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> You can see this with the Republicans who turned into Democrats once the Republicans shifted far enough right that there were no more Rockefeller Republicans

> You can see this with the Republicans who turned into Democrats once the Republicans shifted far enough right that there were no more Rockefeller Republicans and Bill Clinton ran as a Democrat. If you're an accidental moderate, you run the risk of involuntarily changing party affiliation. I think this is interesting because it's been exactly the opposite for me and many of the people I know. At some point over the past ten or fifteen years, the Democrats switched their focus to the point that we've unintentionally found ourselves being Republican now. I.e. the midwest Trump vote.

pjc50 7y ago
In what way do you think the Democrats have switched focus?
- remarkEon 7y ago
  The white working class part of their coalition, which tends to more socially conservative, are not a focus of the party anymore. It used to be a bedrock part of their strategy in the Midwest. At least that is the perception - forget for a moment if a) it’s actually true, that they’ve dropped focus, or b) that voting block was ever a permanent part of that party’s coalition or merely on borrowed time.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    This is part of a generalized development in Western politics though - it even explains why Brexit and Boris Johnson won in the UK. The "left" is now explicitly the party of managerial, globalizing crony capitalism, pushing for maximum openness and free mobility for all factors of production - not of the working classes with their petty, localized concerns, or of traditional "business" classes with their long-time appreciation for economic diversification and the value of free markets. Some people might want to map this to ethnic stereotypes of some sort, or posit that it's the outcome of some kind of intentional conspiracy, and of course this would be quite incorrect. Nonetheless the shift was very real.
    - JoeSmithson 7y ago
      Your position is that the UK Labour party, led by life long socialist and eurosceptic Jeremy Corbyn, who's manifesto proposed nationalising several industries, is "explicity the party of globalizing crony capitalism"? In a strong field this might be the weakest political take I've read in the last month.
      - zozbot234 7y ago
        Jeremy Corbyn is only one player out of many in the British Labor Party. He's a pretty divisive figure for other reasons, and many Labor supporters are even starting to acknowledge this. In fact, if anything positive can be said about the shift towards favoring globalizing crony capitalism, is that it happens to be somewhat less divisive than the old-fashioned Marxist alternative that Corbyn favors. As strange as it may seem, this was very much a shift towards intentional moderation.
        JoeSmithson 7y ago
        The shift from Blair/Brown to Corbyn was a shift towards intentional moderation?
- jaspax 7y ago
  Increased focus on racial and sexual minorities to the exclusion of working-class interests (which has been going on for decades), spilling over into outright contempt of lower- and middle- class whites (which has mostly become prominent in the past 10-15 years).
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    You've got that all wrong. The former didn't happen and didn't spill over into the latter, the Democratic Party abandoned working class interests (not just “white working class”) pretty sharply after Clinton's election. It didn't really accelerate on the other fronts, it just didn't back off of them as hard because racial/sexual/etc. equality is compatible with the center-right neoliberal capitalist economics that became the focus of the new dominant faction of the Party. OTOH, there's evidence that that faction of the party is losing dominance to one focussed on working class interests again.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    > Increased focus on racial and sexual minorities to the exclusion of working-class interests Are these actually in conflict? Are they also not part of the working class? What sort of policies do you think should have been enacted against this?
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Not being from the US I don't know how Democrats view this, but in general, yes, it seems to me they are somewhat in conflict. Diversity activism tends to pit working class members against each other. Meanwhile, the rich don't have to care either way, except to occasionally be seen as backing the more popular view.
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      There's only so much time, attention, and energy. If your focus is on, say, trans rights, you're not spending that time focusing on working-class economics. And even if you can do it all, there's only so much attention the voters have. If all they hear about you is on trans rights, they don't perceive you doing anything about their economic problems. The Democrats' central message used to be "we care about the working people". Now their central message is "we care about illegal immigrants, minorities, and trans people". If your biggest problem is that you have no money because you have no job, that doesn't resonate. More: As the Democrats become dominated by the coastal elites, the party has too many people leading it who don't even know about the working-class problems in the middle of the country.
