You: "There's objective measurements that the democrats moved far left creating the polarization."
Hmm. Could it be that you're... overestimating?
Young Dems more likely to despise the other party https://www.axios.com/2021/12/08/poll-political-polarization...
In 2001, 23% of Republicans/Republican-leaning Americans supported same-sex marraige. By 2019, it was 44%. Among white evangelical protestants specifically, it was 13% and rose to 29%.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/changing-att...
It's true that Republicans have moved more toward same-sex marriage.
However, it also seems to be true that the legalization of same-sex marriage has politically activated many Republicans who are still opposed to same-sex marriage.
When same-sex marriage was not legal, those opposed to it could remain fairly complacent. It was the status quo and wasn't an issue where they felt the need to engage in political activism. The most outspoken people were those in favor of same-sex marriage. But when same-sex marriage was legalized, there was an almost complete reversal, in terms of activism.
So today it feels like Republicans are more opposed to same-sex marriage, even if the raw numbers say otherwise. But perhaps the raw poll numbers don't reflect the level of enthusiasm or activism regarding the issue.
I think this is actually a general point: the level of political activism regarding any issue tends to be highest among those who feel threatened. So ironically, the level of activism opposed to same-sex marriage, for example, becomes higher as that view tends to wane in public popularity. A powerful overwhelming majority, on the other hand, doesn't need to make much effort to maintain its status.
That data shows only that republicans’ support of gay marriage follows the same trend as democrats’, at a lower level. That indicates to me a cultural shift for this single issue more than a political one.
The data in the article below paints a different overall picture, though I went to the source and did not find the information on what their metrics were for the liberal / moderate / conservative spectrum. It’s likely in their downloadable data sets but I am on mobile.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/28/what-elon...
Of course, one can argue that none of this is new, that what's new is pushback.
CRT, itself, is a pretty nebulous concept outside of actual legal scholarship. "Pushing CRT" is a common right-fringe talking point. How much do you think the majority of Democratic voters agree with "pushing CRT"?
That said, the institutional left (IL) is pushing Project 1619 and associated materials outside of law schools, whether or not you want to call that CRT. (Shades of "no true Scotsman.")
This is part of a broader "all-in" on DIE by the IL. "Everything" is racism, sexism, etc.
There's also deplatforming and doxxing.
No, I'm not going to provide a scale. I'm not even going to order deplatforming and doxxing. So, the above isn't quantitative measure.
That's a long way from "nothing is happening."
Who are you quoting? Nobody said that. This seems like a non sequitur.
I'm claiming that the fact that the original poster didn't provide something like "0.2 units to the left" doesn't actually refute his fundamental point.
Feel free to disagree.
> Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
What you've done is complain about some general stuff that you seem to dislike about "the left" and completely fail to engage with the content of the actual article, which I was trying to bring the discussion back to. But hey, at least you acknowledge ignorance about what most people think. Perhaps you should try exiting your bubble and figure that one out instead of dwelling on what you hate about the fringe.
I provided examples of movement by the institutional left. No, those examples don't have numbers, but they do show movement. Besides, how do you apply numbers to this sort of stuff in any reasonable fashion?
Whether or not I like those things or they're "general" has nothing to do with whether they're movement. That's likely why you didn't comment on whether they were in fact movement.
That said, as long as we're lecturing one another on meta-discussion, it's nice of you to provide an opportunity to quote Hannah Arendt: "The elite is not composed of ideologists; its members’ whole education is aimed at abolishing their capacity for distinguishing between truth and falsehood, between reality and fiction. Their superiority consists in their ability immediately to dissolve every statement of fact into a declaration of purpose."
No, the original claim was actually this: "political animosity may be based particularly on partisans’ overestimation of the prevalence of extreme, egregious views held by only a minority of opponents but imagined to be widespread."
The counterclaim was: "There's objective measurements that the democrats moved far left creating the polarization."
My suggestion was that this counterclaim seems to be exhibiting the same fallacy discussed in the paper.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties are very large, and its members have a wide variety of views. If you pay close attention, you'll see that there's quite a bit of infighting, sometimes very bitter, even within each party. Broad generalizations about Democrats or "the left" — and likewise about Republicans or "the right" — are often going to be grossly inaccurate. You can't just treat huge groups as uniform when they're demonstrably not uniform.
