reduction in social services. Those are 3 of the major components of neoliberalism.

Some Democrats have subscribed to the free market myth, and Bill Clinton was a very flawed president, but I stand by what I said: it's a fallacy to say the Democratic Party has shifted to the right, much less shifted strongly to the right.

It's a big tent party and, overall, it's stayed pretty steady.

[SWBTATTReg]

38. Some more fyi on the Overton window...

I didn't know what this was, this is fyi to others...thanks for putting up your post, very fyi to me.

The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse. The term is named after Joseph P. Overton, who stated that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians' individual preferences. According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time.

[leftstreet]

11. Yes n/t

[redqueen]

12. Results are p much what I expected.

Didn't think this was actually seriously in doubt.

for more votes

[bullwinkle428]

13. Absolutely yes in the wake of the Reagan era, but the pendulum has made a swing

somewhat back to the left more recently. I'm 55 years old, so I've had the opportunity to live through this entire "arc"!

You know, for all of the people out there who want to label Bernie as a failure or a loser, or say that he's never accomplished anything in his life, it's amazing that all of the issues that happened to be his key points in the 2016 campaign have come front and center in the 2020 campaign.

[redqueen]

15. Thanks!

Agreed - we are seeing it start to drift back toward our side. I hope a lot of Dems are willing to help keep pushing it. We have a long way to go.

[Wounded Bear]

14. Yes, we've been picking up moderate Repubs who have been forced out of their party...

Repub Party tracks farther and farther right, while the Democratic Party has been getting more centrist.

[MineralMan]

16. No, I don't think so.

We're fighting a Republican Party that has shifted way to the right over that time, though. Sometimes, we're in power, and sometimes they are. When they are, progress slows or stops completely.

However, we have made gains. People can now marry whomever they wish, as long as they're not closely related. We have elected the first black President in history. We have a start on a different way of doing healthcare.

Forty years is a long time, actually. We've made some significant strides in that period of time. Right now, however, we are in a strange period, since Donald Trump took office. We're making corrections to that, and regained a significant majority in the House. If we win back the White House and gain a majority in the Senate in 2020, we will again be able to push through progressive changes.

The Democratic Party hasn't shifted to the right. We're just having an aberrant four years to deal with, and progress is stalled by that.

If anything the Democratic Party, as an organization, is shifting toward the left, and that shift is likely to continue, but we must first win back control of the federal government for the changes to begin taking effect.

[moondust]

17. More like "dragged" to the right.

I'd say twelve years of Reagan/GHWB followed not long thereafter by the rise of Fox News, Gingrich/Delay hyper-partisanship, Kenneth Starr's long partisan witch hunt leading to an absurd partisan hit job they called an "impeachment," SCOTUS handing the WH to Bush/Cheney for 8 disastrous years, racist Tea Party radicalism, Citizens United farce...all tended to drag the political "center" farther to the right making it ever more difficult to recover a functioning government that works for The People rather than a handful of billionaires.

[redqueen]

21. Bingo! nt

[Doremus]

24. And many years (decades) of 'going along to get along'

An honest assessment would include the fact that welfare reform, or the end of welfare as we knew it, occurred during Clinton's era. So did the end of media ownership regs and the Fairness Doctrine, which made it possible for RW hate to spew forth from every TV and radio ad infinitum.

Many, many more examples but those two are my hot buttons.

[moondust]

32. Yes.

Also, many didn't like NAFTA but I don't know if that made things any worse than they would have turned out without it. Some have criticized the 1994 Clinton/Biden Crime Bill as too harsh. Way too much media and other business consolidation has been allowed for too long IMO.

I've always understood the issue with the Fairness Doctrine to be related to the rise of private ownership of cable TV. It was apparently felt that government can regulate the "public airwaves" but not a privately-owned cable that delivers the programming someone chooses to receive for a fee--similar to a private gas or electric service.

[honest.abe]

28. +1

Well stated.

[crickets]

19. I think it depends on the issues.

Women's issues are holding fairly steady, support eroded not by Democratic party change but by the unrelenting attacks from the right; other civil rights and social issues are trending left in spite of same*. Fiscal and labor issues are mixed. Big business gets far too cosy with legislators through PACs and lobbyists, and while labor gets verbal nods, in practice it is definitely not supported as strongly as in the past. It's a mixed bag but overall, certain positive social changes notwithstanding, it's further right. Overton window and all that.

*I should clarify: the racial divide in this country has grown and racial civil rights are eroded much the same as women's rights have been and for the same reasons. It's not that Democrats have changed but that the pushback has been so virulent. Sexual orientation civil rights on the other hand have made great strides and we are the better for that.

[Recursion]

35. IDK

the racial divide in this country has grown

IDK. A cop shoots an unarmed black man today and it's national news. That used to just be a Tuesday. Every Democratic candidate has a position on reparations. They're not all for it, but they all have to articulate a position now.

