> My gut tells me your assessment is wrong - that the Clintonian Third Wayism you describe is waning - chiefly evidenced by Obama being so much further to the left and comparatively weak/confused on foreign policy as compared with the Clintons.
It is waning, as evidenced by how competitive Sanders was in the primary and how popular Sanders remains, though the neoliberal faction is still dominant; but Obama wasn't significantly further to the left than Clinton (not was his administration nearly as weak and fumbling on substantive foreign policy as the Clinton administration, not that that, in either direction, says anything about the dominance of Third Wayism.)
> That the Democratic Party embraces identity politics was my impression as well.
So, incidentally, has the Republican Party for a long time. Christian identity politics, obviously for quite a long time, but also since the Southern Strategy White identity politics (with a sharp uptick recently in n how overt and direct their appeals on both are.)
> I somewhat agree that let's not forget that third-wayism was a response by the Democrats to being locked out of executive power at the federal level for the previous 12 years,
Sure, it made some sense in “I want my party to have this office today” terms, it just was tremendously destructive to the long-term prospects of the party and it's relationship to the grassroots base, and to the key policy interest that distinguished the party from the other major party.
> My memory of the 1992 election is that Clinton managed to exploit general dissatisfaction with a relatively minor recession and conservative disenchantment (and consequent core voter apathy) with Bush's pragmatic decision to hike taxes, along with the split vote on the right created by Ross Perot's candidacy.
Perot's candidacy was almost entirely anti-NAFTA, split the anti-Bush vote, and was fueled by the major-party candidate consensus on NAFTA. With an anti-globalist Democratic candidate, there would have been be no substantial Perot support. Clinton didn't leverage Perot splitting conservative votes, he fueled Perot taking anti-NAFTA votes that had no major party candidate to go to.
> I absolutely understand why the progressive left felt betrayed by the Clinton-Carville machine, but as an outside observer I think the notion that the Democrats would have got anywhere with a Eugene Debs style democratic socialist in 1992 (or any of many similar pipe dreams) is delusional.
The alternatives to Clinton in 1992 weren't Debs-style socialist, they were pre-Third Way pro-labor welfare state Democrats like the vast majority of the party's then-current Congressional delegation.
> For whatever reasons (and I still don't fully understand it, no, check that, I don't understand it at all), the Clintons were an absolute hate-magnet for the Right
It's funny you mention that, since by all metrics Clinton was about the most conservative democrat to gain office recently. A shame we've steadily moved away from middle-of-the-road since then.
>Thee problem with that is that several of the questions that make it up are assessments of current conditions, not pure ideology.
Common problem with political compass type verification. In fact becomes even more complicated when there's more than 2 political parties in an election system.
>If (as is, in fact, the case) the underlying facts changed away from Democrats preferences over the studied time on those issues, Democrats with constant preferences would appear to move left (and, conversely, an apparently stationary position on those issues# would represent a rightward shift in preferences.)
For sure, we can't really deny the political divide. You can't deny when it started to happen.
That is certainly a measurement. I don't believe that is the only factor in play. If that link wasn't paywalled and I could go into the depth of the evaluation. I would best that this has far more to do with negative rights and positive rights.
Trump I would suspect is a classical liberal. The problem is that 'liberalism' has been usurped by the positive rights crowd and now illiberalism is where classical liberals are fighting against positive rights.
Meanwhile on the Democrat far left, folks like AOC are pushing for extreme positive rights.
Overall though I feel like we are side skirting the actual concern. If the identity politics of Obama created the political schism we are seeing. The road to fixing the schism will have to come from the democrats. Obama misplayed his 2 terms in office and increased the divide greatly.
The perception of election fraud is only going to force the republicans to the right. Increasing divide.
> The fact that it is possible for things to be different doesn't imply that they are
Right, so let's stop talking of theoretical possibilities and look at concrete reality. I don't know of the last time a party embraced ideology as strongly as today's GOP; anyone who doesn't see that will never see ideology anywhere - it hardly could get more extreme.
> I do think there are very large segments of both that are almost entirely ideological, and that, unfortunately, these subgroups often take most of the limelight.
