My question has been, as a matter of policy and rhetoric, are Democrats really getting more liberal?
Personally, I have yet to find satisfying evidence that suggests the answer is "yes." First of all, measuring what is a liberal or conservative over time is very difficult. It was once a very liberal position to be anti-slavery. Of course, supporting slavery in any form no longer has any mainstream support. So, what does that mean? Have both political parties become more liberal? In a sense, yes. But really, the definition of what it meant to be "liberal" simply changed. So, when we use policy examples less extreme than slavery, what are we left with? Is the democratic party actually more liberal or are they simply relatively more liberal when compared to the Republican Party?
Social Security under FDR or Medicaid under the Great Society are the very definition of nanny-state handout programs and are, obviously, many decades old at this point. Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Al Gore all undertook specific efforts to evaluate and streamline government: tasks usually associated with small-government conservatives.
Many Democrats were among key supporters of the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Democrats have consistently voted in favor of expanding governmental power of search and seizure. Opposition to the NSA wiretapping program seems to have no party affiliation with the socially libertarian fringes of both parties banding together (while being simultaneously shut out by the mainstream of their own parties).
On the other side of the aisle, the supposedly pro-business conservative Reagan/Bush administration was much more aggressive in pursuing prosecutions against bankers during the S&L crisis than the supposedly big government Obama administration was going after the same in 2008.
And yet the drumbeat continues the universally accepted wisdom that Democrats are more liberal. So much so, in fact, that mainstream press outlets can posit the phenomenon as fact without controversy even as they provide little to no support that it's true.
To flip the coin, I definitely see a more conservative Republican party. As recently as the 80s, a Republican president raised taxes. Meanwhile, every nearly major Republican today has signed the Grover Norquist pledge not to raise taxes ever under any circumstances.
The key provision of the most "tyrranical" governmental overreach undertaken by the Democratic party in recent decades was originated by the conservative American Heritage Foundation. Yet the same policy is now completely politically unacceptable to literally any member of today's Republican party - repeal and replace is a central plank in today's Republican party platform. Former conservative standard-bearers say that the leaders of only a few decades ago would have difficulty gaining support in today's Republican party.
My question is, leaving aside the gerrymandering, leaving aside that people don't want their kids marrying into the other political party, what actual policies lead us to believe that democrats are more liberal than they used to be? What is the democratic party of the last twenty years actually doing that leads to this truism that today's democratic party is more liberal than in years past?
Phrased simply why is today's Democratic party not simply liberal? Why must we insist that Democrats are more liberal?
If you look at the nature of the actual policies passed, I see basically no evidence of a more liberal democratic party at the federal level. The single-largest policy accomplishment of the Obama administration was the ACA which contained no new single-payer government option. Major democratic healthcare reform has almost always carried with it a strong single-payer facet. single-payer healthcare is the standard leftist response to healthcare issues throughout the developed world and has been for decades
The single largest structural reform passed during the Obama administration was, of course, The Dodd Frank bill which was an incredibly modest response to a large-scale principal-agent problem in which very, very few Wall Street bankers were prosecuted criminally. Furthermore, thanks in part to the Obama Administration's soft enforcement tactics and lack of aggressiveness, much of the behavior that caused the meltdown in 2008 has resumed with the largest U.S. banks owning an even larger share of the market, relatively speaking. Compare that to the Reagan Administration's response to the Savings and Loans Crisis in which a conservative Republican aggressively pursued prosecution of malfeasanc.
The third leg of my argument concerns the largest social accomplishment of the Obama Administration is the federalization of marriage rights which was accomplished by court mandate and not the Administration or Legislative action. Furthermore, despite equal rights for gays being a central plank of the democratic candidates throughout the 70s and 80s and despite the fact that Ted Kennedy was pushing for a central position of civil rights for homosexuals in 1980, Barack Obama never placed the issue anywhere near the center of his campaigns and had to "evolve" on the issue or stop lying (depending on whom you ask) just to come out in support of the notion.
