[yellowapple]

I think it's less "move to the right" and more "admit you've already moved to the right".

Democrat attitudes feel increasingly puritan instead of actually liberal to me (as demonstrated by the continued insistence on everyone aligning to a specific moral framework), while Republican attitudes feel increasingly laissez-faire instead of actually conservative (as demonstrated by the continued insistence on destroying our environment instead of, you know, conserving it).

The reality is that the political spectrum is not one-dimensional, or even two-dimensional.

[AstralStorm]

Yet you have only two "teams"... (I loathe to call a structure with so malleable a program a political party.)

[PaulHoule]

What one person calls a "lack of spine" might be another person's "being responsible to your constituency".

I was an elected official of a party committee once and I faced issues where I believed one thing that only half of my constituents believed so I slowplayed whenever I could.

[krapp]

To be fair, both Democrats and Republicans claim to have moral high ground over the other. Evangelical Christians tend to vote Republican because that party has successfully sold itself as the party defending traditional Christian morality and American culture.

[malvosenior]

What is now happening though is that the right is now gaining people who are not religious but are pro-free speech and a host of other related but not religious issues. I used to consider myself pretty far on the left. In the 80s and 90s the Evangelical Christians were the problem. They tried to censor music, video games... Now the censorship and dogma comes from the left. What's very interesting is that those same Christians who I thought were very intolerant of others views (and make no mistake they were and sometimes still are) have accepted people like me. Some of it is that we now have a common enemy but it also feels like they've realized that religion is no longer mainstream and thus have come to accept other less than mainstream opinions even if they don't agree with them.

[yellowapple]

It's worth keeping in mind that the Republicans and Democrats already once swapped sides on the "left" v. "right" spectrum. It ain't inconceivable to think that it might happen again (and in fact might already be in the early stages of happening again).