The Economist: Is America Turning Left?

[EV_Ares]

The Economist asks "Is America Turning left?" The answer given is "Probably—but not in the way many foreigners (and some Americans) hope":

Is America turning left?, The Economist: For George Bush, the presidency is becoming a tragic tale of unintended consequences. In foreign policy, the man who sought to transform Iraq, the Middle East and America's reputation has indeed had revolutionary effects, though not the ones he was aiming for. Now something similar seems to be happening in domestic politics. The most conservative president in recent history ... may well end up driving the Western world's most impressive political machine off a cliff.

That machine has put Republicans in the White House in seven of the past ten contests. ... Watergate helped Jimmy Carter in 1976, just as the end of the cold war and Ross Perot's disruptive third-party campaign helped Bill Clinton in 1992. Better organised and more intellectually inventive than their “liberal” rivals, American conservatives have controlled the agenda even when they have lost: Mr Clinton is best remembered for balancing the budget and passing welfare reform, both conservative achievements. In a country where one in three people see themselves as conservatives (against one in five as liberals) ..., it is easy to see why Mr Bush and his strategist, Karl Rove, dreamed of banishing Democrats from power for a generation.

Now they would settle for a lot less. Having recaptured Congress last year, the Democrats are on course to retake the presidency in 2008. Only one Republican, Rudy Giuliani, looks competitive..., and his campaign is less slick than those of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Voters now favour generic Democratic candidates over Republican ones by wide margins. Democrats are more trusted even on traditional conservative issues... (see article).

For this, he is not guilty. The easy scapegoat is Mr Bush himself. During his presidency, the words Katrina, Rumsfeld, Abramoff, Guantánamo and Libby have become shorthand for incompetence, cronyism or extremism. Indeed, the failings of Mr Bush's coterie are oddly reassuring for some conservatives: once he has gone, they can regroup, as they did after his father was ousted in 1992. Yet this President Bush is not a good scapegoat. Rather than betraying the right, he has given it virtually everything it craved, from humongous tax cuts to conservative judges. Many of the worst errors were championed by conservative constituencies. Some of the arrogance in foreign policy stems from the armchair warriors of neoconservatism; the ill-fated attempt to “save” the life of the severely brain-damaged Terri Schiavo was driven by the Christian right. Even Mr Bush's apparently oxymoronic trust in “big-government conservatism” is shared in practice by most Republicans in Congress.

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[pretzel4gore]

1. the ratwing don't get it! they Lose by winning...

snip>
From this perspective, the worrying parallel for the right is not 1992 but the liberal overreach of the 1960s. By embracing leftish causes that were too extreme for the American mainstream ... the Democrats cast themselves into the political wilderness. Now the American people seem to be reacting to conservative over-reach by turning left. More want universal health insurance; more distrust force as a way to bring about peace; more like greenery; ever more dislike intolerance on social issues.
<snip

And in the service of rightwing ignorance, typified by the above, the punks forget the murders of JFK, RFK, MLK, MalcolmX, Patrice Lumumba http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice_Lumumba, Allende, Alan Berg, John Lennon and .... and...fukkit. No more arguing with these guys. A baseball bat and a rightwinger's head=progress

[Me.]

2. The Economist Is Correct About America Turning Left

But some of their other conclusions are as wrong as Rove thinking his nasty little plans were going to keep America conservative. They assume that the right wing (the DLC and Blue Dogs) of the democratic party will be the dominant force. What they don't understand, perhaps because of wishful thinking and not wanting their agenda to fall by the wayside, is that a turn left is a turn left which means the principles of the right are being rejected. And the very wing of the the republicon party that they favor, the western one, is what started this mess in the first place. * would never have gotten where he is without Raygun's terrible lead.

[KittyWampus]

3. now we just have to turn the electoral process left and away from corrupt GOP'ers and their machines

[Buns_of_Fire]

4. ...and by all means, don't miss the comments at the end

Like this one...

Bruce Wilder says...
The biggest obstacle to America turning Left, imo, is Media Consolidation.

If you are awake to what happened in America, 1994-2007?, the most remarkable thing is not the ascendancy of conservatism so much as the ascendancy of stupidity. Bush does not represent conservative ideas to me so much as he represents stupid. Granted, the conservative party is always the party of stupid, in a sense, but Bush is so clearly personally limited, and becoming progressively less capable, and so many of his policies are just a cover for wealth transfers to the rich, and otherwise destructive to the country, that you have to wonder how we got here.

And, I come back to Media Consolidation. The whole Whitewater "scandal" leading to impeachment was just bizarre, but was forced on the country by a Media out of control. The campaign of slander that Gore was subjected to, which "elected" Bush -- what was that about. The spectacle last week of O'Hanlon and Pollack portraying themselves as "critics" of the Bush war they have been cheerleading since day zero, and that, in turn, letting the Media trumpet "progress" in Iraq, when that luckless land continues to deteriorate. There are still not liberals on teevee, and Chris Matthews is complaining that the Democratic candidates are not fat enough, when he's not speculating on the scent of Republicans....