As recently as 2010 Obama was calling for cuts to capital gains taxes. According to politicalcompass.org:
"[Obama] has surrounded himself with conservative advisors and key figures — many from previous administrations, and an unprecedented number from the Trilateral Commission. He also appointed a former Monsanto executive as Senior Advisor to the FDA. He has extended Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, presided over a spiralling rich-poor gap and sacrificed further American jobs with recent free trade deals. Trade union rights have also eroded under his watch. He has... supported the NDAA which effectively legalises martial law, allowed drilling and adopted a soft-touch position towards the banks that is to the right of European Conservative leaders. Taking office during the financial meltdown, Obama appointed its principle architects to top economic positions. We list these because many of Obama's detractors absurdly portray him as either a radical liberal or a socialist, while his apologists, equally absurdly, continue to view him as a well-intentioned progressive, tragically thwarted by overwhelming pressures."
While, of course, the democratic party doesn't begin and end with Obama, it's worth noting that Workfare reform, DOMA, extension of the Bush tax cuts and the biggest cut in governmental funding since the 1890s were signed into law or enforced through administrative fiat by democratic presidents. Meanwhile, bold governmental regulatory reforms like the Clean Air and Clean Water Act, "hand-out" programs like Food Stamps and WIC and single-payer, large-government services like Medicaid were all either passed outright or expanded under the Democratic administrations/legislative bodies in the 60s and 70s.
Put simply, today's Democrats are far less likely to pursue government-based solutions and far more likely to pursue market-based solutions than previous generations from the same party. If anything, I would argue the mainstream democratic party is more conservative today from a policy perspective (though only slightly).
Just because the average democratic voter is more liberal today, doesn't mean the policies actually being pursued are.
Finally, I have compiled some central democratic planks from the DNC of 1972 to demonstrate that the standard language of social and economic equality is nearly identical to the language used by a Socialist, liberal standard-bearer like Bernie Sanders.
I would argue many of these planks as they were worded back then would not find broad support for inclusion in the Democratic Party today and for those planks that would, the language is essentially identical to language used in today's supposedly more liberal party.
- "Full employment—a guaranteed job for all—is the primary economic objective of the Democratic Party."
- "Tax reform directed toward equitable distribution of income and wealth and fair sharing of the cost of government."
- "Closing tax loopholes that encourage the export of American jobs by American-controlled multi-national corporations"
- "The Democratic Party deplores the increasing concentration of economic power in fewer and fewer hands. Five per cent of the American people control 90 per cent of our productive national wealth. Less than one per cent of all manufacturers have 88 per cent of the profits. Less than two per cent of the population now owns approximately 80 per cent of the nation's personally-held corporate stock, 90 per cent of the personally-held corporate bonds and nearly 100 per cent of the personally-held municipal bonds. The rest of the population—including all working men and women—pay too much for essential products and services because of national policy and market distortions."
- "Stiffen the civil and criminal statutes to make corporate officers responsible for their actions."
- "Effective opportunities for unions, as well as employers, to communicate with employees, without coercion by either side or by anyone acting on their behalf."
- "Move to a minimum wage of $2.50 ($14.24 in 2015 dollars) per hour, which allows a wage earner to earn more than a poverty level income for 40 hours a week, with no subminimums for special groups or age differentials We therefore urge the Democratic Party to adopt the principle that America has a responsibility to offer every American family the best in health care, whenever they need it, regardless of income or any other factor."
- "The epidemic of wiretapping and electronic surveillance engaged in by the Nixon Administration and the use of grand juries for purposes of political intimidation must be ended."
Similar rhetoric, less liberal outcomes. The fact of the matter is that the country is more polarized not because the Democrats became more liberal, it is because the parties, which were to some extent both ideological and geographical entities for decades sorted themselves in such a way that the latter stopped being the case.
Put it another way, liberal Republican and conservative Democrat didn't mean centrist it meant actual liberals and conservatives who belonged to the "wrong" party ideologically due to historical and geographical reasons. George Romney was staunchly pro-civil rights as was Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller helped found the SUNY public college system. Raymond P. Shaffer oversaw massive government works programs while he was governor of Pennsylvania.
Both parties push for less government involvement in people's day-to-day (though that's changing lately for the Democrats), both parties have substantial pro-war elements (though we seem to be sorting along that dimension ideologically, as well). For basically the entire 80s, 90s and early 2000s there were few mainstream conservationist nor pro-regulatory Democrats to speak of. The Democratic Party of the 40s - early 70s was much more liberal than the Democratic Party of the 90s and 2000s. It remains to be seen if that's going to change permanently.
