"The leftist elites are out of control" is not even close to a new idea, and it's not exactly an apolitical viewpoint. AEI is hustling goods on this one. The t

"The leftist elites are out of control" is not even close to a new idea, and it's not exactly an apolitical viewpoint. AEI is hustling goods on this one. The thesis is plainly wrong (or, at least, wildly incomplete): + On most social issues, for example, the country -- all of it -- has moved substantially to the left since 1973. The sort of rhetoric regarding homosexuality that was commonplace 30+ years ago will get you side eyes at all but the most fundamentalist churches these days. Quantitatively, there was a 30 point swing in opinion polling on gay marriage just from 2002 until 2018 [1]. Support for gay marriage was so radical and fringe prior to the 1990s that it wasn't even polled. And even a lot of the early polling in the 90s asked only about "acceptance" rather the marriage. Homosexuals were still being charged with sodomy in the 1980s [2]. It's impossible to understate the shift in opinion on homosexual rights between 1973 to today. And the shift to the left is even more pronounced in gender politics sans abortion. Stuff like [3] is unfathomable today. + Ditto drugs. + The country has moved substantially to the Left (or, anyways, away from the 1970s Right consensus views) on trade issues. It's easy to forget that pre-NAFTA it was overwhelmingly the leftists who opposed free trade. The development of a left-leaning bloc that is liberal on both immigration policy and trade policy is very much a Clinton-era thing (that, perhaps, might already be in retreat within the Democratic party). + And there are a lot of other issues where movement is more leftward than not. E.g., race. Remember that actual segregationists were out of national majorities but still held considerable regional power throughout the 70s, and some even held onto some elected offices into the 21st century. Strom Thurmond was still serving in the US senate in 2003, and his electoral support eroded monotonically throughout the last two decades of the 20th century. The country hasn't moved to the left on every issue, but saying it's slightly right of where it was in 1973 is, for most of the biggest issues in contemporary politics, absolutely false. It's my experience that discussions of the Pauline Kael Syndrome are mostly ahistorical or even anti-historical. Which is somehow quite ironic. Also, 2 of your 3 links are broken. [1] https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/ https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowers_v._Hardwick#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowers_v._Hardwick#Background [3] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/forty-years-ago-women-had-a-hard-time-getting-credit-cards-180949289/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/forty-years-ago-wo...