morelisp 7y ago
> At some point over the past ten or fifteen years, the Democrats switched their focus Clinton was elected on explicit Third Way positions nearly 30 years ago. If you think something changed in the past 10-15, you're falling for GOP propaganda. What you're noticing is the democrats finding a new base a decade after losing their working class supporters, through a combination of Third Way politics, the Republican Southern Strategy. The GOP saw this coming and stoked / capitulated to increasing racist elements of the party during Obama's presidency. This is the only major change in the past decade. (Well, the democrats aren't really that smart - it's not so much they're finding a new base as they're left with the ones the new GOP ideology intentionally excludes. As a party, they are doing a terrible job mobilizing this!)
- war1025 7y ago
  I think Southern racism has very little to do with the Republican shift in the Midwest. We've had heavy hispanic immigration for twenty years and they've all been fairly well integrated. I would guess what actually happened to the older people I know is that they grew up in union jobs at factories that got sent to Mexico after NAFTA went through. Unions lean heavy Democrat. When the union fails you, I think that leads fairly directly to losing faith in the Democratic party. Further, the insistence by many within the party that the only reason someone would want to leave the Democratic party is that they're racists really doesn't do them any favors.
  - morelisp 7y ago
    I agree that NAFTA is one major inflection point, but it supports 25 years ago, not your 10-15. I mean, I'm in full agreement that the democrats as a party have abandoned anything but the neoliberal project - I just also think if you expect anything but isolationism and racism out of the GOP - neither of which is good for the working class - you've fallen for their big lie. > I think Southern racism has very little to do with the Republican shift in the Midwest. I didn't say "Southern racism", I said "Southern Strategy", which is a specific GOP maneuver to pick up white working-class voters from the 50s onwards, as they calculated it would be better to give up the black and civil-rights focused voter base they were already losing, to pick up the white working-class, primarily agricultural, voters alienated in the South. They used existing racism, but they also stoked it. It was extremely effective (to the point you can even use "Southern racism" as a shorthand and "everyone knows" what you mean). While they mostly couldn't predict a similar opportunity in more industrial labor in the north 2-3 decades later, they definitely didn't miss the chance when it arose - and again, they've used existing racism, but also heightened it in places it was previously marginal.
guelo 7y ago
Political polarization has increased so this is happening on both sides, people moving towards democrats and republicans.
sagichmal 7y ago
This political perspective is completely incoherent. Democrats have shifted rightward since WWII, along with every other political group in the country. Former Democrats who become Republicans because they feel the party has shifted out from under them are creating excuses to mask their own changing opinions.
- war1025 7y ago
  > Former Democrats who become Republicans because they feel the party has shifted out from under them are creating excuses to mask their own changing opinions. To me, this is the incoherent view. Of course the voter base has changing opinions. It's completely to be expected that over the course of decades political alliances will shift. The entire point of what I said is that the political opinions of the Democratic party moved in a direction that did not match that of my general demographic. Now that opinions have shifted, we find that our interests are better served by Republican talking points than by Democratic ones. So we vote red. People like to bemoan the fact that America has a two party system, while many other places have a parliamentary system with many parties. The fact is America just handles its coalition building at an earlier step. There is no single "prototypical" Republican or Democrat. There are many factions throughout the country that weigh the political winds and throw their weight behind the group they see as most likely to benefit their own particular concerns. None of this should be nearly so divisive a topic as it clearly is. The post I replied to noted that there were a bunch of "Rockefeller Republicans" who shifted and become Democrats. I replied that a similar thing had happened around me, only in the opposite direction. Blue collar Democrats from the 70s-00s, found that after the financial crisis, the political winds pointed them to the Republican party.
  - sagichmal 7y ago
    > The entire point of what I said is that the political opinions of the Democratic party moved in a direction that did not match that of my general demographic. Now that opinions have shifted, we find that our interests are better served by Republican talking points than by Democratic ones. I agree that the Democratic platform has moved, but it moved rightwards. The Republican platform has also moved (considerably more) rightwards. If your political positions were once aligned with the Democrats but are now better aligned with Republicans, your personal opinions have necessarily moved dramatically rightwards, and your new alignment has nothing to do with the shift of the parties.

