Who You Callin’ “Extreme”?

[Valin]

Power Line:

Steven Hayward

October 11, 2015

 

The conventional wisdom of Certified Smart People, and their media sycophants, is that the trouble with Washington is that Republicans have become extreme. I always like to say, “As if!,” and say the trouble is that they are not extreme enough (though extremity of opinion is not the same thing as political prudence or cleverness over how to win political fights—this is what seems in especially short supply at the moment, but that’s a subject for another time). As I like to remind people, the Republican Party began as an extremist party in the 1850s—the more so after the Supreme Court declared the central purpose of the GOP to be unconstitutional.

 

I can see very little of today’s Republican Party that you can’t find in Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, or in his infamous nomination acceptance speech of 1964. On the other side, lots of Democrats, including both Clintons and Barack Obama, opposed gay marriage until very recently. Leading Democrats—including Al Gore, Richard Gephardt, and Jesse Jackson—were opposed to abortion-on-demand well into the 1980s. Try to find a prominent pro-life Democrat today. It wasn’t that long ago that Bill Clinton had repositioned Democrats as a fiscally responsible, market-friendly party. Now the Dowager Countess of Chappaqua is running against his legacy, while Bern-It-Down Sanders is channeling the id of the Democrats who are disappointed that Obama isn’t left enough. And it’s Republicans who are extreme? Legal weed must be spreading faster than I thought.

 

Well now we have some empirical evidence, and as we know, you can always trust empirical social science evidence (see below). There’s a new academic paper on income inequality (the nit-Piketty obsession with the academic industrial complex) that concludes it is the Democratic Party that is becoming more extreme. The American Interest offers this summary:

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

Who You Callin’ “Extreme”? (Part 2)
Steven Hayward
October 14, 2015

Further to my post a few days ago that it’s the Democratic Party that has become more extreme, this today from the sensible liberal Bill Galston in the Wall Street Journal:

 

 

(Snip)

 

Oh what the heck, since I’m saying relatively nice things about Galston (he was issues director of the Mondale for President campaign in 1984), I might as well replay this from 2013 (just 1:48 long):