From Pine View Farm

A Narrowing Spectrum 3

Ezra Klein reflects on the narrowing of the Republican political mind:

Imagine a policy spectrum that goes from 1 to 10 in which 1 is the most liberal policy, 10 is the most conservative policy and 5 is that middle zone that used to hold moderate Democrats and Republicans. The basic shape of American politics today is that the Obama administration can and will get Democrats to agree to anything ranging from 1 to 7.5 and Republicans will reject anything that’s not an 8, 9 or 10. The result, as I’ve written before, is that President Barack Obama’s record makes him look like a moderate Republican from the late 1990s.

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3 comments

  1. George Smith

    May 29, 2013 at 6:36 pm

    So when will the Ezra Kleins of the media just come right out and saw what’s obvious. The GOP is engaged in the Cold Civil War 2? And they can’t beat the president, like Jefferson Davis couldn’t beat the North no matter how many times Lee beat up on McClellan. But they have put a stranglehold on everything so the country is not governable as long as they remain. And people are going to die as a result. People who aren’t insured and are unlucky, people on the bad end of austerity, people who are in areas hit by storms and other natural disasters. There is no progress, no battling climate change, no improvement of education, no reparation of infrastructure, no gun control, just one slow motion train wreck of inaction and building conspiracy theory and desperation as the party of white neo-Confederates wages its cold war against the president and everyone outside. As I’ve intimated before, if there were a health crisis, a plague, that needed fast mass action by the federal government to contain, the GOP would malevolently block it until it personally started killing them, by which time it would be too late.

     
  2. Frank

    May 29, 2013 at 7:35 pm

    “As I’ve intimated before, if there were a health crisis, a plague, that needed fast mass action by the federal government to contain, the GOP would malevolently block it until it personally started killing them, by which time it would be too late.”

    They already have.
     
    Can you say “AIDS“?
     
    And you already know that I think that re-fighting the Civil War underpins the Republican Party in its entirety.

     
  3. George Smith

    May 29, 2013 at 10:37 pm

    Yeah, re AIDS. They never recovered from that one. I’d recommend American Theocracy by former Nixon-man Kevin Phillips. He wrote a thick book seeing it coming years before almost anyone else, one chapter being badly titled “America in a Dixie Cup.” Most of his extrapolations came true, predictions that the Republican Party would take the country into decline through a paralytic southern parochial nihilism. I should make an interlibrary loan to you as I’ve read it three times already over the last ten years. He apparently deeply regretted the southern strategy.