The Democratic Party is FINALLY (once again) a LIBERAL political party.

[hedda_foil]

40. The party in the 80s had run out of steam and ideas after 50 years in power.

They lost the South because of Civil Right laws, making a majority more difficult to achieve. At the same time, they were so used to being the party in charge of both the House and Senate that they became way too comfortable with being a permanent majority and didn't know how to handle becoming the minority.

The problem wasn't being too far left; it was the above plus:

- White working/middle class backlash (to integration of their neighborhoods and busing in the schools) in the North. Here's where a lot of white union members became Reagan Republicans.

- Right wing backlash to the chaos of the 60s and early 70s. This backlash was built on an underlying desire for order and stability.

- The aging of the FDR Democratic electorate. For more than two generations, seniors were reliably Democratic voters. This group, who had lived through the Depression as adults, were in their beginning to die off in the 80s.

- Goldwater actually managed to get 40% of the vote in 1964. I haven't done the stats, but I suspect that the Southern white shift from D to R on top of Goldwater's 40% base easily provided the pukes with a pretty damn stable majority.

- Traditional, moderate Congressional Republicans, particularly -- but not only -- in the Northeast, provided enough reassurance to college educated R's that it was still their party. This group has almost completely moved from R to D or I.

- For all these reason, the only way Dems could win for about 20 years was by running Southern Democratic candidates to hang onto as many Sourthern white votes as possible, while keeping black voters mollified. That's the rationale behind Clinton/Gore. It wasn't about being liberal or moderate; it was about wooing Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina -- the mid South.

Most of these underlying conditions have now been reversed. Trump's base boils down to unreconstructed Southern whites, working class whites who have been made to fear that it's brown and black people who are responsible for the drop in their standard of living.

And white evangelicals, whose interpretation of Christianity was literally invented by far right political consultants to convince them to vote Republican. Falwell (who was close to bankrupt at the time) et al made a quid pro quo deal with the far right devil. They got rich and powerful by convincing their congregations that God hated gays and abortion. The former was a relatively easy sell. They had to work a litte harder on the "pro choice" front, since most of their parishoners were originally okay with Roe. But the evangelical base is shrinking as their kids leave the fold.

Nothing of these factors relates to being "too" liberal.