pjc50 7y ago

In what way do you think the Democrats have switched focus?

remarkEon 7y ago
The white working class part of their coalition, which tends to more socially conservative, are not a focus of the party anymore. It used to be a bedrock part of their strategy in the Midwest. At least that is the perception - forget for a moment if a) it’s actually true, that they’ve dropped focus, or b) that voting block was ever a permanent part of that party’s coalition or merely on borrowed time.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  This is part of a generalized development in Western politics though - it even explains why Brexit and Boris Johnson won in the UK. The "left" is now explicitly the party of managerial, globalizing crony capitalism, pushing for maximum openness and free mobility for all factors of production - not of the working classes with their petty, localized concerns, or of traditional "business" classes with their long-time appreciation for economic diversification and the value of free markets. Some people might want to map this to ethnic stereotypes of some sort, or posit that it's the outcome of some kind of intentional conspiracy, and of course this would be quite incorrect. Nonetheless the shift was very real.
  - JoeSmithson 7y ago
    Your position is that the UK Labour party, led by life long socialist and eurosceptic Jeremy Corbyn, who's manifesto proposed nationalising several industries, is "explicity the party of globalizing crony capitalism"? In a strong field this might be the weakest political take I've read in the last month.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      Jeremy Corbyn is only one player out of many in the British Labor Party. He's a pretty divisive figure for other reasons, and many Labor supporters are even starting to acknowledge this. In fact, if anything positive can be said about the shift towards favoring globalizing crony capitalism, is that it happens to be somewhat less divisive than the old-fashioned Marxist alternative that Corbyn favors. As strange as it may seem, this was very much a shift towards intentional moderation.
      - JoeSmithson 7y ago
        The shift from Blair/Brown to Corbyn was a shift towards intentional moderation?
jaspax 7y ago
Increased focus on racial and sexual minorities to the exclusion of working-class interests (which has been going on for decades), spilling over into outright contempt of lower- and middle- class whites (which has mostly become prominent in the past 10-15 years).
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  You've got that all wrong. The former didn't happen and didn't spill over into the latter, the Democratic Party abandoned working class interests (not just “white working class”) pretty sharply after Clinton's election. It didn't really accelerate on the other fronts, it just didn't back off of them as hard because racial/sexual/etc. equality is compatible with the center-right neoliberal capitalist economics that became the focus of the new dominant faction of the Party. OTOH, there's evidence that that faction of the party is losing dominance to one focussed on working class interests again.
- pjc50 7y ago
  > Increased focus on racial and sexual minorities to the exclusion of working-class interests Are these actually in conflict? Are they also not part of the working class? What sort of policies do you think should have been enacted against this?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Not being from the US I don't know how Democrats view this, but in general, yes, it seems to me they are somewhat in conflict. Diversity activism tends to pit working class members against each other. Meanwhile, the rich don't have to care either way, except to occasionally be seen as backing the more popular view.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    There's only so much time, attention, and energy. If your focus is on, say, trans rights, you're not spending that time focusing on working-class economics. And even if you can do it all, there's only so much attention the voters have. If all they hear about you is on trans rights, they don't perceive you doing anything about their economic problems. The Democrats' central message used to be "we care about the working people". Now their central message is "we care about illegal immigrants, minorities, and trans people". If your biggest problem is that you have no money because you have no job, that doesn't resonate. More: As the Democrats become dominated by the coastal elites, the party has too many people leading it who don't even know about the working-class problems in the middle of the country.