Again, a false equivalence IMHO. Which very large, limelight-stealing Democrat group are you referring to? Hillary Clinton supporters were the largest group; she's almost the opposite of ideological. Obama and his supporters are very non-ideological. The participants in last Saturday's marches were generally non-ideological, AFAICT.
>In regards to 2): Both parties are using identity politics, but I feel like it's distinctly the progressive left that is using it to be divisive.
I don't think that having the Republicans tell me to act more white and Christian, when I'm actually only sort of white and not Christian at all, is unifying. It feels a lot more like being singled out and attacked.
> The entire point of what I said is that the political opinions of the Democratic party moved in a direction that did not match that of my general demographic. Now that opinions have shifted, we find that our interests are better served by Republican talking points than by Democratic ones.
I agree that the Democratic platform has moved, but it moved rightwards. The Republican platform has also moved (considerably more) rightwards. If your political positions were once aligned with the Democrats but are now better aligned with Republicans, your personal opinions have necessarily moved dramatically rightwards, and your new alignment has nothing to do with the shift of the parties.
US progressives that aren't alienated from the political process tend to be Democrats (by voting behavior if not identity), but the reverse is not true; Democrats as a whole are a coalition of (mainly) progressives center-right corporate conservatives, the latter being somewhat more dominant, and many of them (Manchin and Sinema get a lot of attention recently, but the problem is much deeper) regularly ally with Republicans against progressives.
> Why would I support any politician when the available choices do not line up with my views and desires in almost any fashion
Engagement alters the available choices; engagement by (frequently disappointed) progressives has reduced the center-right domination of the Democratic Party from its peak in the 1990s.
> Can I have a new left wing please? This one appears to be broken :(
I've been saying this since basically after Obama was elected.
I was a HUGE supporter of his, even in the democratic primaries. I donated to him, I was running local groups that were canvassing and phone banking to get him elected. I was ecstatic when he got elected (though I viewed it as a foregone conclusion, I didn't think McCain had a chance).
When it came to the governing, I was not really impressed. Basically from day 1, everything seemed stuck. He got a few things done (ACA though that's of dubious benefit, and was done in such a way that it became a political punching bag and can't get any reforms), but mostly in the first two years. After the 2010 midterms, this shit was just complete gridlock. You can blame whomever you want for the gridlock but a good leader builds compromise and ends gridlock.
I think there are two good examples of this. First, after sandy hook Obama promised that he would pass gun control legislation. Now, I do not agree with lots of things that he would like to do with such legislation, but, I do agree that there are some changes required. He has basically failed to pass any legislation around gun control and his response to that isn't to propose new legislation that can pass congress. His reaction was to go on national television and cry (literally) about his failure to pass gun control legislation.
I'm sorry, I don't want a damn leader who CRYS about their political failures. I know dead children is a sad subject, but, this is ultimately a political failure.
The 2nd one is Guantanamo. When he was campaigning one of his promises was to close Guantanamo, bring prisoners home and try them for their crimes. After 8 years, that has not happened and its become so politically untenable that he's basically letting these people out, without trying them at all. It is a mind-boggling
Withdrawing from Iraq/Afghanistan was another campaign promise that I was personally invested in too, but that is a far more complex one and though he doesn't get a pass from me on that as I have personal losses there, I acknowledge that its more complex.
I do not agree with lots of things that (old) republicans did (though I am hopeful about the new republican party of today), but they get shit done. They wanted to block (stupid) gun control legislation, they did. They wanted to block returning Guantanamo prisoners to the USA, they did.
Sometimes doing something, even if its not perfect, is more important than doing nothing, especially when you don't have a crystal ball and don't know what exact result specific actions/legislation will have. Move fast, break shit.
Or even remotely accurate; the Republican Party has been moving consistently, though at varying speeds, to the right since at least the 1980s; the Democratic Party made a huge jump to the right (and very close to the Republicans) in the early 1990s, ushering in the brief period of the neoliberal consensus before the sharp acceleration in the rightward movement of the Republican Partyp, stayed stuck in essentially the same position for a while, and has moved a little bit to the left over the last couple years.
