In yesterday's post, I addressed the Democratic Party's dust-up over Ilhan Omar and her propensity to spout, shall we say, Mel Gibson-isms, but without the excuse of booze, being a practicing muslim. I have written critical posts about the left's new favorite, Ocasio-Cortez, along with posts about my own state of befuddlement at the House Democrats' lunacy when it came to the re-election of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker. Anyone in the party who contemplated another choice was a fool. As this is happening, the party is, broadly speaking, coalescing around policy proposals that are significantly further left than anything they considered before.
And no, I'm not just talking about various forms of single-payer healthcare. Right about now, the lefty's response is to say, "single-payer isn't extreme!" A) In this country, it is, but more importantly, b) there's way more going on in the Democratic Party than that.
The "Green New Deal," poorly specified though it is, goes far beyond environmental policies, and is much further left than anything the party has touched before. Elizabeth Warren is proposing breaking up prominent companies. She is also proposing that corporations, following from the "corporations/people" linguistic/legal thing that lefties never really understand, should have legal responsibilities that no human person has. Major presidential candidates are advocating reparations, which has been a complete nonstarter, politically. I could keep going...
Did Sanders do this? I don't know. I was skeptical, after 2016, that Sanders would push the party left, and there are other forces at work, so I don't know how things balance out, but if you look at the policy proposals that are currently the big news in the Democratic Party, it is moving way left. Way left. Along with that, you get tensions over leadership, so Nancy Pelosi winds up facing problems with some moderates in her party, along with what we might as well call the left-wing tea party. You get purity tests, which... come on. We're seeing! You get anti-intellectualism, exemplified by Ocasio-Cortez, the oversimplification of all politics, exemplified by Sanders. Back in 2016, I was equating him with the tea party anyway. His model of politics was always simple and simplistic. All you need is campaign finance reform, and then everything turns into a socialist utopia! How much more anti-intellectual and oversimplified could you possibly get?
Is this the Sanders-ification of the Democratic Party?
Here's the problem. Measurement. We conventionally measure ideology through voting scores. Like, in Congress. For that, we can rely on "NOMINATE" scores, which use an algorithm developed by Keith Poole & Howard Rosenthal. We track voting in Congress over time, and assess ideology by extracting the underlying ideology that best explains everyone's votes. Cool, right? Using those methods, the GOP moved further right than the Democratic Party did left over time. We call that "asymmetric polarization."
Right now, we don't have a full array of votes on all of this. We've got proposals, many of which won't get votes. This is a social science complication. I don't have a good answer here, except to point out that if you look at the trends, the proposals indicate fast movement to the left in the Democratic Party.
Time to pick on Matt Grossman & Dave Hopkins again. Yay! Their argument, for the last several years, has been that the GOP moved more to the extreme than the Democratic Party because the former is an ideological movement based on a quest for purity, while the latter is a coalition of interest groups, and I've been calling bullshit on that since before it ever went into print. (I know them both.) All parties are coalitions. That's kind of the definition. Also, no existing, practical ideology is consistent. Philip Converse, 1964. They're socio-political log-rolls. Hans Noel. 2013. Having a quest for purity in the context of an ideology which is just a logically unstable, socio-political log-roll is just a rhetorical dodge. Ignore the rhetoric. What has really been happening in the GOP and conservatism? White identity politics. See, um... everything that happened in 2016. That's group politics, fully consistent with ole' Phil Converse. Everything else is just rhetorical bullshit used to cover that up. Don't believe me? Whom did the GOP nominate?
This isn't retrospective analysis. I actually posed this, during the primaries, as a test of Grossman & Hopkins, on this very blog. Trump was the least ideologically pure candidate, but the most aggressively white supremacist candidate. The most ideologically pure was Ted Cruz. Trump mopped the floor with Ted Cruz. If Grossman & Hopkins were right, Trump shouldn't have won.
Why did Trump win? White identity politics. That's not ideology. That's group identity.
And on the Democratic side? Plenty 'o identity politics, with the added complication that they take "multiculturalism" as a principle, as I wrote yesterday in my Ilhan Omar post! In that sense, the Democratic Party is the more principle-driven party, which is exactly what is tying them into knots on Ilhan Omar. In other words, I still call bullshit on Grossman & Hopkins.
What is the effect of all of this, though, on polarization? These proposals, to the degree that we can measure them, when we can, should push the Democratic Party way left. The effect of all of this identity politics internecine warfare.... Um... Let's just say that an increasing focus on identity politics overall pushes the party left. (Keeping in mind that the GOP's rightward movement is about white identity politics! Racial polarization matching up with party. Awesome.) Less so, arguably, than the "Green New Deal," but the Democratic Party is moving left faster than it has in a long time.
Is the extremism gap being erased? Without measurement, we can't say. And this doesn't get at several things. It doesn't get at the corruption gap. Donald Trump has sealed the deal on that. He can't seal any other deal, but he has ensured that the Republican Party claims the title of most corrupt major party in American history. We can also address topics like procedural extremism. The use of shutdowns, debt ceiling threats, blocking a Supreme Court seat... these kinds of tactics, sometimes known as "constitutional hardball," are pretty much the purview of the GOP, and there hasn't been anything comparable on the Democratic side.
And certainly nothing like the emergency declaration, which doesn't get the title of "constitutional hardball." That was flat-out unconstitutional. However, that was also Donald Trump. No other individual would have done that.
I doubt even Mitch McConnell would have had the sociopathy to pull a stunt like that, and that guy has five sociopathic thoughts every morning before he takes a piss.
As far as party-level stuff, though? And ideological content? The Democratic Party really is moving way left. It is hard to pick it up with our standard measure, NOMNATE, because that measure is based on congressional voting, and most of what is happening now isn't congressional voting, but that doesn't mean it isn't real.
And that means Matt Grossman & Dave Hopkins are still wrong.