| > Perhaps it is the American right-wing moving further right, but I am more inclined to believe the American left is moving farther left. The Republican Party is clearly moving further right over a long time scale; the Democratic Party is also moving further left. Whether those things are true of the “American right” and “American left” is a little more complex question (from where I sit, it seems that the American Right is moving to the right more clearly and across the board, while the American left is moving left on social issues but not so much on economic issues, but that the economic left is starting to regain power in the Democratic Party, which if you mistake the Democratic Party for the American left looks like the left moving farther left on economic issues.) > Take for example this speech by Bill Clinton in 1995 Bill Clinton is not, and never was, part of the American left. He is a moderate economic and social conservative—all the prominent liberal figures in the Democratic Party took a pass on the 1992 primary expecting Bush to be unbeatable. Paul Tsongas was probably the closest thing to a left candidate in a major party primary in 1992 (he was at least a solid social liberal), but his campaign was hampered by health concerns regarding his cancer (which turned out to be not entirely misplaced.) > To think that this was a speech by a Democrat president about 20 years ago is unfathomable to the left today. Not any more than it was at the time; the left disliked Clinton during the primary in 1992, mostly saw him as the lesser of three evils in the general (though Perot’s anti-NAFTA stand got him some support from the left even though he was not in any way a left candidate), and attacked him mercilessly from 1993 on when it came to policy as most of his gestures toward the left in the campaign turned out to be hollow, and his health care reform foundered on exactly the grounds the left challenged it earlier: it was overly complex in pursuit of buy-in that wouldn't come anyway from corporate interests, when there was a strong public majority support for simple single-payer. |