Posted on 10/06/2017 6:13:56 AM PDT by Kaslin
Almost no one disagrees that our two major political parties, the oldest and third-oldest in the world, have become increasingly extreme and estranged over the past decade. It's a startling contrast with the state of political conflict in the dozen or so years after the fall of the Soviet empire.
In 1992, Bill Clinton ran on a moderate Democratic Leadership Council platform and, after the implosion of Hillary Clinton's health care plan and the election of Republican congressional majorities in 1994, mostly governed accordingly.
This was the natural reaction of a politician who found an unusually wide range of policy positions acceptable and who was aware that Democrats had lost five of the six previous presidential elections by an average of 10 percent of the popular vote.
In 2000, George W. Bush ran as a compassionate conservative, distancing himself from the abrasiveness of congressional Republicans and the militant liberalism of congressional Democrats.
This was the natural reaction of a politician with a narrower range of acceptable policies and an awareness that hostile mainstream media would do everything possible to delegitimize a confrontational approach.
Both presidents took stands -- generally supported by elites and at the time not particularly unpopular with voters -- in favor of free trade and extensive immigration. And in the 1995-2005 decade, their approaches, including bipartisan compromises on major issues, seemed to produce popular results.
Those days are long gone, and similar approaches are angrily attacked. Contrast the platforms of Bill Clinton 1996 and Hillary Clinton 2016. Contrast the policies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
My earlier attempt at a general rule explaining this is that a party's wingers -- left-wing Democrats, right-wing Republicans -- grow increasingly discontent when their party is on the brink of, and after, losing a congressional majority. My updated version is that party politicians have, unlike candidates Clinton in 1992 and Bush in 2000, been operating in reckless disregard of losing congressional majorities.
In retrospect, the tea party rebellion that broke out in Barack Obama's first year in office and swept the 2010 midterm elections was also a rebellion against Bush policies -- budget deficits, the Medicare prescription drug entitlement, the bank and auto bailouts.
The House Republican rebels who pushed the 2013 government shutdown and ousted Speaker John Boehner in 2015, acting out of purism, jeopardized Republican majorities. Similarly, their unwillingness to support measures to revise Obamacare prevented moving policy in a conservative direction and gave increased leverage to House Democrats.
President Trump has taken to blaming Republican leaders Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan for such failures. This week, according to Politico, vice presidential aide Nick Ayers has been urging donors to stop funding congressional Republicans. "If we're going to be in the minority again, we might as well have a minority who are with us, as opposed to the minority who helped us become a minority," he said.
Democrats, currently with their smallest congressional minority since the 1920s, seem eager to take stands risking perpetuation of that status. It's reminiscent of Hillary Clinton's shift on abortion from her husband's "safe, legal and rare" to supporting Medicaid abortions and her abasement in repudiating his anti-crime policies in deference to the preposterous claims of #BlackLivesMatter.
Her willingness to take such risks was evidently based on the notion that demographic change -- increasing numbers of nonwhite voters -- guaranteed a Democratic victory.
Despite her defeat, that assumption and confidence that Trump's unpopularity will doom Republicans seem to be shared by many Democrats. Thus, 16 Democratic senators, including some mentioned as possible 2020 nominees, have endorsed single-payer health care, a policy voted down resoundingly in purple Colorado and abandoned in shambles in deep blue Vermont.
The rush to the extremes in both parties threatens to derail an obvious compromise on immigration triggered by Trump's announcement that he would withdraw Obama's (legally dubious) Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which granted protection from deportation and permission to work to "dreamers," immigrants brought here illegally as children.
As William Galston, a veteran of the Clinton White House argued in "The Wall Street Journal," a compromise is obvious: a bill giving legal status to dreamers but including tougher border and internal enforcement, such as mandatory E-Verify.
Some Republicans oppose giving legal status to dreamers, despite its overwhelming popularity. Some Democrats are insisting on giving legal status to not only dreamers but practically all immigrants and will most likely resist effective enforcement measures, despite their widespread popularity. So it's possible that neither side will get what it wants.
One might get the impression that large segments of both parties are determined to lose the next congressional and presidential elections -- and that both deserve to.
I don’t compromise with liberal Democrats, aka communists. I believe in conservatism and the American Constitution. I guess I’m an extremist. Whatever.
Overwhelming popularity?
Didn't we just elect a guy who said he opposed this? Does tell us nothing?
Moderation fuels the Establishment’s quest to maintain the status quo.
The RINO bleat like sheep, thinking to overwhelm us with their lies and "fake news" polls.
DACA Polls Conceal Public Opposition
...But the skewed “nation of immigrants” polls dominate media coverage. For example, the Washington Post claimed Friday that; “Polls show broad public support for the dreamers, and Democrats and immigrant rights groups have promised to wage a fierce political effort against the White House, and Republicans, if Trump chooses to end DACA.”
