Re:Congress' push to regulate Big Tech is fizzling out
by dragonwriter on Thursday July 21, 2022 @07:22PM
(#32186486)
> The Democratic Party becoming liberal is a recent development.
It being the left-most of the two major political parties has been the case since it was clear how the emerging alignment from the long 20th century realignment was shaking out, by, say, the late 1960s.
> In 2006, 32% of Democrats identified as liberal. 23% were conservative (the rest identified as moderate). In 2018 it’s 46% liberal/35% moderate/17% conservative.
So…what? Unless you have some kind of calibration of where the people with these self-identifications place the liberal/moderate/conservative divides, this doesn’t tell you anything, since it can just as easily be interpreted as shift in what Democratic voters consider liberal vs. moderate.
You can’t measure how liberal the Democratic Party is by how liberal Democrats see themselves.
> That means that even today, a minority of Democrats are liberals. An even smaller minority are progressives. The Democrats are not and have never been a majority liberal party, although that is rapidly changing.
You seem to be using Pew data [0] for self-identification. But–while it lacks the kind of over-time comparison one might like (they’ve done it several time since the 1980s, but the methodology has changed), Pew also has a present (well, 2021) political typology derived by bucketing actual views into descriptive buckets: 51% of Democrats are in left/liberal buckets, 28% in a distinctly-Democratic group that tends to self-identify as moderate, 13% in a moderate group that is about evenly split between the two parties, and the remaining 8% in more typically Republican buckets (all of which are Right/Conservative.) [1]
> The reason democrats like Manchin and Sinema block liberal policies is that they are conservatives.
Neither seems to be a conservative (in any of the senses usually used within the American political spectrum.) Manchin might be in the equally-split “Stressed sideliners” bucket, maybe.
Sinema has maybe made the most rapid transition from a far-left critic of the Democratic Party for being too friendly to the Right to the the very right edge of the Democratic coalition over her career as a political activist and politician…or she is just an ideology-free opportunist.
It being the left-most of the two major political parties has been the case since it was clear how the emerging alignment from the long 20th century realignment was shaking out, by, say, the late 1960s.
> In 2006, 32% of Democrats identified as liberal. 23% were conservative (the rest identified as moderate). In 2018 it’s 46% liberal/35% moderate/17% conservative.
So…what? Unless you have some kind of calibration of where the people with these self-identifications place the liberal/moderate/conservative divides, this doesn’t tell you anything, since it can just as easily be interpreted as shift in what Democratic voters consider liberal vs. moderate.
You can’t measure how liberal the Democratic Party is by how liberal Democrats see themselves.
> That means that even today, a minority of Democrats are liberals. An even smaller minority are progressives. The Democrats are not and have never been a majority liberal party, although that is rapidly changing.
You seem to be using Pew data [0] for self-identification. But–while it lacks the kind of over-time comparison one might like (they’ve done it several time since the 1980s, but the methodology has changed), Pew also has a present (well, 2021) political typology derived by bucketing actual views into descriptive buckets: 51% of Democrats are in left/liberal buckets, 28% in a distinctly-Democratic group that tends to self-identify as moderate, 13% in a moderate group that is about evenly split between the two parties, and the remaining 8% in more typically Republican buckets (all of which are Right/Conservative.) [1]
> The reason democrats like Manchin and Sinema block liberal policies is that they are conservatives.
Neither seems to be a conservative (in any of the senses usually used within the American political spectrum.) Manchin might be in the equally-split “Stressed sideliners” bucket, maybe.
Sinema has maybe made the most rapid transition from a far-left critic of the Democratic Party for being too friendly to the Right to the the very right edge of the Democratic coalition over her career as a political activist and politician…or she is just an ideology-free opportunist.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/17/liberals-ma...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/the-democrat...