In the 90s, the Democrats were trying to enact a single-payer health care system, and the Republican response to it was similar to what we now know as the ACA. Now, the Democrats fight for the Republican plan and the Republicans want to do away with it altogether.

Democrats in the late 60s wanted a national gun registry and ban handguns for anyone who can't demonstrate a need, with household self-protection not considered sufficient need. Any existing guns that didn't qualify would be confiscated. Republicans only wanted to ban things like assault weapons, ownership by felons, and carrying loaded weapons in public. Now, Democrats struggle to ban assault weapons, and Republicans oppose almost all forms of gun control.

FDR enacted a top marginal income tax rate of 94%. Republicans wanted taxes reduced, after the war, to a level that would pay for postwar government spending. Now, the top marginal income tax rate is 39.6%, with Democrats proposing little tweaks like increasing it a bit or increasing the payroll tax cap, and Republicans wanting to slash tax rates (I saw one the other day saying that we should aim for 1-2%) and not caring in the least about the increased deficits this would bring.

Seems to me that the American left is moving sharply right, to the point where the Democratic Party would be considered centrist or mildly right-wing by most standards, while the American right is also moving sharply right and is teetering on the precipice of going all-in on racist nationalism.

> Republicans only wanted to ban things like assault weapons, ownership by felons, and carrying loaded weapons in public.

Citation needed.

Check out the Gun Control Act of 1968 which was greatly shaped by the NRA (cut down from a stricter version, but they were OK with banning gun ownership by felons), the Mulford Act which prohibited carrying loaded weapons in public in California and passed with bipartisan support (signed into law by none other than Ronald Reagan), and the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons ban (which didn't have Republican support in Congress but did have support from both Reagan and Gerald Ford).

> In the 90s, the Democrats were trying to enact a single-payer health care system

Well, there was grassroots pressure for that and majority support in public polling, but what actually got pushed by the Clinton White House was very much not single-payer.

The Clintons are famous for a strategy called "triangulation" where they move as far to the right as necessary to get enough votes to win an election. With a voting base, and voting system that skews as far right as America's that leads to them taking some right-wing positions.

I've always thought this was a clever strategy, but apparently enough people live in their own social bubbles that many progressive types don't realise how unprogressive a lot of older, rural voters are (and you could argue they've been misled by their news providers into positions that are contrary to their own values and desires) and can't understand why compromise is necessasary to actually win elections.

Some have argued that this is bad because you need to inspire people, like Obama did, but Obama is another triangulator, so I'm not sure how that makes sense.

The problem is that this is a short term strategy. You might win this election, but move the overton window to the right.

The other problem is the risk of alienating your base.

Left here, not unfathomable or particularly surprising. You don't need to go back to Clinton to find a Democratic president who expanded border security and cracked down harshly on illegal immigration; Obama did the same thing, despite all the rhetoric that the Democrats want open borders and lawlessness. What's weird is how negative a reaction things like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals got, seeing as it's just a milder form of H. W. Bush and Reagan's executive orders to prevent ICE from breaking up families in the 80s and 90s.

> Perhaps it is the American right-wing moving further right, but I am more inclined to believe the American left is moving farther left.

The Republican Party is clearly moving further right over a long time scale; the Democratic Party is also moving further left. Whether those things are true of the “American right” and “American left” is a little more complex question (from where I sit, it seems that the American Right is moving to the right more clearly and across the board, while the American left is moving left on social issues but not so much on economic issues, but that the economic left is starting to regain power in the Democratic Party, which if you mistake the Democratic Party for the American left looks like the left moving farther left on economic issues.)

> Take for example this speech by Bill Clinton in 1995

Bill Clinton is not, and never was, part of the American left. He is a moderate economic and social conservative—all the prominent liberal figures in the Democratic Party took a pass on the 1992 primary expecting Bush to be unbeatable. Paul Tsongas was probably the closest thing to a left candidate in a major party primary in 1992 (he was at least a solid social liberal), but his campaign was hampered by health concerns regarding his cancer (which turned out to be not entirely misplaced.)

> To think that this was a speech by a Democrat president about 20 years ago is unfathomable to the left today.

Not any more than it was at the time; the left disliked Clinton during the primary in 1992, mostly saw him as the lesser of three evils in the general (though Perot’s anti-NAFTA stand got him some support from the left even though he was not in any way a left candidate), and attacked him mercilessly from 1993 on when it came to policy as most of his gestures toward the left in the campaign turned out to be hollow, and his health care reform foundered on exactly the grounds the left challenged it earlier: it was overly complex in pursuit of buy-in that wouldn't come anyway from corporate interests, when there was a strong public majority support for simple single-payer.

Not all that unfathomable, Obama deported record numbers of criminal illegals.

Here's another snippet from President Clinton:

"I have long opposed governmental recognition of same-gender marriages and this legislation is consistent with that position."

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/scotts/ftp/wpaf2mc/clinton....

That's a general social trend, not unique to the left. Steadily increasing numbers of Republicans also support gay marriage, currently around 40%. (http://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay...)

The same source shows a roughly similar shift on immigration, with older people being less keen and the average opinion changing as they age out:

http://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/4-race-immigration-an...

Deportations took a dramatic downfall in his second term and most of the "deportations" took place at the border, not in the way you think they did https://www.ice.gov/removal-statistics/2016

Always love the reflexive downvoting on the site, when facts don't match your view of reality

Bill Clinton was fairly right wing for a Democrat. He was certainly to the right of Carter and Johnson on many issues.