Okay, Covington Scissoring the Overton Window?

FDChief:

July 1st, 2019 at 9:07 pm

Except 1) Douthat is an utter wingnut completely in the bag for the GOP, and 2) what Sorkin calls “radical ideas” are fairly center-left in every industrial democracy outside the GOP.

Pretty much every poll shows the U.S. “left” as roughly “left” as it was in 1932. The “right” has gone, in effect, full-on Gilded Age; as Poole says, the GOP is now where the GOP (and, to be fair, most of the Democratic Party) was in 1899.

So it’s a “scissor, but not because “both sides” are redshifting relative to each other. The “left” would like to re-regulate some of the more nutbar capitalism experiments unleashed by the Reagan and Bush regimes.

The right wants to return the U.S. to Jim Crow, the Triangle Fire and “The Jungle”. There’s not really a political symmetry there

Charles Cameron:

July 2nd, 2019 at 4:21 pm

Okay. I tend to lean that way myself, but I suspect I have friends who lean symmetrically the opposite way.. Besides which, I’m trying for stirring thought on both sides here, rather than emphasizing my own preference.

Eugine Nier:

July 16th, 2019 at 5:50 pm

@FDChief This is total nonsense. It’s telling that both Keith Poole and yourself insist that the GOP has moved far to the right without naming a single issue on which this has happened. In fact if either you tried you’d find that it is in fact almost impossible to find a single issues on which today’s GOP is to the right of Obama’s 2008 position. For example, the GOP has aperantly more-or-less given up trying to repeal Obamacare and remember Obama was officially opposed to gay marriage in 2008. The only reason it seems to you that Republicans have moved right is that left particularly under SJW influence has moved far beyond all reason and sanity and are annoyed that the right isn’t following suite.

Charles Cameron:

July 17th, 2019 at 4:15 am

Mr Justice Stevens died today, and his WSJ obit had a comment that can be taken as a response to your view, Eugine:

Justice Stevens insisted he had remained ideologically consistent—it was the court, he said, that had shifted to the right over his tenure, as new generations of Reagan and Bush appointees replaced liberals who took the bench in the 1950s and ’60s.

Eugine Nier:

July 17th, 2019 at 7:24 pm

And still hasn’t named a single issue on which this mythical rightward shift occurred.

It’s possible that Stevens felt like a shift occurred because the Reagan and Bush appointees weren’t willing to race leftwards quite as fast as Stevens would have liked.