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Originally Posted by bobabode
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Awesome article!
This one addresses an issue that really makes my blood boil. This ridiculous notion that both parties are equal to blame for the mess we are in.
HELL NO!
It's the fucking Republicans that have gone batshit crazy!
And the so called "center" is now way way way to the right of where it was 40 years ago.
This chart says it all:
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It took mainstream journalism a long time to feel comfortable stating an obvious fact: that the modern Republican party is going through a push to the extreme unlike anything that is happening to today’s Democrats, and unlike anything else that has happened in politics since at least the Goldwater era and probably since long before. (After all, the Goldwater-era GOP had a significant liberal/moderate wing: Rockefeller, Scranton, Javits, Ford, George Romney, even Nixon and the first George Bush.) It feels so much more responsible, and is certainly safer, to write about “extremists on both sides.”
Three years ago, the think-tank eminences Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann wrote a Washington Post essay called “Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem.” That was an inspired headline, because it captured the fact that even now it is harder than you would think for reporters just flat out to state that truth. This summer Christopher Ingraham of the Post’s WonkBlog provided a chart that should run alongside any “extremists of both sides” discussion. As the little thumbnail below shows, the Democrats are about as extremist-and-moderate as ever; the Republicans are not.
From WonkBlog this past June, showing proportion of House members from each party who are not moderate or centrist, from 1879 through 2014.
The point is: Only now, a year after Eric Cantor was driven out of his House seat by a challenger not closer to the middle but further to the right; a month after John Boehner decided to leave one of the theoretically most-powerful jobs in American governance; when possible savior-successor Paul Ryan is being attacked as too liberal; and during a GOP presidential primary campaign whose “center” is further to the right than any in memory—only in these circumstances have reporters begun to talk directly about the Republican party’s move toward the fringe. We’d all still really prefer to warn against “extremists on both sides.” If you listen you’ll still hear that on talk shows.
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