Not only are you wrong about the direction each party is moving, you are wrong on a more fundamental level about the idea that the distance between them is fixed (or, at least, that the recent movement has been constrained by an upper bound on that distance forcing them to move together.)
>"the current conservative movement is heavily ideological"
The current Democratic establishment is also heavily ideological. Aside from a few outliers like Bernie Sanders, a lot of the Democratic rhetoric is built up around identity politics. You don't have to look far to find it, but to give you one example, listen to how much this DNC vice chair candidate hammers home the 'diversity' message:
> Obama is not a progressive and I don't think he's been particularly supported by progressives (other than the fact that they tend to vote for Democrats).
A lot of progressives supported Obama in 2008 primaries, especially toward the end of that season, because, as it was clear who the reasonably viable contenders were for the Democratic nomination, Obama generally seemed slightly to the progressive side of Hillary Clinton (which is perfectly compatible with him being a centrist Democrat rather than a particularly progressive one; I don't think anyone in the Democratic party has mistaken Clinton for anything other than a centrist for a long time.)
Maybe, more significant was that he was ideologically a center-right neoliberal, the same as the dominant faction of the Republican Party at the time he was elected.(but not the same as the right turn the Republican Party took in response.)
> he shifted to a more moderate position after 1994
Not really. Overall policy outcome shifted from what a center-right neoliberal with weakly progressive stands on social issues could agree with a Democratic Congress that was to his left on both economic and social issues on to what athe same President could agree with with a Congress that was slightly to his right on economic issues and far to his right on social issues.
Welfare reform, for instance, may have passed after Republicans took office, but it wasn't Clinton “shifting to a more moderate position”, as it was a major part (though not as significant as health care, on which he was defeated by Democratic defections before Republicans took control) of his 1992 platform.
But the point is, in either case, while you can find excuses for each of the exceptions to the supposed “divided government is normally total gridlock outside of unusual emergencies” idea, the history of divided government has far more exceptions than cases which support the rule.
> And I thought that was very strange, because that used to be the Democratic Party's core constituency.
Abandoning the working class and going all-in for neoliberal economics while retaining center-left social policies was the defining feature of Bill Clinton’s campaign and Presidency; that faction of the party was dominant from then on, though there have been signs of that dominance weakening over the last several years; it would be poetic if it's dominance (in Presidential terms) within the party began and ended with a Clinton.
> My experience is that the stance the Democrats take is the opposite of the stance the Republicans take, and vice-versa. If one party flips on an issue, the other almost immediately flops.
I’m sorry but that is way too reductive. For one thing, there’s a bipartisan consensus (for better or worse) on a lot of foreign policy, which is a pretty huge area.
And, your comment obscures the meaningful differences in ideology between the groups of people each party represents. And the different interests of those groups.
The Democrats are far from perfect. But it’s not a “both sides equally bad” situation.
Well, maybe it is when it comes to corporate money in politics. But even there you see bipartisan consensus on the fringes, I think, plus iirc the Republicans were basically all about Citizens United.
But yeah money in politics is a big problem on both sides. To be fair, it’s been a big problem in all of politics throughout all recorded history.
Which doesn’t mean we can’t (and haven’t) made some progress.
> Third party starts to look a lot more appetizing then it's not a clear cut sane-vs-lunatic scenario.
There are always lunatics; there'll be folks in NY who hold their nose and vote for a Democrat because the House is tight and they've heard of Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. (Or for a Republican in Kansas, because they don't want AOC being in the majority. As someone pointed out elsewhere in the thread, one person's lunatic is another's hero.)
> It gives me a LITTLE hope that this third party support is so high.
It shouldn't. Look past the headline (to the first chart); polls have showed fairly consistent majority support for a third party for decades.
>I would expect that the Democrats and Republicans are seeing the world (and the media) through blue- and red-tinted glasses. I would expect that the independents are, on average, seeing more clearly.
I am a registered member of the Democratic Party.
That said, I am not a fan of either the US Democratic or Republican parties. I find both parties less interested in governing and more interested in maintaining/increasing their power.