The American people — well over 300 million of them — have diverse political views. But we have a political duopoly. Which means that these diverse views held by Americans have to somehow fit mostly within these 2 parties. It's a mistake to overgeneralize about political parties and similar groups.
I personally find the terms "left", "right", "liberal", "conservative" to be practically meaningless. They've lost all of their original meaning and become opaque cudgels for the political parties to pretend they have some kind of coherent ideology. But this is a bit of a tangent.
Anyway, I would bet that most Democrats and most Republicans don't even know WTF CRT is. Even the ones who complain about it!
Nope. The top-level post claimed the existence of objective measures of "the left" moving "far left", of which I haven't seen evidence.
And, I'd never claim that "the left" hasn't moved. The left/right terminology is rather sloppy, so I've tried to use the language of TFA: Democratic and Republican voters. But, let's look at "progressives" for a moment. The goal of progressives is to identify oppression in the world, and work towards overcoming it. That is to say, the goal of progressives is to change with the times, which is why, for example, today's progressives hate Margaret Sanger but still support Planned Parenthood. The goal of social conservatives is to resist change and as we're seeing with Roe v. Wade, undo past progressive changes (which, I think, is technically "regressive") which is why, for example, we see today's social conservatives rallying around statues of Robert E. Lee.
But that's not what the article about. The article is about how each side sees the other. It's nicely summarized by this SMBC comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-04-07
What's going on today is that Democratic voters increasingly identify Republican voters as the nazi-flag bearing Charlottesville rioters, and Republican voters increasingly identify Democratic with murderers like Kermit Gosnell and Christopher Dorner.
https://areomagazine.com/2022/01/18/yes-children-are-being-t...
2) The article about US schools was written by an Australian.
3) The article seems free of any actual empirical examples of its main claim.
4) There have always been groups in the US who want censorship in schools for anything they don't like politically or religiously, most notably, the science of biological evolution. The "oh no, what are they teaching the children in schools" crowd is very hard to take seriously. There are people who don't want slavery mentioned in schools. They don't want the Holocaust mentioned in schools. It's hard to imagine a more "radical agenda" than all of this censorship and denial of facts. Wipe away history? Wipe away science?
The irony is that those who say "just teach the controversy about evolution and the Holocaust" [there's no scientific controversy] would also refuse to "teach the controversy" over CRT.
I've never taught high school, but I did teach (philosophy) at the university level in the past, and the people who complain about what's taught in college typically believe laughably inaccurate caricatures of what actually happens in the classroom. We're not proselytizing students; it's hard enough just to keep them awake during class and prod them to actually do the assigned reading in the first place.
Yeah, I gave the article an honest read, looking for real evidence, because it runs entirely counter to my experience. I'm a mom of a kid in grade school, and I've talked to a lot of parents and teachers about this topic. I'm in the very liberal Vancouver area, and my same-aged friends are spread across Canada and the US. Nobody I know is seeing anything like the racist trash that tastyfreeze and Areo are spreading.
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/12/22/...
https://www.heritage.org/education/report/rescuing-math-and-...
Heh, let me know when you come up with something that isn't a political hack publication.
I took the time to read the first link you chose. It did not show what you thought it showed. You thereby lost credibility and the benefit of the doubt in my eyes. So no, I'm not going to waste any more time reading your links unless I have a very good reason, and I also find it suspicious that all of your links are to publications with well-known political agendas. This is why I'm suggesting you find an article, one article, any article, that doesn't come from such a publication.
Your "other side" comment is an incorrect assumption, because I'm not on a side and have no political party. I'm what you might call an "independent".
As I said... wilfred social science...
Here's a nice visual graph that I like: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/12/7-things-to...
Go put your finger on the republican line and see where it moves.
There has been analysis done by many groups which have confirmed where the political polarization derived heavily starting with gay rights. The republicans who had 'closeted' homosexuals moved left. Trump literally started a fight with russia and the middle east trying to benefit homosexuals. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-adm...
The republicans clearly moved left and it was the right thing to do. Whereas Truman != Obama. It's rather easy to objectively see both parties have moved left.
