It’s no secret that the Republican party has moved to the right. President Obama is only the latest person to suggest that Ronald Reagan could not have made it through the 2012 primaries. But with all the chatter about polarization and Congress’ inability to compromise, the media often ignores the fact that there has been no analogous move to the left by the Democrats. It’s easier, after all, to blame both parties. Given the constant accusations from conservatives about liberal media bias, the meme of equal responsibility is not only convenient but attractive in its safety. Opinion writers are just as guilty of false equivalency. Thomas Friedman tops the charts, with his pleas for a “centrist” candidate willing to both raise taxes and curb entitlements (a description that pretty much describes President Obama), but there are plenty of other offenders; Mat Miller at the Washington Post, whose columns plug the ostensibly grassroots group Americans Elect, is another notable myth-peddler. If news outlets cling to the equal-opportunity offenders meme in order to appear unbiased, pundits like Friedman and Miller do so in order to claim the coveted mantle of “centrist.” My favorite sharp-tongued economist, Paul Krugman, has this to say about centrists, colleagues like Friedman and David Brooks included:
Their self-image, and to a large extent their professional selling point, depends on posing as high-minded types standing between the partisan extremes, bringing together reasonable people from both parties — even if these reasonable people don’t actually exist. And this leaves them unable either to admit how moderate Mr. Obama is or to acknowledge the more or less universal extremism of his opponents on the right.
False equivalency is practiced by the “liberal” mainstream media, but conservatives are the prime beneficiaries. Hiding behind the idea that both sides are at fault, Republicans ignore the fact that gridlock in Washington is mostly their responsibility. If voters can spread the blame, they will exert less pressure on the GOP to move back to the center. Democrats often find themselves torn between the party’s more liberal, Occupy-type base and the vast majority of more moderate voters, but for all the talk of the Santorum-Romney split in the GOP, the real Republican rift is between the extremists and the ultra-extremists. The Tea Party tugs to the right a party that has already moved far from the center. Case in point is the frequency with which Obama – who has been silent on gun control, can’t seem to “evolve” on gay marriage, and caves on regulation of greenhouse gases – is labeled a socialist. Some socialist: his health care plan was the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation, cap-and-trade once attracted the support of John McCain, and the specter of bank nationalization devolved into a multibillion-dollar handout to Wall Street.
Writing this weekend in the Washington Post under the wonderful headline “Let’s Just Say It: Republicans Are The Problem,” Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein delivered the sort of blunt truth that has thus far been confined to more liberal publications like The American Prospect and The Nation. (Ornstein, I should point out, is a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.) While acknowledging that “Democrats are hardly blameless” in the gridlock game, Mann and Ornstein also believe that their “tendencies do not routinely veer outside the normal bounds of robust politics. If anything, under the presidencies of Clinton and Obama, the Democrats have become more of a status-quo party.” Again, health care is a case in point. Instead of radically revamping the insurance market by pushing for the single-payer coverage favored by his party’s left wing, Obama opted to preserve the role of private companies. But Republicans, who had favored just such an idea in the 1990s, had grown too ideologically rigid to embrace a plan — any plan — by a Democratic president. The authors make a sports analogy that even I, who can’t tell a goal post from a basketball hoop, know is apt:
While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.
Bemoaning this rightward shift is nothing new, of course, but Mann and Ornstein are more direct than most in addressing the role of the press. “We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story,” they write. “But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality.”
It’s a message that couldn’t come at a better time, as false equivalency was on blaring display after Tuesday’s primary election in Pennsylvania. Two Democratic incumbents, both members of the moderate (but dwindling) Blue Dog coalition, were ousted by more liberal challengers. The Times reports that newcomer Matt Cartwright, who beat ten-term Representative Tim Holden, “made Mr. Holden’s vote against President Obama’s health care law a major issue in the newly redrawn 17th District.” Holden encountered something of a perfect storm; not only had a recent redistricting left him with a more liberal constituency — a previously Republican-majority district was transformed into one in which Democrats had a 24-percentage-point edge — but his opponent received substantial financial backing from left-wing advocacy groups like MoveOn.org and the League of Conservation Voters. Cartwright ran as a ” an old-school Roosevelt Democrat” and argued that Holden was too conservative for voters. The other pivotal Pennsylvania race also turned on redrawn Congressional lines, as a merger of two districts forced a pair of relatively popular Democrats to run against each other. Jason Altmire, a Blue Dog who voted against health care reform, suffered a similar defeat at the hands of Mark Critz, who benefited from strong labor-union support and an endorsement from Bill Clinton.
Headlines at Politico spun the primary victories as a leftward march: “No Centrists Need Apply,” wrote Charlie Mahtesian, while a the site’s “In the Arena” feature asked: “Will Dems’ moderate purge backfire?” Never mind that, prior to the election, the Times had quoted David Wasserman, an editor at the authoritative Cook Political Report, as saying, “There is an ideological tinge because Cartwright is more liberal and Holden is a Blue Dog. But that’s not really the reason Holden’s vulnerable. It’s much more because of redistricting,” which meant Holden was unfamiliar to 80% of his new constituency. By contrast, Cartwright’s law firm had run TV commercials in the area for years.
