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At some point in the last two years, I read an article which charted how self-identified Republicans and Democrats responded to Gallup questions on a range of social and economic issues over a significant period of time, maybe 30-40 years. It argued, contra the standard woke narrative, that the polling data clearly indicate that Republicans have been remarkably consistent in their responses to questions about a range of issues during the period, while self-identified Democrats have grown increasingly radical. The only social issue on which the median Republican in 2024 would give a significantly different response to his equivalent in 1990 is gay rights.
If you're in the Motte, you're reading all of the above and thinking "well, duh". But it's remarkable how durable this idea is, that the Republicans have slowly drifted into becoming a far-right party while the Democrats are the ones who've stayed in place (Know Your Meme has a catalogue of these comics which starts with the opposite framing in which Democrats became progressively more radical while the Republicans stayed in place, but my recollection is that that comic was itself a reaction to a comic arguing the reverse). After all, endorsing the Democrat policy package just means "being a decent person", and surely the definition of what a "decent person" looks like can't have changed much in the space of a mere thirty years, can it? The eagerness to maintain this façade is probably a significant motivating factor behind woke people's propensity to rewrite the past and pretend that we've always been at war with Eastasia e.g. paraphrasing a 1993 RBG quote to make it seem more trans-inclusive than it really was. Hell, you don't even have to go back as far as that: you can make some Democrats uncomfortable simply by quoting Obama's speeches concerning immigration circa 2008, and the "what is a woman" gotcha question with which to embarrass Democrats simply didn't exist thirty years, twenty or even fifteen years ago. It'd be interesting to play a clip of one of Bob Dole's 1996 campaign speeches for a group of self-identified Republicans and see how they react, and specifically to observe the ratio of "spluttering, appalled disbelief":"embarrassed agreement":"YesChad".
From Freddie's perspective, if the median Democrat became increasingly radical on a range of economic and social issues in the last ten years, but the Democratic party did not fully embrace this shift and instead remained stubbornly committed to being boring centrists with some woke window dressing (preferred pronouns, land acknowledgements) - it's easy to understand how this could feel like Freddie and his ilk are demanding the same things they've always demanded and the Democrats are shifting further and further right. Someone once compared it to parallax, or the illusion of relative motion: without optical frames of reference, it's difficult for humans to tell the difference between "I am stationary and that object is moving away from me" vs. "that object is stationary and I am moving away from it".* Freddie might even be a special case, in that I get the impression that, owing to his politically engaged parents, he was significantly more radical than the median Democrat in the nineties and 2000s. It might be literally true that Freddie and his immediate social circle have been demanding the same package of policy proposals since he was in high school, but the DNC have only had to sit up and take notice of their growing far-left faction (if only to fob them off) in the last ten years, as those policy proposals shifted into the Overton window as a result of Occupy Wall Street and the Great Awokening. I imagine Freddie must have found the last ten years quite confusing, as the cool kids started expressing some of the same opinions he's professed for most of his adult life, but he still isn't allowed to sit at the cool kids' table.
I think Freddie is correct that Al Gore's campaign was essentially "Clintonism minus Clinton", and which clearly exposed that Clinton's personal charisma was necessary to sell the whole package. In fact, I'd go even further than that: the package was largely irrelevant. Clinton was so charming that he probably could have run on a bizarro world mirror image of the package he actually ran under (protectionist, openly pro-gay marriage, doveish on the international stage etc., unlike the real Clinton) and would still have won a first or even second term.