I feel like this is rather objective fact. The better discussion, why is this the case? Is it perhaps where the democrats have gone is the right place both parties eventually end up? Or are we about to watch 2nd civil war?
I don't know what the point is supposed to be here.
> Here's a nice visual graph that I like: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/12/7-things-to...
> Go put your finger on the republican line and see where it moves.
Ok. I downloaded the gif and went through it frame by frame. What it shows is that the Median Democrat stayed exactly the same during 1998-2011, while the Median Republican moved right the whole period of 2004-2011.
Anyway, this story is from 2014, so it's missing the last 8 years.
Now try doing the whole span it's depicting, instead of picking the best years for your viewpoint.
> Anyway, this story is from 2014, so it's missing the last 8 years.
Here's an update that includes 2015 and 2017: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/interactives/political-...
It continues the same trend of median Republican barely moving while come 2017 median Democrat flies off even further left.
What do you think is my viewpoint?
During 1994-1997, both parties were moving left. And during 2012-2014 they were moving in opposite directions. I focused on the period of 1998-2011 because that seemed to be when there was the biggest difference in behavior between the 2 parties.
The claim of incomingpain was that "the democrats moved far left creating the polarization". But this is not supported by the given data. The parties were moving in lockstep prior to 1998, and the Democrats didn't move at all for many years after 1998.
It seems difficult to argue that the polarization was created in 2017, given the data from 1998-2011. Anyway, incomingpain, the one who made the claim, was also the one who linked to the pre-2015 data.
Here's the funny thing: incomingpain said "The republicans clearly moved left and it was the right thing to do." And Republicans did indeed move left 1994-2003... but then they moved back right starting in 2004. They moved right at the same time that Democrats were staying the same. So shouldn't incomingpain argue that backtracking was the wrong thing to do, if moving left was the right thing to do?
It would be interesting to go back to Women's suffrage because I'm sure people were having the same discussion. Liberals have moved left while Republicans have stayed where they are. But of course, moving to the left on equal rights for women is not liberals moving too far to the left. It's society course correcting. You don't get to say "Well liberals got women's rights so we get ____" But too many Republicans are saying the equivalent of that (hell some Republicans do https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/politics/2021/10/22/a... say exactly that.)
Human rights can't be a partisan consideration. It can't be something we compromise over. We just have to evolve as a society, get over it and instead have substantive conversations about the policies that move the needle in people's lives.
Really? Does "legalize abortion" mean more government intervention? Does "abolish the police" mean more government intervention?
Sometimes your opponent actually is taking an actual anti-human rights position. It's pretty common.
Framing the debate in terms of individuals' rights is intended to remove the topic from the realm of political discussion and shut down dissent. It also completely drowns out discussion of the societal effects of allowing/banning abortion, which is just as important as the effect on individuals. The same unproductive dynamic plays out in the debate over e.g. the right to free speech.
This ignores massive societal shilf we've had - which is erosion of worker's rights.
The 'left' used to mean worker's rights, helping the poor, maybe socialism or welfare.
Now you have folks who see themselves as left because they suport trans right, but their solution to 'No parental leave in America' is 'more freee market'
Contempt for your constituency is not how you build a winning coalition.
Is this actually "the left" though? The same people who came up with the insult "basket of deplorables" also came up with the insult "Bernie bros".
Seriously, if the left means Hillary Clinton and does not mean Bernie Sanders, then we might as well just throw all political labels in the trash.
If so, I haven't paid enough attention to politics to keep track of what's going on. But if not, then I think it's fair to say that the left as a whole abandoned the working class, with Bernie being the exception.
Bernie has the "luxury" of living in one of the smallest states in the nation, Vermont. He can wage a ground game campaign and not worry about having to raise massive amounts of money for big market TV ads. This makes him less susceptible to corruption than other senators. Also he was never a Democrat in the first place but an independent who decided to run for the Democratic nomination, so he was never fully a part of the the party apparatus.
It's interesting to contrast with how Trump basically waltzed in and took over the Republican party, despite not having been a solid Republican himself in the past. I take this as a sign of how marginalized the left has been from the Democratic party. Sanders has taken over the spot of being the Democratic scapegoat for all their problems, a spot formerly held by Ralph Nader.