Telling comparison of the Parties by @DouthatNYT. The GOP is “craven and debased,” while the Democrats “have swung to an ideological extreme.” In reality, the median GOP Congressperson is far more “extreme” than the most left Democrat./1 nytimes.com/2019/11/26/opi…
The Republicans are extreme, compared with conservative parties elsewhere, in their climate change denialism, their near-religious faith in tax cuts for the rich, their belief that any form of gun regulation is anathema, their total opposition to ACA, and much more./2
The House GOP voted _unanimously_ against the Obama stimulus plan that likely saved the country from a depression. The GOP Senate, for totally spurious reasons, refused to hold hearings for a Democratic Supreme Court nominee. /3
The most progressive Democrats are talking about raising taxes at the top income levels to near (but still less than) Eisenhower-era levels; they are promoting free public college, which existed in much of the country until relatively recently; they evoke FDR’s New Deal./4
As a whole, the Democratic Party has shifted to the left, although it remains far more diverse ideologically than the GOP. Still, the Republican Party is significantly further to the right than the Democratic Party is to the left. /5
Note the category error in only calling the GOP “craven and debased” (however true this judgment is). This diagnosis suggests the problem is a lack of political courage, but exempts their political _beliefs_ from scrutiny. /6
Another way of framing this is that the GOP’s extremism lines up ideologically with what in some cases are considered far-right parties in Europe, while the Democrat’s extremism aligns the most extreme of them with European social democrats./7
