<< If nothing else this past year has outed Clinton as a liberal. We can put to rest the "New Democrat" BS for good. >>
Not at all. I said the right hates him as a liberal, and as the leader of the liberals.
That certainly doesn't mean he is a liberal. A real liberal would not allow the witch hunts, both hetero and homo-sexual, now going on in the military (which I think sucks). Classic liberals would not have cut more than a million people off welfare, nor instituted workfare, nor supported three strikes for felons, nor handed out so many business benefits, nor bombed Iraq, etc. (though I certainly *would* have done most of these things, being a 'moderate'.)
What the New Democrat thing is about is taking (after some massaging) every single working financial conservative idea and putting them to work in the Democratic Party. This idea has been successful, both in the real world and in gutting the Republicans of any unique working financial ideas. That has left Republicans dependent on their religious wing (with some unintended side effects ;-) to distinguish themselves.
Like it or not, the New Democrat thing is very real. Most Democrats now describe themselves as fiscally conservative, and they are, compared to 20 years ago, though they are not willing to gut all services for tax cuts. Foreign policy is now pretty pragmatic on both wings. The whole country has moved 'right' on the financial axis, left on the international policy axis, and so now left and right are defined in religious and social policy terms only.
I don't see what the Republicans can do about that, short term. To survive, they need to promote and adopt a position on some new political axis, that is to say, throw a new ideological dimension into the mix. But what?
Remember that this stuff keeps changing. Generations of people come and go, radical becomes accepted, etc. A little more than a century ago, the Democrats were the conservative party and the Republicans were the radicals or progressives. Lesser issues change polarity or dissappear every generation. I mean, 15 years ago we were talking about the Laffer curve and taking seriously people who believed the apocalypse would be happening right around now.
Hey, anybody notice the Republican TV preachers are pretty quiet about that Apocalype thing lately? I guess they don't want to lose that last shred of credibility for the 2002 elections. :0)
Meanwhile the Pope has embraced evolution. Ideology keeps changing, you see. What is constant is the struggle, but even that can be under control, civil, and productive, or out of control, even bloody. We get to choose.
Chaz |