[andym]

20. On social policy the Democratic Party has moved steadily left, economically it moved rightwards

from President Carter until President Obama. The ACA was evidence of the end of the rightwards shift and a shift back to the left, albeit a small one economically, so that the Democratic Party is not as Left as it was in the 70s.

By social policy I mean civil rights, gay rights, gender rights etc.

On issues like environmental protection, it has held its ground.

[redqueen]

22. I'd say on environmental policy we have not, and that it was in fact that very thing

that contributed to Nader's messaging in the run up to the 2000 election.

Otherwise agreed.

[lapucelle]

60. Yes, indeed, we do have Ralph Nadar to "thank" for The Bush presidency, the Iraq War,

the Roberts / Citizen's United Court, and the current state of our environment.

[T]he debate has raised questions about how the support that each candidate has voiced for the environment might translate into practice. Mr. Gore, for example, is being backed by most major environmental groups, but in other quarters, his past statement that environmental protection should become ''the central organizing principle for civilization'' is being portrayed by his opponents as evidence of either betrayal or bad judgment.

''This administration tries to take credit for our economy, but they seem to have forgotten what makes it turn,'' Mr. Bush said over the summer, in outlining what he has portrayed as a more practical view. ''Even today, in our new, high-tech economy, America runs on oil and gas and coal gained from the earth and water held behind our dams.''

Mr. Gore still clearly sees the environment as a winning issue, and his campaign has tried to focus attention on Mr. Bush's environmental record in Texas, which Gore aides say should raise deep doubts about the governor's commitment to protection. ''When it comes to the environment, I've never given up, I've never turned back, and I never will,'' Mr. Gore said at recent rallies.

snip==================================================================================

''Al Gore is suffering from election-year delusion if he thinks his record on the environment is anything to be proud of,'' Mr. Nader said recently. ''He should be held accountable by voters for eight years of principles betrayed and promises broken.''

Even though the Clinton administration has disappointed them on some issues, such as its failure to tighten automobile fuel-economy, most leading environmentalists have rallied to Mr. Gore. He, more than anyone else, they argue, deserves credit for the administration's environmental achievements. Furthermore, as president, they reason, he would finally have the freedom to put his own agenda in place.

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/03/us/2000-campaign-environment-favorite-issue-gore-finds-himself-2-front-defense.html

No wonder Ralph Nadar received the Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental activism.

[DBoon]

23. What Hubert Humphrey ran on in '68 looks like Bernie now

The reagan years were a shock to 20th century liberalism from which we have not recovered

[Skidmore]

25. GOP politicians spent decades

caterwauling that America was center right. Some people are easily fooled and enamored of labels. They buy labels without pay attention to the handiwork.

[Eliot Rosewater]

27. Democratic party did what it had to do to compete with filthy, disgusting cheaters

who NEVER win elections, they steal them.

And I see the KGB posting here again. wow

They are easy to figure out...they really are. I am not referring to you of course...

[Voltaire2]

41. There is no KGB. Its been disbanded for decades now.

And as for Russian trolls, they *might* waste their time here, but why? FB and twitter are where they get the most traction, the most bang for their bucks, not here.

[Dustlawyer]

29. Campaign finance, including dark money has affected our whole political landscape.

Certainly it is more widespread in the Republican Party, but we do have corporate Democrats who hurt our goals at times.

We need to end this legalized bribery once and for all! Our politicians need to focus on our countries problems and not on raising money which requires certain promises and compromises.

[Dave in VA]

30. Interesting question

but why did you choose 40 years? I'm old enough to remember when the Democratic Party was in complete control of the old confederacy. Even though they were supportive of most of the FDR and Truman economic policies, they were also full on Jim Crow; poll tax, litereracy tests, white's only water fountains, back of the bus, etc.

I remember Fannie Lou Hamer (https://www.becauseofthemwecan.com/blogs/culture/10-fannie-lou-hamer-quotes-to-celebrate-her-100th-birthday) forcing the 1964 DNC Convention to seat the legally elected delegation from Mississippi instead of the dixiecrats.

So not an easy to answer question in reality.

[SWBTATTReg]

37. If one studies history, they would learn that all parties drift left or right, and back again and...

again and again...

[Turin_C3PO]

40. Some ways yes, other ways no.

The party is more socially liberal and more economically conservative, I believe. Pre-Reagan, government was seen as a good thing, whereas now it’s viewed more as a necessary evil.

[brooklynite]

43. Well, it's shifted to people who can get elected...

[redqueen]

49. With a little (lot of) help from the M$M.

Manufacturing Consent is seriously a thing and we shouldn't be pretending as if going along with it is harmless.

[appalachiablue]

44. Something to think over

[Polybius]

47. No, it has shifted to the left (and that's a good thing)

10 years ago the party wasn't even on-board with marriage equality. We have also moved considerably to the left on abortion.

[samnsara]

51. ok just remember where the Dem party was in the 40s and 50s..

..i think the progression of the party is pretty impressive given the short time in history.

[Atticus]

56. Is this a serious question? nt

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

58. If there was a category "DOH!!" that would have been my vote.