It’s the Progressives’ Fault

And I found this post by Kevin Drum gratifying, especially because I’ve been pointing this out for most of two decades, frequently to the bitter denunciation of progressives:

I’ve made this point many times before, and I want to make it again more loudly and more plainly today. It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle. It is liberals. And this shouldn’t come as a surprise since progressives have been bragging publicly about pushing the Democratic Party leftward since at least 2004.

Now, I’m personally happy about most of this. But that doesn’t blind me to the fact that “personally happy” means nothing in politics. What matters is what the median voter feels, and Democrats have been moving further and further away from the median voter for years:

but he’s worried about it:

Despite endless hopeful invocations of “but polls show that people like our positions,” the truth is that the Democratic Party has been pulled far enough left that even lots of non-crazy people find us just plain scary—something that Fox News takes vigorous advantage of. From an electoral point of view, the story here is consistent: Democrats have stoked the culture wars by getting more extreme on social issues and Republicans have used this to successfully cleave away a segment of both the non-college white vote and, more recently, the non-college nonwhite vote.

Plenty of facts, figures, and charts.

Not only are Democrats abandoning the white working class, they are rapidly discouraging blacks and Hispanics as well. It’s like the Cheshire cat.

I only have one major problem with Kevin’s post. The first is that progressives are not liberals. Most liberals are over 80 years old and are even more discouraged by the direction of their party than I. Liberals are tolerant; progressives aren’t. They reject any views that aren’t their own and their vision is always just beyond reach. That’s the nature of today’s progressivism. It’s a form of vanguardism but one unmoored from any principles other then overthrowing the existing order. Should their order become the existing order they’ll want to overthrow that, too.

Update

Some may ask why did it happen? I think that Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2016 moved the “Overton Window”. Add social media to that and the illusion of numbers they provide and that’s sufficient to explain it. If you wonder why it makes a difference, the answer is that I think we’re sitting on a powderkeg right now. There are places in the country that have been in a state of rebellion for more than a year.