I read something interesting today; I'm not sure if this is one of the threads where conservatives were discussing how the Democrats elected on Nov 7 were actually conservatives in disguise, so "Haha, we win after all."
I think it was this thread.
Anyway, here's what I read:
"The officially accepted version of the Democrats' victory was that the party won by deftly running moderates in red states. This argument implied that the presumed incoming speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had rather tackily seized power on the backs of candidates who actually held her liberalism in high contempt and were just itching to inaugurate a showdown over gay marriage roughly 17 minutes after taking the oath of office.
But that's not quite true.
In fact, of the 27 Democrat candidates for the House who won outright on Nov. 7, only five can truly be called social conservatives. Far more are pro-choice, against the Iraq war and quite liberal. Why, there's even a woman who was tossed out of a presidential event for wearing an anti-Bush T-shirt (New Hampshire's Carol Shea-Porter) and a fellow who ran an alternative newspaper and who proudly supports affirmative action -- in Kentucky, no less (John Yarmuth).
So the experts got it wrong again, which is really not so surprising given that what happened on Election Day was quite nuanced. The Democrats moved to the center and to the left at the same time. In doing so, they became more like the hegemonic Democratic Party of old. And if, in 2008, it turns out that Nov. 7 did, in fact, usher in an era of Democrat resurgence, it will be precisely because the party managed to sustain this left-center coalition and render the distinctions between the two groups less important. "
link
The last sentence is important.
For about six... mmm, maybe almost ten years now, "liberal" has become synonymous with some fictional fringey freak from San Francisco who wants to enter into gay marriage with an illegal alien and have a dozen abortions, each one for "convenience", and all at taxpayer expense.
Either that, or some rich but eccentric Hollywood star, who wants to outlaw guns, ban freedom of speech unless they happen to agree with the opinion being expressed, and force everyone to quit smoking and drive hybrid cars.
Or Cindy Sheehan.
It's gotten to the point where both "Liberal" and "Feminist" are dirty words; you might as well declare yourself a neo-nazi or a child molester, for all the mainstream credibility you're likely to have with either of these labels attached to you.
The fact is, there was a time, not very long ago- in recent memory- when the majority of Americans identified more strongly with the left than the right, and when "Conservative" or "Fundamentalist Christian" were the labels that people wished to avoid, the labels that carried a stigma, the labels that destroyed one's credibility as handily as if they were a klan robe and hood, or a dunce cap and a kick-me sign.
The pendulum swings.
It swung far right this time; now it's headed left again.
The moderates will no longer be creatures of the right; they will belong to the left now, for awhile. The right has become
immoderate; it has become something moderates can no longer support.
Meanwhile, the left is welcoming them back into the fold...
not by becoming more moderate and less extreme, but by allowing lefties from a variety of points on the spectrum to be seen and heard, rather than drowning them out or denying them the right to
call themselves lefties.
It's the "Big Tent" theory that worked so long and so well for the GOP... and continued to work until the GOP went so extreme that conservative fundamentalists were emboldened enough by their apparent sway over the President of the United States to insist that they no longer wanted to share a "big tent" with homosexuals, no matter how conservative and republican said homosexuals might be, or with moderates, who were and always have been the backbone, the meat-and-potatoes, the
majority, of
any party.
The left, meanwhile, opened its arms to the rejected centrists.
The left- including the capital-L "Liberals"- will be in power for awhile now. Definitely through the 2008 presidential elections (these things go in 5 to 10 year cycles).
Deal wit' it. :mrgreen:
