Unfortunately, Obama contributed to the leftward shift in his second term. He blamed the war on drugs for mass incarceration, even though state and local prisons (which held the vast majority of American prisoners) held far more people convicted of violent and property crime than drug crime. Cancelling Keystone XL was a mistake, as was federal officials saying anything whatsoever about transgender students and bathrooms.
A couple of requests for future iterations: (1) How much decline in references to "rural" and "farmers"? (2) Disentangle the LGB from TQ to get better data on public opinion.
This is a great article and should be shared with Democrats who wonder how Trump and the Republicans took power -- and what can be done about it. By ignoring and abandoning the median voter, the far left democrats played a critical role in electing Trump and the Republicans. That may be disheartening, but this is a time for realism, not idealism.
I keep arguing that we've come to the point where what Democratic partisan activists believe in is that they'll win every so often regardless of their policy positions simply because voters get tired of the other side-- and that during such moments they can put in place, by executive orders and judicial activism if need be, whatever policies they want. Therefore they seem to think it makes the most sense to fight it out over how the pie will be divided among Democratic factions when it occurs, even if by the Irrational Regime hypothesis it means they're less likely to get it. It's much like the shift in professional baseball to emphasize home runs-- with large numbers of strikeouts the concomitant effect.
That in a nutshell is why I rarely vote Democratic any more. Ambition to transform the country dramatically is so ingrained in partisan Democrats that they assume without even really considering it that they get to have their ambitions as a right. It no longer matters whether I might agree with some of their ideas if they did anything in response to dissent other than unfriend me. To me that attitude toward ambition is one of the core malaises of the United States. Crushing those activists and that attitude is the only thing I vote to do.
To use the old "visitor from another planet" metaphor: A visitor from another planet examining the 2024 document would conclude that democrats were racists, ethnocentrists and genderists. I'm assuming they would adhere to an honest definition of each term, which would be stereotyping of a human group based on race/ethicity/gender fashion.
Unfortunately, Obama contributed to the leftward shift in his second term. He blamed the war on drugs for mass incarceration, even though state and local prisons (which held the vast majority of American prisoners) held far more people convicted of violent and property crime than drug crime. Cancelling Keystone XL was a mistake, as was federal officials saying anything whatsoever about transgender students and bathrooms.
A couple of requests for future iterations: (1) How much decline in references to "rural" and "farmers"? (2) Disentangle the LGB from TQ to get better data on public opinion.
This is a great article and should be shared with Democrats who wonder how Trump and the Republicans took power -- and what can be done about it. By ignoring and abandoning the median voter, the far left democrats played a critical role in electing Trump and the Republicans. That may be disheartening, but this is a time for realism, not idealism.
I keep arguing that we've come to the point where what Democratic partisan activists believe in is that they'll win every so often regardless of their policy positions simply because voters get tired of the other side-- and that during such moments they can put in place, by executive orders and judicial activism if need be, whatever policies they want. Therefore they seem to think it makes the most sense to fight it out over how the pie will be divided among Democratic factions when it occurs, even if by the Irrational Regime hypothesis it means they're less likely to get it. It's much like the shift in professional baseball to emphasize home runs-- with large numbers of strikeouts the concomitant effect.
That in a nutshell is why I rarely vote Democratic any more. Ambition to transform the country dramatically is so ingrained in partisan Democrats that they assume without even really considering it that they get to have their ambitions as a right. It no longer matters whether I might agree with some of their ideas if they did anything in response to dissent other than unfriend me. To me that attitude toward ambition is one of the core malaises of the United States. Crushing those activists and that attitude is the only thing I vote to do.
To use the old "visitor from another planet" metaphor: A visitor from another planet examining the 2024 document would conclude that democrats were racists, ethnocentrists and genderists. I'm assuming they would adhere to an honest definition of each term, which would be stereotyping of a human group based on race/ethicity/gender fashion.