The parallels are obvious in explaining why I think Hanania is dead right that we're unlikely to ever see a DeSantis presidency. Anyone arguing that "DeSantis is offering Trumpism without all the grandstanding and narcissism; and he's actually competent and focused so he can get policies passed rather than wasting time getting into fights on Twitter" is fundamentally misunderstanding how the median voter thinks. Trump being shameless, grandiose and larger-than-life is half of what makes him likeable to ordinary people. The fact that he spends so much time shitposting on Twitter is part of his charm: it makes him seem human and down to earth, unlike career politicians who are obsessively focused on "optics" and whose every lawyerly, carefully worded public announcement might as well have been generated by ChatGPT for all the passion and colour it conveys. Even if DeSantis spent 20% more time getting into pissing contests on Twitter, voters would be able to tell that that was something he'd been focus-grouped into doing, not something he was doing because he wanted to. Voters like Trump: they grudgingly tolerate DeSantis as one of their teammates, but they aren't shy about telling him "Governor, you're no Teflon
DonRon".Before the election, my uncle who lives in Massachusetts was visiting. If anyone can legitimately be said to suffer from TDS, it's him (at one point before dinner he even raised his glass to toast to "our next President Kamala" - brrr). Over dinner, he was making another of his interminable rants about how he simply couldn't understand how Republicans could just overlook how nasty and dysfunctional Trump was, just because he endorsed many of the policies they wanted. I pushed back on this, and said - of course you can understand it. Clinton was probably the sleaziest POTUS the office has ever seen (as big of philanderers as JFK or indeed LBJ were, I'm not aware of them being accused of rape - or if they were, Clinton surely bested them in terms of sheer number of accusations). You ignored this, because he was charming and he was on your team.
What I was most surprised by was that my uncle actually conceded the point, and unlike many people to whom I've made a comparable argument (about Clinton or other Democrats), he did not play the "no that's totally different, all those women who accused Clinton were vindictive liars/Russian assets" card.
*Does anyone know if there's a term in psychology for this specific cognitive bias, wherein the default is for people to believe that what they currently believe is what they've always believed? [EDIT: Someone DM'd me to say I'm thinking of consistency bias: "Incorrectly remembering one's past attitudes and behaviour as resembling present attitudes and behaviour."]
It really does seem to be something that people actually believe, rather than something they're knowingly lying about. I know that my opinions on a range of political issues have changed over time, and acknowledging this in any particular case only sometimes makes me uncomfortable, but a lot of people I know get very defensive when you point out that they used to believe something other than what they currently do.
Al Gore won the popular vote and lost the electoral college over a microscopic margin in Florida. That’s not ‘Clinton’s personal charisma is a necessary part of the deal’ that’s ‘bad luck is bad luck’.
Wouldn't have come down to a microscopic margin in Florida if he'd won his own home state of Tennessee or Clinton's Arkansas.
Or is it bad luck in all the other places he didn't win by a wider margin?
Sure, he wasn't as good a candidate as Clinton(Bill, that is). But a hair's breadth of winning in an era when elections generally were not close is evidence that the party is competitive.
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I think this is off base. Clinton was charming, but he won his first term with a plurality because Ross Perot won 19% of the vote. And immediately he had to govern far to teh right of how he campaigned. All that "Triangulation" stuff was Clinton being a shrewd political operator and figuring out that the country didn't want his ideas, they just wanted his face and interpretations on a Republican policy platform.
The Democrats got smashed in the '94 elections (where Joe Scarborough got his start as a firebreathing Republican). Clinton made political hay out of the defeat, and it won him re-election. Welfare reform, the '94 crime bill (notice that year?) etc.
But no, there is no way in hell the people who were in power and voting back in the '90s were in any mood for very liberal policies except perhaps a narrow range of gay rights and general fun-having. If you think liberal criminal justice policies were popular the year murder peaked in the US, you didn't observe it up close.
We'd just won the Cold War, had the Gulf War and no one wanted the stern Republican daddies in charge anymore, but they certainly didn't want the policies of the seventies back. And marginal Republicans weren't as worried about the existential nuclear threat and ideological superstruggle anymore, and were willing to vote on other issues. Hence, Perot picked up a lot of people from both sides who were looking for an option to the old ideologies. Clinton was the one who wound up seizing the moment to change the policies and interest groups of the left-wing coalition, which is what is being reacted to with the current re-alignment.
Only this time it is Trump who is doing the moving around, liberalizing the old Republican doctrines that no longer serve their new political base.
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