But still, I'm a registered Democrat. Why is that? Where I live (NYC), the electorate is ~5:1 D/R. As such, a win in local (city council, Comptroller, etc.) and state (assembly, senate, etc.) Democratic primaries generally assures victory in the general election.
As such, I made the choice a bunch of years ago to change my party registration to the Democratic party.
Does that mean I see issues through "blue-tinted glasses"? I think not.
I'd also point out that I tend to be much more libertarian (small 'l') WRT social issues (equality of opportunity, stay the hell out of peoples' bedrooms and doctors' offices, personal freedom of expression, privacy, etc.), but also a strong advocate of living wages and a very strong government supported safety net.
I have some ideas about why all that is for the good, and have even discussed (especially free expression and a strong safety net) here on HN.
As should be obvious, neither party really supports positive change in most of the issues I find important. One more so than the other, but still woefully inadequate.
Regardless, I choose who I vote for based on my perception/understanding of the candidates' themselves, not which party's line on which these folks are running.
Perhaps I'm an outlier, and folks just vote whatever their family/peer group votes.
I'd say that I'd tend toward a strong belief in the idea that a "well educated electorate is essential to democratic self-rule." (usually, and incorrectly, attributed to Thomas Jefferson, but it's not who said it that matters, but that it's true).
We're falling down on that point (lots of others too, but who's counting?) and need to make sure that by the time an American citizen reaches the age of 18, they understand the US system of government in a reasonable amount of detail, both from conceptual and practical standpoints. You'd think that would be a no-brainer, but apparently (and unfortunately) not.
And that applies to many members of both the major, center right (Democratic) and further right (Republican) parties in the US.
It's a sad state of affairs, but one that's easily fixable, at least for future generations. I'm not holding my breath.
>Obama was worlds different from Romney, and that comparing Obama to Bush was lunacy
Amazingly there is a middle ground. Yes, Obama is taking after Bush in scary ways. It makes me sick and it's why I voted third party in the re-election. That having been said, it's terribly reductionist to say that "Romney and Obama are the same" and anyone who is a woman or gay will almost surely agree with me.
>I have to wonder what happens when those Obama supporters with left-wing sentiments read an article like this.
We're pissed off and still terrified at how much worse it would be with Romney. Or, we, like you, wish that third party candidates were viable, that people would be educated enough that it would MATTER that people like Gary Johnson exist, etc.
> What with the Democrats being further left than ever
I'm not sure where you're getting that idea. The democrats have been moving towards "the center" so hard that it has pushed the republicans to the extreme right such that many of them now simply refuse to recognize the results of elections that don't go their way.
About the only thing in the platform that's gotten more progressive is the stuff about LGBTQ+.
> I believe, admittedly from anectodical experience, that we are remarkably together on values.
I don’t think that’s true any more. Major schisms have been opening up over the past couple of decades. For example, a significant portion of the elite is now opposed to color blindness. That’s a fundamental thing to disagree about in an increasingly multi-ethnic society. The same people also oppose the “melting pot” ideal of American immigration. The Democratic Party’s “safe, legal, and rare” has turned , in NYC at least, into “abortion until the moment of birth,” at least in NYC. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2022/05/23/....
When my family came to this country in 1989, Carter Democrats and Reagan Republicans didn’t disagree on the fundamental notions of a good life. You got educated, got married, had 2.5 kids and a white picket fence, etc. They both venerated the founders and the history of America, and agreed on what qualities of that historical America led to the prosperity that Americans enjoy today. They disagreed on the role of government in achieving that ideal, on economics, on a few social issues at the edges.
It is waning, as evidenced by how competitive Sanders was in the primary and how popular Sanders remains, though the neoliberal faction is still dominant; but Obama wasn't significantly further to the left than Clinton (not was his administration nearly as weak and fumbling on substantive foreign policy as the Clinton administration, not that that, in either direction, says anything about the dominance of Third Wayism.)
> That the Democratic Party embraces identity politics was my impression as well.
So, incidentally, has the Republican Party for a long time. Christian identity politics, obviously for quite a long time, but also since the Southern Strategy White identity politics (with a sharp uptick recently in n how overt and direct their appeals on both are.)
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