Except evidence has shown the the left has moved further left than the right has moved right. Both have moved but the left has moved further left in the US.
Many, including possibly you based on comments so far, are enchanted with the idea that one side is correct always and another side is wrong always.
I think this is the root of the problem - a meta problem where communication has broken down - because the go-to discussion technique is to quote a gish-like succession of cherry-picked examples so the conclusion of the conversation can be one side is always wrong and another side is always right.
Said another way, any conclusion that ascribes traits to "the left" or "the right" is exactly the sort of stuff I would hope a News Literacy course teaches you to discredit.
I think the problem is twofold, political parties are followed as if they are sports teams, and due to shrinking advertising revenues the news media dishes everything with a massive helping of hyperbole. For example, which US political party has a majority of its registered votes in support of gay marriage? The answer is both, but that doesn't get acknowledged in the media.
The article is a few years old, but by most measures, the Democratic party has been moving from the center-right toward the center-left, making it a relatively centrist party on the global stage, while the Republican party has remained firmly right-wing.
Your comment appears to be true, but what we're seeing may simply be America rebalancing herself for the first time since the lead-up to the Cold War.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/solutions-to-political-...
It would seem unsurprising that the end result of this, upon pulling the "center" of each party towards its own extreme, is essentially what we've seen -- ~50% of conservatives now believe in vaccine/pandemic conspiracy theories, vs liberals support some extremists at the local level, but also continue to support centrists like Biden at the national level.
They wouldn't be pulled to extremes, they'd already be there. However, most research shows it's the right that's moved far. Look at Trumpism and compare that to prior conservative leaders, such as GW Bush, GHW Bush, Reagan, Ford .... Biden fits right in with Clinton and Obama.
> liberals support some extremists at the local level
What extremists? There are people farther left than Biden, but nobody trying to seize power from the people, letting a deadly pandemic spread for political reasons, backing arrest and brutality toward their political enemies, etc.
It's not balanced; if Amy punches Bob, it's not even-handed to blame both of them. If Amy burns down the house, it's not even-handed to say 'we're all crazy'.
I see Trumpism as a cause, not a symptom.
The right was casting about for a leader after McCain and Romney (both centrists) lost to Obama. Trump (and allies) spoke loudest, and so pulled the "party truth" to the right for the Republican party.
Those Republicans who disagreed (of whom there were many) left politics or stopped speaking publicly about their disagreement. Or, over time, began to agree with the party line. Little tent politics.
> What extremists?
There's a well known group, who you can probably find by seeing who's on the Fox News homepage right now, who says things would would be considered far left.
And yet, Biden still calls these people crazy and says no to the more extreme policy proposals. Big tent politics.
My comment wasn't sharing blame. It was remarking on the fundamentally different organizations that the right and the left run, and who they allow to speak.
Fair enough, and I think that's a valuable point. However, I think the following is too:
>> What extremists?
> There's a well known group, who you can probably find by seeing who's on the Fox News homepage right now, who says things would would be considered far left.
> And yet, Biden still calls these people crazy and says no to the more extreme policy proposals. Big tent politics.
I don't think they are extremists, but if you can name some and their extreme policies, I'd go with it. Fox isn't a great source for deciding what is 'far left'.
But to talk about policies, I would call defunding all police, complete student loan forgiveness, banning nuclear power and crude exports, and opposing market based carbon taxes extremist.
This post is an excellent example of information to not trust.
That depends on all of the time frame (are you talking from the height of the mid-to-late-1990s “neoliberal consensus” where the DNC had shifted sharply right on economic issues compared to its previous positions, and when—due in part to the economic boom, broader in reach down the distributional ladder than subsequent expansions—racial issues were at a historically low salience, or some other time), and your political frame of reference (a fix set of policy stands defining degree of left/right-ness, or comparison to evolving global or developed-world standards), and what you are calling “the left” and “the right” that have moved (are you talking about the nth-percentile position in the electorate, are you talking the median position in each of the major parties [and, if so, are you looking at the party-in-the-electorate or the party-in-government], etc.)
And, as with most identity-charged issues, standard selection tends to be biased by the desired outcome (either directly and consciously, or because of worldview, e.g., a conservative will be biased toward the constant-policy rather than evolving-international-norms standard in measuring how far to the right or left things in the US are.)