Yet another exercise in the arts of false equivalencies in this morning’s Times, which bemoans the fate of Olympia Snowe, who didn’t want to face the wrath of the right in this year’s election. But, in true modern media fashion, it was absolutely necessary for the Times to make it clear that the center is being hollowed out by identical processes in both parties.
It would take a lot of time to deal with the examples of the Democrats supposedly victimized by the thought police on the left, so I’ll restrict myself to a few observations.
First, where is the Club for Growth of the left. Identify, please, the organization on the left that targets insufficiently liberal Democrats for destruction.
To get to some specifics. Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, complains about the fact that while he is anti-abortion, he is taking heat for not being anti-abortion enough. This is not an example of pressure from the left and is in no way similar to Snowe’s experience.
Also, it doesn’t count if someone decides for whatever reason not to seek re-election unless that reason has something to do with the kinds of pressures Snowe was experiencing. Evan Bayh called himself a centrist, which in this day and age means he was an intellectually dishonest corporate shill, but let us put that to the side. There was no concerted effort among Indiana Democrats to defeat Bayh. In fact, the way he went about retiring was a stab in the back to the Democrats, since they had very little time to find another candidate. Ben Nelson is in the same category. No one was attacking him from the left. Plenty of us didn’t like him, but he wasn’t facing any opposition to his renomination. If he thought he was going to lose the general election it was because he felt that even he wasn’t bat shit crazy enough to satisfy the right wingers in his state.
More fundamentally, it simply isn’t true that the two parties have gravitated toward the extremes. The Republicans surely have, but the Democrats have not. In fact, the Democrats have, in many respects, become more “centrist” as the Republicans have succeeded in redefining the center as they pull the “respectable” right end of the spectrum ever more into tinfoil hat land. As one small example, twenty years ago you would not have found Democrats looking to make “grand bargains” about Social Security or Medicare. The Democratic party is far more dominated by corporate influence than at any time since before FDR. That is not left wing. As yet another small example the Democrats just passed a health care bill that was essentially the Republican plan from just a few years ago. Last but not least, the issue that finally drove Snowe to the breaking point, the issue of insurance coverage for contraceptives, is not one in which the Democrats have taken an extreme position. Their position is consistent with the law in 27 states and entirely consistent with the Constitution the right wing claims to own. It is the Republicans that have staked out an extreme position that makes a mockery of the First Amendment principles that they claim to be upholding.
A left wing Senator as far to the right as the average Senate Republican would be advocating, among other things that never enter the public conversation, confiscatory taxes on the rich, say in the 85% area (you know, where it was in the communist ‘50s), truly universal health care, orderly destruction of our empire, taxation of the churches, withdrawal of accreditation from religious schools that teach creationism, and oddly enough because it’s not really a left-right issue, meaningful action on climate change. And they wouldn’t just believe in these things in the darkest recesses of their hearts; they’d be screaming about them and calling anyone who opposed them threats to America. When that blessed day comes the Times can write with some justification about a polarized Senate. Right now, there’s only one party at the pole; the other one is just slightly removed from the equator.
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