- Distaste for Donald Trump and the leftward shift may go hand-in-hand, as Democratic leaders move the party’s overall politics left in reaction against the president. (Washington Free Beacon)
GAY PATRIOT notes the following about the above graph[s] (emphasis added):
…PEW FOUND DEMOCRATS HAVE MOVED SUBSTANTIALLY LEFT ON A VARIETY OF ISSUES WHILE REPUBLICANS’ VIEWS REMAIN RELATIVELY CONSTANT.
“In nearly every domain, across most of the roughly two dozen values questions tracked, views of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and those of Democrats and Democratic leaners are now further apart than in the past,” Pew noted.
Emblematic of this hard-left shift is the talk that ancient Senator Dianne Feinstein — a doctrinaire liberal — may be challenged by hard-left California hairpiece Kevin de Leon (of “ghost guns that fire 30 magazine clips per second” fame.) De Leon is so hard left he makes Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren look like … um… someone just moderately left-wing. Susan Collins, maybe.
When Dianne Feinstein was first elected to the Senate, she was decidedly left-leaning, Someone like Kevin de Leon would have been considered part of the radical fringe. He’s now quite the mainstream of a party whose activist core believes that equates Free Speech with White Supremacy and due process with rapists…
See More:
✦ New Study Finds Democrats Moving Left, Driving Growing Partisan Gap (Washington Free Beacon)
…Democrats’ leftward shift helps to exacerbate an overwhelming partisan divide. Across ten questions Pew has asked of survey respondents since 1994, the difference between Democrats and Republicans averages 36 points. That is the highest rate ever, though the gap has been growing continuously since 1994, when the average difference was just 15 points. The gap between Republicans and Democrats “far exceeds divisions along basic demographic lines, such as age, education, gender and race.”
“In nearly every domain, across most of the roughly two dozen values questions tracked, views of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and those of Democrats and Democratic leaners are now further apart than in the past,” Pew noted…
[….]
“The party is being pulled in a more liberal direction, there’s no question about that,” Bowman said. “I mean Elizabeth Warren’s comment a few weeks ago essentially that this isn’t Bill Clinton’s party, we’re not the party of welfare and crime. I think she’s reflecting the views of many of the people in her party. And I think a lot of it happened during the Obama years.”
✦ Yes, the Democratic Party’s Polarization Helps Explain Trump’s Rise (National Review)
…The point here isn’t to recommend that those on the left repress their moral convictions. It’s simply to note that, given the remarkably fast and profound ideological changes undergone by the Democratic party, and given that the rival party’s raison d’être is to resist sudden and wholesale social changes, the resulting moment was perfectly predictable and, even though it is morally problematic in numerous respects, totally understandable.
To believe that the Democratic party’s leftward drift is not in any way responsible for Trump is to bizarrely think that the party is at one and the same time the Left’s most promising and effective vehicle for change and also so socially inconsequential as to be incapable of provoking any sort of reaction from its ideological opponents.