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Reductive analogy time: A donkey and an elephant are walking down a road, the donkey in the middle, the elephant on the right, both tied on either end of a rope. Over a span, the donkey pulled to the left and the elephant, in degrees, moved to the center. Now the donkey is on the left of the road and the elephant is in the middle of the road.
The friction we are currently experiencing is that while the donkey wants to go further to the left, and has continued pulling to the left, the elephant has decided not to allow itself to be moved any further and thus is still in the center.
The donkey does not like not being able to continue moving to the left. The elephant does not like continually being pulled to the left and perhaps like to move back towards the right side of the road.
So they are both pulling in opposite directions, the donkey worrying that the elephant will use its greater strength to force the donkey to the right, and the elephant worrying that the donkey will use its greater speed to force the elephant to the left.
This analogy is not comprehensive, but maybe it will help someone frame some of the reasons why the one tribe is so angry at the other and vice versa.
Or even remotely accurate; the Republican Party has been moving consistently, though at varying speeds, to the right since at least the 1980s; the Democratic Party made a huge jump to the right (and very close to the Republicans) in the early 1990s, ushering in the brief period of the neoliberal consensus before the sharp acceleration in the rightward movement of the Republican Partyp, stayed stuck in essentially the same position for a while, and has moved a little bit to the left over the last couple years.
Not only are you wrong about the direction each party is moving, you are wrong on a more fundamental level about the idea that the distance between them is fixed (or, at least, that the recent movement has been constrained by an upper bound on that distance forcing them to move together.)
There is a sort of relativity here, and you are a moving frame of reference. When you see everybody but you going right, it's actually you going left. If you could travel back in time to discuss politics with your former self, both of you would probably get offended.
No, they've moved consistently to the right, the most dramatic manifestations of this movement being with the Contract with America in 1994 and Trump in 2016+.
> The Democrat party
It's the Democratic Party; the misuse of the noun form in place of the adjective is a weird tic of Republican activists.
> has moved farther to the left than the Republicans ha
Well, it's moved a little to the left recently while the Republicans have continued their journey to the far right, after basically moving to a position nearly identical to the Republicans of the time on economic issues and slightly to the left on, but deprioritizing, social issues with the Clintonian center-right neoliberalism of the 1990s.
And "democrat" vs "democratic" is probably an autocorrect "tic". I'm also not a Republican, and certainly not an "activist" in any way. My personal beliefs are that almost all politicians are simply interested in power and say the things they think will get them elected -- and in general the striking differences between the parties are on which programs they want to spend the money that does not exist.
Bill would not be able to get the nomination of the Democratic Party today -- he would be considered far too right wing.
He could have credibly run as a Democrat, probably won the nomination, and had the Democrats singing his praises now. His policies on immigration align with Clinton, Obama, Schumer and others from less than ten years ago. He's to the left of both of the Clintons on prison reform. He's to the left of both of the Clintons and Obama on gay marriage (well, Hillary changed her position two years ago, but otherwise). He's to the left of Bill on fiscal responsibility. etc. I could go on.
Trump is a corrupt, opportunist that is probably more of a kleptocrat than having any coherent ideology, but the Trump Administration is a right-wing authoritarian regime in its concrete policy actions.
> He doesn't align socially or fiscally with the Republican Party
In the 2016 primary campaign, while there was still any significant Republican Party in the electorate or in government that hadn't aligned itself almost completely with Trump's actions, and when one could only assess Trump's position by trying to construct a narrative out of a mass of ambiguous and conflicting statements (both during the campaign and prior) rather than concrete policy and personnel actions, this was a defensible position, but it no longer is.
> He could have credibly run as a Democrat
Perhaps before he burnt Bridges with the Democratic electorate by (among other things) jumping into birtherism, he might have—he did have a long history of seeking influence with the New York political establishment (dominated by Democrats) by feigning support for Democratic policy positions that, had he not started showing his true colors as he did several years before running for the Republican nomination, he might have been a non-ridiculous (though still doomed) 2016 Democratic primary candidate, even with his even longer and well-documented history of racism and sexism which Democratic 2016 primary voters would probably have been less forgiving of than Republican primary voters the same year. Of course, he would have had to run a very different campaign with a very different assumed persona.
> probably won the nomination,
No, and to even treat that as even semi-serious requires not understanding the situation and rules in the Republican nominating process Trump exploited to win, the ones in the Democratic primary that Clinton exploited to win, and how the rules of both are engineered to be different than each other or a simple election.
> He's to the left of both of the Clintons and Obama on gay marriage (well, Hillary changed her position two years ago, but otherwise).
Rhetorically on that narrow issue perhaps, but his substantive actions are far to their right on LGBTQ issues generally. This is particularly dramatically clear when it comes to policy on transgender military service,where both Obama and Trump made active policy changes to the policy which was in place prior to their own respective presidencies, in opposite directions.
> He's to the left of Bill on fiscal responsibility. etc.
To the extent that there are ldleft and right positions on fiscal responsibility, the left wing position is that “fiscal responsibility” is a reason to cut defense and security spending and/or raise taxes on the rich to pay for government spending, while he right wing position is that fiscal responsibility is a reason to cut social programs or cut taxes on the rich (because tax cuts obviously increase revenues) to pay for government spending. Trump is not to the left of, well, anyone in the Democratic Party Cli on this issue.
His full page ads calling for the execution of the exonerated Central Park Five ran thirty years ago!
Are you seriously claiming that the Republicans are a centrist party?
I would be interested to hear contrary opinions on why we haven't drifted left socially.
Start the graph in the 60's and you'll get a very different graph. The standard narrative is that Clinton shifted the party to the right, and it's now returning to where it was in the LBJ days.
Clinton was to the right of Trump on many things.