Wow, it's amazing to look at how many right-wingers there used to be in the MADP; it seems like these days, liberals genuinely preferring the GOP candidate was a far more common occurrence. Reading a globe article about John Silber, he sounds far more like a Harvey Mansfield or Charles Murray than a Noam Chomsky or standard liberal professor.
“My major contribution,” he said, “has been to declare that there is one university in the country with no interest in intellectual fads, in following propaganda and ideology.”
While I certainly don't agree with him ideologically on a lot of things, I really do miss the socon Democrats.
Elizabeth Warren would never make it in that MADP. But Billy Bulger did. Ed King and Louise Day Hicks did for a while.
At the same time we really shouldn't devalue that many of these types, if they had lived in the New Deal era, would be considered political hacks. It wasn't until Democratic Catholic dominated political institutions (particularly organised labor) lost a lot of their steam that the Social conservatism of these types really stood out.
Point is, the talking point of "conservative ethnic Democrats and liberal white protestant Republicans" often misses an entire sea change of political focus that occurred between 1968-present day.
