What has caused the Democratic Party to lurch so far left?

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

2010, when Blue Dogs, lost in House. What was left were Pelosi Dems, Latino & Black caucus & Northern Liberals. Reid is being replaced by Schumer, and that will move Senate Dems left. But, no question, Health Care has moved Dems.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Mirrors give that illusion.

[tallguy23]

The country has moved to the left on a number of issues, gay rights and prison/drug reforms in particular. Also, the Millennials are pretty damn liberal and are now the largest chunk of the overall population.

[NeverAgain]

2010, when Blue Dogs, lost in House. What was left were Pelosi Dems, Latino & Black caucus & Northern Liberals. Reid is being replaced by Schumer, and that will move Senate Dems left. But, no question, Health Care has moved Dems.

wat. Oh. It's OC. Never mind.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Trump is not a conservative.

Actually he fits a more traditional definition of conservatism than do most of the Conservative intellectuals or even the tea partiers.

[Adam Griffin]

I absolutely adore Naso's shtick, which he's been at for over 10 years now. Basically, it has always went like this:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Of course - as alluded to above - Naso has never been supportive of Democrats or found them to be reasonable. He'll go back in time a few years and point to that period as being an era where Democrats were reasonable (as opposed to *now*, in which they're hardcore extremists), but you'll find the same claims made during that so-called "reasonable" time period. It's just his shtick...a way for him to cry crocodile tears about the party he hates. By 2025, he'll be talking about that reasonable pragmatist Obama who respected wholesome family values as part of his tirade on Hitlery Killton.

Hey, at the very least, my search for the perfect example of this post from years ago delivered arguably the best Naso quote ever for my sig!

[Reaganfan]

I think there is more to it than that. I've read some articles that claim the "Reagan Era" might actually be more 1981 to 2009 than 1981 to 1989. Basically that Bill Clinton and the Democrats were a de-facto extension of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

You'd never see a Democratic President sign NAFTA. You'd never see a Democratic President get an FOP Police endorsement. You'd never see a Democratic President say we have to "end welfare as we know it".

Am I wrong?

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Am I wrong?

well ...

[Virginiá]

I think there is more to it than that. I've read some articles that claim the "Reagan Era" might actually be more 1981 to 2009 than 1981 to 1989. Basically that Bill Clinton and the Democrats were a de-facto extension of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

You'd never see a Democratic President sign NAFTA. You'd never see a Democratic President get an FOP Police endorsement. You'd never see a Democratic President say we have to "end welfare as we know it".

Am I wrong?

I don't think you're wrong. The political landscape has largely been dominated by Reagan-era / conservative ideas until 2009, like you said. I don't think Democrats are really going "so far left" as much as they are returning to where they should have been in the first place. Republicans have simply had it good given the conservative realignment of that era, which forced Democrats more towards their direction to be able to compete, due to the playing field / public ideology shifting under their feet.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

2010, when Blue Dogs, lost in House. What was left were Pelosi Dems, Latino & Black caucus & Northern Liberals. Reid is being replaced by Schumer, and that will move Senate Dems left. But, no question, Health Care has moved Dems.

wat. Oh. It's OC. Never mind.

I was referring to the single payer, health care reform that Bernie Sanders has proposed. But, tax penalties that goes along with Obamacare, which law was intended for,to help, hurts poor people who are in part time jobs. Medicaid only goes to qualified people, not everyone.

[hopper]

Seriously? Today's Democratic Party of hating Wall Street and cheering black people who chant "We want dead cops", and who may actually nominate a socialist...isn't that extreme? Even if I thought with a liberal hat on...why so extreme left?

You have Hillary running against policies her husband supported. This article from several weeks ago made me think about what could have caused this.

http://hotair.com/archives/2015/11/02/has-the-liberal-wing-of-the-democrats-finally-pushed-the-party-too-far/

I don't think all Black Dems want Cops dead though.

Now nominating a socialist now that gets me...

[hopper]

Trump is not a conservative.

Actually he fits a more traditional definition of conservatism than do most of the Conservative intellectuals or even the tea partiers.

He does? Can you explain?

[hopper]

It hasn't, if anything it's lurched to the right (courtesy of the Clinton/Tony Coelho/DLC types).

DLC is not popular in the 2010's. I wish DLC was popular this decade though.

[hopper]

American has moved to the left on many issues.

Well Social Issues it has moved left.

[Oldiesfreak1854]

Obama, just as what has made the GOP lurch far right.

[Stranger in a strange land]

Seriously? Today's Democratic Party of hating Wall Street and cheering black people who chant "We want dead cops", and who may actually nominate a socialist...isn't that extreme? Even if I thought with a liberal hat on...why so extreme left?

Let me just address this one point, and if time permits, I'll write a longer, snarkier post later. Part of the problem with the Black Lives Matter Movement, a problem which also afflicted Occupy, the Environmentalist Movement, and pretty much every Left Wing Movement of the last 30-40 years, is that when everyone's a leader, nobody is. As a result, if members of the movement take counter-productive actions like chanting "we want dead cops" or blocking freeways for hours so that people can't get to work, there's nobody to call them to account or tell them that they shouldn't be doing that. There's also the problem that in this type of environment, nobody is vetted and people don't know one another, so people constantly accuse each other of being insufficiently ideologically pure or committed to the cause.  

