Why the Democrats Can Move to the Left

[applegrove]

Why the Democrats Can Move to the Left

By Ramesh Ponnuru at Bloomberg

http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-13/bill-clinton-s-legacy-helps-liberal-democrats-today

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Partisan sorting. The Obama years saw the remaining conservative Democrats get wiped out, as Weigel notes. The Democrats are a more uniformly progressive party now. There are fewer conservative Democrats among the party’s elected officials and activists to counsel restraint, and fewer conservative Democratic voters to worry about alienating. The platform reflects these developments.

Demographics. Democrats have grown increasingly convinced that demographic trends augur a lasting progressive majority. Whites are more conservative than nonwhites, married people are more conservative than single people, and church-going Christians are more conservative than everyone else. The percentage of the population that belongs to each of those conservative groups is dwindling, which suggests that conservatism will dwindle, too. These trends give liberals a reason to think that their positions have become less politically risky than they used to be and will be even less risky in the future.

The success of Bill Clinton. Judged by the standards of today’s Democrats, the Clinton administration looks conservative. Clinton signed laws cutting the capital-gains tax, requiring able-bodied welfare recipients to work, making criminal sentences more severe, funding the building of prisons, and defining marriage in federal law as the union of a man and a woman. He said abortion should be “rare,” a sentiment absent from the party’s platform today.

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Republican haplessness. Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. They have spent much of the Obama administration at war with themselves. This year the party's voters chose the presidential candidate who polled worst in a general election, and looked least likely to organize and raise funds for a competent national campaign, to be their nominee.





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[Tal Vez]

1. We should move further to the left

after we win the election so that it might mean something.