morelisp 7y ago

> At some point over the past ten or fifteen years, the Democrats switched their focus Clinton was elected on explicit Third Way positions nearly 30 years ago. If you think something changed in the past 10-15, you're falling for GOP propaganda. What you're noticing is the democrats finding a new base a decade after losing their working class supporters, through a combination of Third Way politics, the Republican Southern Strategy. The GOP saw this coming and stoked / capitulated to increasing racist elements of the party during Obama's presidency. This is the only major change in the past decade. (Well, the democrats aren't really that smart - it's not so much they're finding a new base as they're left with the ones the new GOP ideology intentionally excludes. As a party, they are doing a terrible job mobilizing this!)

war1025 7y ago
I think Southern racism has very little to do with the Republican shift in the Midwest. We've had heavy hispanic immigration for twenty years and they've all been fairly well integrated. I would guess what actually happened to the older people I know is that they grew up in union jobs at factories that got sent to Mexico after NAFTA went through. Unions lean heavy Democrat. When the union fails you, I think that leads fairly directly to losing faith in the Democratic party. Further, the insistence by many within the party that the only reason someone would want to leave the Democratic party is that they're racists really doesn't do them any favors.
- morelisp 7y ago
  I agree that NAFTA is one major inflection point, but it supports 25 years ago, not your 10-15. I mean, I'm in full agreement that the democrats as a party have abandoned anything but the neoliberal project - I just also think if you expect anything but isolationism and racism out of the GOP - neither of which is good for the working class - you've fallen for their big lie. > I think Southern racism has very little to do with the Republican shift in the Midwest. I didn't say "Southern racism", I said "Southern Strategy", which is a specific GOP maneuver to pick up white working-class voters from the 50s onwards, as they calculated it would be better to give up the black and civil-rights focused voter base they were already losing, to pick up the white working-class, primarily agricultural, voters alienated in the South. They used existing racism, but they also stoked it. It was extremely effective (to the point you can even use "Southern racism" as a shorthand and "everyone knows" what you mean). While they mostly couldn't predict a similar opportunity in more industrial labor in the north 2-3 decades later, they definitely didn't miss the chance when it arose - and again, they've used existing racism, but also heightened it in places it was previously marginal.

guelo 7y ago

Political polarization has increased so this is happening on both sides, people moving towards democrats and republicans.

sagichmal 7y ago

This political perspective is completely incoherent. Democrats have shifted rightward since WWII, along with every other political group in the country. Former Democrats who become Republicans because they feel the party has shifted out from under them are creating excuses to mask their own changing opinions.

war1025 7y ago
> Former Democrats who become Republicans because they feel the party has shifted out from under them are creating excuses to mask their own changing opinions. To me, this is the incoherent view. Of course the voter base has changing opinions. It's completely to be expected that over the course of decades political alliances will shift. The entire point of what I said is that the political opinions of the Democratic party moved in a direction that did not match that of my general demographic. Now that opinions have shifted, we find that our interests are better served by Republican talking points than by Democratic ones. So we vote red. People like to bemoan the fact that America has a two party system, while many other places have a parliamentary system with many parties. The fact is America just handles its coalition building at an earlier step. There is no single "prototypical" Republican or Democrat. There are many factions throughout the country that weigh the political winds and throw their weight behind the group they see as most likely to benefit their own particular concerns. None of this should be nearly so divisive a topic as it clearly is. The post I replied to noted that there were a bunch of "Rockefeller Republicans" who shifted and become Democrats. I replied that a similar thing had happened around me, only in the opposite direction. Blue collar Democrats from the 70s-00s, found that after the financial crisis, the political winds pointed them to the Republican party.
- sagichmal 7y ago
  > The entire point of what I said is that the political opinions of the Democratic party moved in a direction that did not match that of my general demographic. Now that opinions have shifted, we find that our interests are better served by Republican talking points than by Democratic ones. I agree that the Democratic platform has moved, but it moved rightwards. The Republican platform has also moved (considerably more) rightwards. If your political positions were once aligned with the Democrats but are now better aligned with Republicans, your personal opinions have necessarily moved dramatically rightwards, and your new alignment has nothing to do with the shift of the parties.