The grass roots, bottom-up approach has its advantages, but it also prevents the formulation of cogent demands and ideas, allowing vocal extreme elements to seize the spotlight, which in turn results in media coverage which highlights the actions of the craziest, loudest people in the movement rather than the movements' legitimate grievances. With BLM, this gets to be even more problematic (God, I hate using that word) because the behavior and rhetoric of certain activists plays right into certain unfortunate stereotypes of urban African-Americans. Tea Party groups suffer from similar problems, though they have copious financial support from big business and work closely with already established conservative media outlets, blogs, talk radio, and other organizations, so it tends to be less of an issue for them.

[Bandit3 the Worker]

The Democratic Party today is far more conservative than it was in the '80s (especially not counting the old Dixiecrats).

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

The Blue Dogs were wiped out in 2010, and Mark Pryor and Mary Labdrieu were finished in 2014. The only centrist Dems left are Manchin, Reid & Casey Jr. And Reid is gone after 2016, replaced by Cortez-Masto. The Brady bill, which set in motion the party shift to the left, after 1994, when Southern Dems, were too wiped out, the DLC has been less influential.

But, these arent the Cold War, Walter Mondale-Ferraro Dems, these are pragmatic Dems.

[Bandit3 the Worker]

The Kentucky Democrats have improved lately by getting rid of Kim Davis and Jim Gooch (and getting back me). But that's only in the past few months, and that's only Kentucky.

[Virginiá]

The Kentucky Democrats have improved lately by getting rid of Kim Davis and Jim Gooch (and getting back me). But that's only in the past few months, and that's only Kentucky.

I think that depends on how you define 'improved'. Have they improved the quality of their party in relation to the national party platform (and common human decency)? Definitely! Have they improved their position in Kentucky? Oh my, not at all. These social / energy-related issues are absolutely decimating what is left of the KY/WV Democratic party. The Democratic majority in the Kentucky House is going to slip into a permanent minority status any day now.

[Bandit3 the Worker]

Have they improved their position in Kentucky? Oh my, not at all. These social / energy-related issues are absolutely decimating what is left of the KY/WV Democratic party.

The Democrats are actually growing in the urban areas though.

[RFayette 🇻🇦]

Have they improved their position in Kentucky? Oh my, not at all. These social / energy-related issues are absolutely decimating what is left of the KY/WV Democratic party.

The Democrats are actually growing in the urban areas though.

Do you just not care about losing in rural areas?

[TNF]

The Democratic Party has only lurched 'so far left' in the minds of imbeciles without a dint of understanding of what 'the left' is. Perhaps compared to their not-so-glorious past as the party of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and the military-industrial complex they've moved 'to the left', but that isn't saying a whole lot. Today, as in the past (both recent and not-so-recent), the Democrats remain the world's second most enthusiastic capitalist party. The fact that a so-called 'democratic socialist' (who doesn't even support policies that could even vaguely be deemed 'social democratic') is running for the nomination of this catch-all, 'Everyone Who Isn't a Republican' party is irrelevant.

Bernie Sanders represents the dying gasp of the old liberalism, the kind that had a reliable political base in mass institutions like trade unions and that sought to smooth over class conflict by expanding the scope of the state bureaucracy relative to the past. The thing is that those institutions were ultimately undermined by becoming adjuncts of that bureaucracy and the party that defended it to the death. Private sector trade unionism is now a shell of its former self, even as industrial plants dot the landscape of the American South and the US produces more today than it ever has. The Democratic Party has become the party of the 'post-industrial' types, i.e. the professional middle classes, with a few public sector trade unions thrown in here or there and an overwhelming number of utterly destitute people who vote for it every four years because the Republicans are so utterly toxic.

The new Democratic Party, and the new liberalism, is not 'left' in the traditional sense, but in the 'post-ideological' world we live in, it seems left-wing, relative to the Republicans. Because politics has become little more than arguing over cultural issues that are really irrelevant to the bulk of the population (i.e. whether or not to charge bakeries who won't cater gay weddings with a hate crime), the positions the Democrats take relative to the Republicans seem far more radical than they actually are. But in reality they're very conservative. Hillary Clinton didn't run in 2008 as 'the woman candidate', and strayed away from making her sex the center of the campaign. Not so in 2016, where the cult of identity has risen to even greater heights, and where commentators regularly say that the 'progressive' thing to do is just vote for Hillary because she is a woman, not because of any policy positions she may or may not hold.

In the past, being on 'the left' meant calling for policies which allow for more freedom, be it freedom from being defined by 'our identity' to freedom from want, to freedom from the prying eyes of an unaccountable and increasingly despotic state bureaucracy. Today, what gets defined as 'left wing' is actually quite conservative, as we get told that we need the state to keep us from doing things that are bad for us (smoking, drinking soda, etc), to protect us from being offended, and to police our private lives with unheard of regularity. If by the former definition you argue that the Democratic Party has 'lurched far to the left', you've got no grip on reality. If by the latter definition you're making this argument, then the term 'left-wing' has no real meaning anymore.

[Horus]

They haven't lurched left. They're just catching up with the other center left parties in the western world.