In contrast, “We asked ‘Do you think that immigrants are hard workers who make good neighbors?’,'” Beck told Breitbart News. “Overwhelmingly, people say yes, but when they’re asked to give a priority … they say ‘No, immigrants are not the priority, Americans are the priority.”
It’s called “gaslighting”.
Baroness us such a lying piece of crap and cheap labor express hack
What overwhelming popularity for Amnesty ?
The same lie repeated over and over by the D.C. Unelected elites .
Is he quoting his pals in the uniparty ?.
I am sick of these frauds .
ITEM---Back in 1992, the House was faced w/ a banking scandal. Then-Republican Minority Whip Newt Gingrich, along with 7 freshman Republicans made the difficult strategic decision to publicize the scandal. Gingrich actually got the Democrat Speaker Tom Foley to publish the troubling details....... resulting in 77 House members, mostly Democrats, resigning or being ousted by fed-up taxpayers. Some faced felony charges.
ITEM---Today there's the monstrous House security breach by tech staff w/ charges of wrongdoing being bandied about. Democrats hired and PAID their IT's w/ our tax dollars but Democrats refuse to come forth and do the right thing by the American taxpayer. Americans are kept in the dark as to the status of their safety and security....and the profligate use of their tax dollars to subsidize some mighty shady activities in Democrats' offices.
‘The House Republican rebels who pushed the 2013 government shutdown and ousted Speaker John Boehner in 2015, acting out of purism, jeopardized Republican majorities.”
Did I miss something? As I recall it, the Pubbies GAINED seats after the shutdown.
...and governed as a LIBERAL.
Liberals always pretend to be "moderate" when they run for office. If they were honest about theoselves, they would never be elected to office!
“In 1992, Bill Clinton ran on a moderate Democratic Leadership Council platform”
Have we already forgotten that it was fake news and election fraud that put the Hillbilly Whorehopper in the White House?
And both political parties are very good at it. Hence the hatred for truth tellers.
Where are the parents of the “dreamers?” Have they been deported yet?
If we keep the dreamers we keep the parents because of chain migration. Chain migration is the elephant in the room.
Definitely a bad axiom. The political left has so overwhelmingly taken over the Democrat party, and purged both its conservatives, then moderates, then liberals, that it has nothing left but extremists.
The Republicans have a liberal leadership, substantially in agreement with what had been the Democrat moderates and liberals, propped up with internationalist corporatist money; but the vast majority of Republicans are conservatives who reject all of the above.
And conservatives, almost by definition, are not extremists, but those who have always rejected liberal and leftist bad ideas that have been disastrous to our nation.
Yet the article makes a common double mistake, one that is often exploited by leftists against conservatives.
The first mistake is to assume that conservatism always respects and embraced the status quo “settled law” as its baseline to reject change in any direction. But much of the status quo law is bad and needs to be substantially changed or eliminated altogether.
The second mistake is often used by Democrats: propose a radical, extremist, ruinous and terrible idea; then accuse conservatives of being “extremist” for opposing it.
Townhall needs to be questioned as to why they have fallen into this trap. Opposing radical and destructive change is in no way extremist.
I may have missed your point. The Dreamers are all adults now, average age 25 yearsold many in their 30’s.
This is not the situation of children claiming citizenship by being born in the USA to illegals where deporting the parents deports “American citizen” children. In that situation POTUS has said by all means keep the families together, the illegals should take their children with them when they go back.
“Liberals always pretend to be “moderate” when they run for office.”
Like Juan McCain. And the MSM gives them cover with the “moderate” label.
We conservatives, OTOH, always get adjectives appended to “right-wing like “arch”, “extreme”, “ultra”, “far” etc.
The people who gave us gun control, never-ending war, a `New World Order’, who facilitated the invasion of America, profligate spending, higher taxes and set the stage for the curse known as Obama: the Clintons and Bushes ... “moderates”.
Townhall is a joke.
In short, I'm just curious about what happened to the people who brought them here.
On a related point, the "dreamers" say that they can't go back to their home country, because they don't have much memory of it. They would be going to a "foreign" country.
Well, when their parents came to the US, they were traveling to a "foreign" country.
Why is it that their parents (who were probably in their 20's or 30's at the time) had no fear of coming to the US, but their "snowflake" children cannot travel to a foreign country?
If their parents have already been deported, the parents can greet their "snowflake dreamers" at the airport (in their home country), take them home, let them live in their basement, and help them start a new life in their native country.
Barone is a Cheap Labor Express propagandist.
That is patent BS if he is suggesting that the Republicans have become more conservative and Democrats more liberal.
It is only true if he is suggesting Republicans have become FAR more liberal and Democrats have become insane communists.
Barone is no doubt suggesting #1 which is absurd.
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