Neither the country nor the south has become more conservative. However, the south has become a lot more Republican. And that, in a nutshell, is the so-called "Republican revolution."
Friday, October 07, 2005
A closer look at who's shifted
The Conventional Wisdom likes to say that the country has moved to the right in the last decade or two, and that explains the Republican ascendancy. But that explanation obscures the real truth, which is that almost the entire shift in Congress can be attributed to a shift in composition of the Southern delegation (see also part I of this analysis here). That may well be in response to the social and religious issues of the day, which have clearly polarized the whole country, but it's hard not to see that localized change as a rather different phenomenon from a more universal trend! As Chris Bowers puts it,
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2 comments:
I have felt for sometime that the basic political spectrum of the country has remained unchanged but the drift of the Democratic Party leadership to the Left has tossed a large portion of their former base out of the boat.
Boy, what portion of the leadership, exactly, has moved left? I'm not convinced that most of them really know where that is!
I'd say that the biggest problem is that the language of the Left has somehow become less acceptable in public discourse -- we've forgotten, say, about responsibility to communities and one another, and instead like to talk about rights and wealth. Thus many people see "values" as having a party stamp, rather than seeing the two parties as showcasing two different ways of prioritizing the rights and responsibilities of individuals and the government. Changing public discourse is a mighty slow row, but if you realize that there are regional differences in how well you're being heard, you're going to approach things differently than if you think it's a national mindset question.
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