Ron Fournier writes in The National Journal Elites Beware: Eric Cantor's Defeat May Signal a Populist Revolution "Americans see a grim future for themselves, their children, and their country. They believe their political leaders are selfish, greedy, and short-sighted—unable and/or unwilling to shield most people from wrenching economic and social change. For many, the Republican Party is becoming too extreme, while the Democratic Party—specifically, President Obama—raised and dashed their hopes for true reform. Worse of all, the typical American doesn't know how to channel his or her anger. Heaven help Washington if they do."
"Which side of the barricade are you on? Populists from the right and the left—from the tea party and libertarian-leaning Rand Paul to economic populist Elizabeth Warren—are positioning themselves among the insurgents. Sosnik pointed to six areas of consensus that eventually may unite the divergent populist forces:"
- A pullback from the rest of the world, with more of an inward focus.
- A desire to go after big banks and other large financial institutions.
- Elimination of corporate welfare.
- Reducing special deals for the rich.
- Pushing back on the violation of the public's privacy by the government and big business.
- Reducing the size of government.
Actually, that doesn't look like too bad of a list. I wonder if he asked anyone if they'd heard of Lawrence Lessig's Mayday SuperPAC?
Meanwhile Pew issued a long (121 page) report Political Polarization and Growing Ideological Consistency. "The new survey finds that as ideological consistency has become more common, it has become increasingly aligned with partisanship. Looking at 10 political values questions tracked since 1994, more Democrats now give uniformly liberal responses, and more Republicans give uniformly conservative responses than at any point in the last 20 years."
"This translates into a growing number of Republicans and Democrats who are on completely opposite sides of the ideological spectrum, making it harder to find common ground in policy debates. The share of Democrats who hold consistently liberal positions has quadrupled over the course of the last 20 years, growing from just 5% in 1994 to 13% in 2004 to 23% today. And more Republicans are consistently conservative than in the past (20% today, up from 6% in 2004 and 13% in 1994), even as the country as a whole has shifted slightly to the left on the 10 item scale."
There's lots of graphs and data. By the numbers Democrats have moved more leftward, but they point out that 1994 was a peak for conservatives (Gingrinch and all). Also, "This movement among the public, and particularly the engaged public, tracks with increasingly polarized voting patterns in Congress, though to a far lesser extent. As many congressional scholars have documented, Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill are now further apart from one another than at any point in modern history, and that rising polarization among elected officials is asymmetrical, with much of the widening gap between the two parties attributable to a rightward shift among Republicans."
They point out that "The Ideological 'Center' Is Not Necessarily 'Moderate'". "There is a tendency to assume that people at either end of the ideological scale are most likely to hold more extreme political views, yet this often is a flawed assumption. Many Americans may hold liberal or conservative values, yet do not consistently express very liberal or conservative opinions on issues. Conversely, being in the center of the ideological spectrum means only that a person has a mix of liberal and conservative values, not that they take moderate positions on all issues."
Dara Lind of Vox picked on one of their issues, Most Americans want a path to citizenship. Most of the rest want mass deportation.. "What they found: the overwhelming majority of Americans either want unauthorized immigrants to be eligible for citizenship (now or eventually), or want them deported. There's no real middle ground."
"There's a persistent belief in Washington that there's an easy "compromise" on the question of what to do with America's 11 million unauthorized immigrants: give them legal status instead of deporting them, but don't allow them to pursue citizenship. But the Pew poll shows (as have other polls) that there isn't actually a constituency for that position."
Ezra Klein picks up, The single most important fact about American politics: "the people who participate are more ideological and more partisan, as well as angrier and more fearful, than those who don't."
"There are three forms of political polarization, and what matters most in American politics is how they interact with each other. The first is party polarization: how far Republicans and Democrats are from each other. The second is ideological polarization: how far liberals and conservatives are from each other. And the third is engagement polarization: how different the politically engaged are from the politically disengaged...What Pew finds, in other words, is that these forms of polarization are all converging. American politics is increasingly driven by a small group of highly ideological, highly partisan, highly politically engaged people."
"People often assume "polarization" is a synonym for "extremism." It isn't. What's happened in American politics is not that the two parties have become more extreme...Polarization is a measure of how political actors sort themselves, not how extreme they are. As the report says, "those who are ideologically mixed are often as likely to hold more 'extreme' positions as those who are more ideologically consistent. Conversely, one can be uniformly liberal (or conservative) in one's political values, but have a 'moderate' approach to issues."
Matthew Yglesias combines some of this with Cantor's loss and says The conservative base has a crippling aversion to governing. "Enten's conjecture is that it represents an "insider/outsider" dynamic. His key finding is that while Cantor is quite conservative on the main axis, he also scores as very insidery. And he further finds that insiderishness is a quantitatively important predictor of when Republicans lose primaries."
"Conservative voters have decided that the idea of compromising is something that they are against. Liberals, by contrast, believe that political leaders should try to cut deals...The way American politics works is that to pass a bill requires you to overcome an enormous quantity of chokepoints. That means that, in practice, if you want to do things you end up needing to make compromises...To get things done, you either need to accept half a loaf or else you need to trade one of your priorities for the other guy. That's what GOP congressional leaders have done from time to time because it's really the only thing a leader can do. But conservatives don't like it because conservatives don't like the idea of dealmaking.
Paul Krugman looks at Eric Cantor and the Death of a Movement. Movement conservatism is "an interlocking set of institutions and alliances that won elections by stoking cultural and racial anxiety but used these victories mainly to push an elitist economic agenda, meanwhile providing a support network for political and ideological loyalists. By rejecting Mr. Cantor, the Republican base showed that it has gotten wise to the electoral bait and switch, and, by his fall, Mr. Cantor showed that the support network can no longer guarantee job security. For around three decades, the conservative fix was in; but no more."
"It was the perfect illustration of the strategy famously described in Thomas Frank’s book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” in which Republicans would mobilize voters with social issues, but invariably turn postelection to serving the interests of corporations and the 1 percent."
"Before the Virginia upset, there was a widespread media narrative to the effect that the Republican establishment was regaining control from the Tea Party, which was really a claim that good old-fashioned movement conservatism was on its way back. In reality, however, establishment figures who won primaries did so only by reinventing themselves as extremists. And Mr. Cantor’s defeat shows that lip service to extremism isn’t enough; the base needs to believe that you really mean it."
Andrew Sullivan watched an evening of Fox News and says "It was like slipping into an alternative universe." "Look: I know I may be a total sucker for even hoping to see some semblance of fairness and balance on Fox. But it’s still shocking to see programming designed not to uncover reality, but to create a reality in which no counter-arguments are ever considered, and in which hysteria is the constant norm. MSNBC is almost as bad, of course, but with CNN as the new Discovery Channel, the entire possibility of a balanced newscast has disappeared from cable – and from the lives of most Americans. Again, this is not new. But as it continues, it intensifies. And as it intensifies, the possibility of governing all of the country recedes into the distance." Sullivan posted interesting comments he received.
Kevin Drum says we're Living in the World That Fox News Built. "As critical as Gingrich was, he lasted only a few years before flaming out and becoming a historical footnote. It was Fox News that became the ongoing, institutional expression of Gingrichism. The Republican Party would have turned right in any case, but without Fox I'm just not sure Gingrichism would ever have developed a critical mass. Without Fox, our politics never would have gotten so astonishingly toxic that a significant fraction of the nation—not just a fringe—honestly believes that we have a lawless, America-hating tyrant in the White House who's literally committed himself to destroying the country from both within and without. Yes, the tea party has won. But it won because of support from Fox News. In reality, it's Fox News that won."
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