That’s an excellent observation from Frum. Another GOP “value”, dead and buried.
Not that anyone will notice. At this point Republicans can run on their actual platform - power and money for us, nothing for you - and they’d still get 47% of the vote.
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Don’t know where to post this, seems as good a thread as any:
According to its 2016 manifesto, the Republican Party lies far from the Conservative Party in Britain and the Christian Democratic Union in Germany — mainstream right-leaning parties — and closer to far-right parties like Alternative for Germany, whose platform contains plainly xenophobic, anti-Muslim statements.
The Republican platform does not include the same bigoted policies, and its score is pushed to the right because of its emphasis on traditional morality and a “national way of life.” Still, the party shares a “nativist, working-class populism” with the European far right, said Thomas Greven, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin who has studied right-wing populism.
(I might take issue with “does not include … bigoted policies.”)
And edit. For anyone curious on how the US moved so far right, a Reddit comment that in a nutshell summarizes US political history (it does however leave out the civil rights movement and its impact. I suspect some will take issue with this synopsis though.)
Summary
–]brainmouthwords [score hidden] 48 minutes ago
It started during World War I. After wealthy and powerful war profiteers pressured President Wilson into getting the US involved in the war. Wilson created the Committee on Public Information. The CPI’s job was officially to create pro-war and anti-German propaganda. After the war was over, the CPI was renamed and restructured for a new purpose: Anti-Socialist propaganda. This persisted for years and years, manifesting itself in multiple “Red” scares including the McCarthyism of the 1950s and 1960s. This anti-Leftist zeitgeist allowed for the first permanent shift in the political spectrum, causing left-leaning politicians to shift towards the center for the sake of keeping their own careers, and right-leaning politicians to shift further to the right in an effort to differentiate themselves more from their centrist contemporaries. The Cold War and excellent economic conditions (largely resulting from the fact that most of the developed world was still rebuilding itself after WWII) perpetuated this trend until the 1980s when the advent of the credit system gave financial institutions and ostensibly, corporations as a whole, more control over society in general. Newt Gingrich and co. were also discovering that they didn’t have to be bipartisan in order to remain in power. This led to the next shift of the American political spectrum towards the right – Neoconservatives came into existence, and Neoliberals (centrist democrats) soon after for the sake of their own survival. This is how Bill Clinton managed to have political success at the national level during a time of conservative dominance. His political conservatism and social liberalism epitomizes neoliberal strategy.
This decades-long bias toward right-wing government policy has given republicans an advantage for quite some time, is a large part of the reason corporate and wealthy interference in our government has thrived, and why progressive policies in US government have been enacted largely through Supreme Court decisions and social change instead of through legislation. This bias is also why the rest of the developed world looks at the US and wonders why he is considered an “extreme” left-wing politician when in almost any other country in the western world he would be modestly to the left of center at best. Furthermore, what most Americans consider to be centrist policy would be considered to be right-wing leaning in the rest of the developed world.