Moderation in the Democratic Party is hardly dead; as Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post’s Fix column observed, many of the socially conservative Blue Dogs came from the South, where the GOP has driven Democrats (and former Dixiecrats) to extinction. “Instead of going the Blue Dog route,” Cillizza writes, “some of the candidates have chosen to align themselves instead with another moderate group — the more socially liberal and fiscally conservative New Democrat Coalition.” There is logic to this shift, as social conservatism is clearly a loser in a party that has thrown down the “war on women” gauntlet and gone to the mattresses to defend Planned Parenthood. Fiscal conservatism, on the other hand, is trendier than ever, from the constant invocation of Simpson-Bowles as the Word of God to the coronation by self-proclaimed centrist columnists of Paul Ryan as a Very Serious Person.
Yet mainstream coverage of Holden and Altmire’s losses was hardly more sanguine than the Fox News contribution. The Washington Post wrote that Holden and Altmire “lost their primary battles to more liberal opponents who painted their centrism as apostasies that could no longer be tolerated.” The races were not choices between two varieties of Democrats but referenda on the existence of moderation itself:
These were the latest blows delivered to the Blue Dogs, whose membership ranks have been decimated the last two years by a perfect political storm that has driven the House Democratic caucus farther to the left than at any time in the last decade.
But just how far left has the House Democratic caucus moved? In the language of Mann and Ornstein, has the party edged from the 40-yard-line to the 25, or is it nearing the goal post? Despite the gleeful hand-wringing of conservatives – Fox News hyperventilated that Democrats “are clearly facing a terrifying reign of their own as liberal activists and unions keep hounding moderate members out of office” – this is hardly the Paris Commune. In a classic case of false equivalency, the media has decided that both parties must bear equal responsibility for the death of moderation. If the Republican party has veered to the right, Democrats must have made a similar swing to the left.
Unfortunately, this narrative doesn’t comport with reality. The Altmire-Critz race, wrote Caitlin Huey-Burns at RealClear Politics, was between “two conservative Democrats” forced “into a member vs. member primary.” While Democrats vote out center-left representatives like Altmire and Holden, the GOP goes after staunch conservatives like Utah’s Orrin Hatch, who rated 100 percent on the ideological scorecards of the Chamber of Commerce and the American Conservative Union in 2010. There is room on the liberal spectrum to the left of Altmire and Holden, but it’s hard to get farther to the right than Orrin Hatch. The positions taken by the ousted Democrats — Altmire supported a balanced-budget amendment — were conservative by any measure; neither Altmire nor Holden was a liberal counterpart to Hatch. It’s one thing for a right-winger to face a primary challenge from an even more extreme right-winger. It’s quite another for an actual centrist to be challenged by someone incrementally further to the left. Pennsylvania’s Democrats were deposed not because they declined to become card-carrying Communists but because they declined to support a version of health care reform originally proposed by the conservative Heritage Foundation!
The Economist’s Matt Steinglass cites this development to demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief, the Democratic party has actually moved to the right in recent years: “[T]he Democrats in 2010 literally passed the universal health-insurance reform that had been proposed by the GOP opposition in the Clinton administration, only to find today’s GOP vilifying it as a form of Leninist socialist totalitarianism.” Steinglass (h/t Kevin Drum) takes exception with the football metaphor employed by Mann and Ornstein:
The Democrats, as far as I can see, have moved from their 40-yard-line to midfield, or their opponents’ 45. As recently as the Clinton presidency, Democrats actively pushed for gun control, defence budgets under 3% of GDP, banning oil exploration off America’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts, a public option or single-payer solution to universal health insurance, and…well, Clinton-era progressive income-tax rates. Today these positions have all been abandoned. And we’re talking about positions held under Bill Clinton, a “third way” leader who himself moved Democratic ideology dramatically to the right, the guy responsible for “ending welfare as we know it”. Since then, Democrats have moved much further yet to the right, in the fruitless search for a compromise with a Republican Party that sees compromise itself as fundamentally evil.
And yet centrists like Altmire are quoted as jaded authorities on the growing gulf between the parties. “The lower the number of people who are from the center means the worse the environment is going to be,” he tells Politico. “It’s certainly fair to assume that there will be more partisanship. There will be a wider divide than we have ever seen before in Congress.”
True, but partisan venom stems less from this widening divide than from the intransigence of an uncompromisingly conservative GOP – and the resulting backlash from Democrats who find themselves forced into a corner by such rigid opposition to formerly acceptable positions. Republicans who once viewed abortion as a procedure best kept “safe, legal and rare” now equate it with infanticide. Likewise, old-school conservatives like Newt Gingrich who once advocated market-based solutions to climate change are compelled to dismiss global warming as a George Soros-sponsored conspiracy.
Democrats aren’t faultless. Even Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum grudgingly admits to a leftward shift on such issues as gay rights and financial regulation. (It’s worth noting, however, that these issues are perhaps the two on which a shift to the left is most needed.) Drum concludes that blame for the flight from the center can hardly be apportioned equally:
Nevertheless, the truth is that both sides haven’t moved away from the center. Only Republicans have, and Democrats have spent the past 20 years chasing them in hopes that eventually they could reach some kind of reconciliation. But it never did any good. The Democratic move rightward was interpreted not as a bid for compromise somewhere in the middle, but as a victory for a resurgent conservative movement that merely inspired them to move the goalposts even further out.
Again, sports metaphors are not exactly my thing. But it seems to me that conservatives have not only moved the goalposts but torn them down, tossed the pieces around the field, and started doing keg stands in the end zone.
. . . So Well Read. . . 