When President Obama recently complained to news media executives about their ostensibly even-handed "pox on both of your houses" coverage of the partisan battles in Washington, it might have seemed like, well, a partisan shot from a Democratic president. After all, his complaint was that the GOP had moved so far right, and intransigently so, that it was wrong to create a false "equivalence" by blaming both parties equally for the Washington gridlock. To a skeptic that comment, coming from a Democrat, sounded suspiciously partisan itself. But while the president was making the kind of argument you would expect of the nation's top Democrat, he actually had the support of science â well at least political science research that maps that rightward GOP shift. Keith Poole of the University of Georgia, with his collaborator Howard Rosenthal of New York University, has spent decades charting the ideological shifts and polarization of the political parties in Congress from the 18th century until now to get the view of how the political landscape has changed from 30,000 feet up. What they have found is that the Republican Party is the most conservative it has been a century http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpoli...political-scientist-with-dread?sc=tw&cc=share
Just goes to show the republicans have been wrong the past 100 yrs it's about time they got their heads outta their a$$es
FT, it seems that Canada's Right Wing is on pretty much the same track, unfortunately: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=3515804#post3515804
I said it several months ago, I went left because the GOP has gone INSANE. They seriously want to roll us back some 50 years.
I could be wrong, but I suspect you probably haven't really gone more left. You just chose not to hop on the express train to the right. So while the distance is broadening, you are not necessarily the one who is moving.
I didn;t read the article, but there was a similar one in the WashPost this past sunday. Basically, it made the somewhat implausible claim that republicans are more responsible for the current state of hyperpartisanship. Without getting into the issues too deeply, I think two things have happened. One, the government has veered far to the left. Policies that were deemed mainstream democrat 30 or 40 years ago are called right wing now. A lot of it revolves around cultural issues, eg abortion, the radical gay agenda, treatment of and respect for religion in general, affirmative action, etc. Also, there has been a shift in power to the radical environmentalists. We cna;t build a dam or bridge without decades of litigation now. There is the whole Great Society entitlement culture , that has become institutionalized now but once was considered radical. The second thing that has happened is that large numbers of voters have totally lost faith in both parties. On the republican side in particular, voters see "moderate" republicans as cowardly backstabbers who value compromise above principle or even worse, don't really share their principles. Voters see the country on an unsustainable trajectory and are in no mood for compromises. The republican party probably has gotten a little more conservative, although Ronald Reagan was clearly our most conservative president in the modern era. Democrats however have gotten vastly more liberal. They have also purged their moderates. The result is a wide chasm between competing viewpoints that leaves little room for compromise.