{"id":3119,"date":"2011-01-08T10:56:12","date_gmt":"2011-01-08T15:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/?p=3119"},"modified":"2011-01-08T11:30:54","modified_gmt":"2011-01-08T16:30:54","slug":"gop-slide-to-the-right-fractures-and-divides-dems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2011\/01\/gop-slide-to-the-right-fractures-and-divides-dems.html","title":{"rendered":"GOP slide to the right fractures and divides Dems"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Spectrum<\/a>
Politics requires a full spectrum of ideas (Photo by lumaxart on Flickr)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Republicans repeatedly urge Democrats to meet them in the middle\u2014a middle which keeps moving further and further to the right of an ideological center.\u00a0 And Democrats, in an effort to show bipartisanship, have willfully obliged.\u00a0 Norman Goldman wrote<\/a> in the Huffington Post this week that Dems need to rebrand themselves.\u00a0 They should stake out the true center and demand the GOP meet them there.\u00a0 However, while this is a fine high-minded principle, it ignores a fundamental law of physics that Republicans are exploiting to their advantage.<\/p>\n

Nature abhors a vacuum.<\/em><\/p>\n

In the two-party system that defines American government, the true middle is simply the dividing point between the parties.\u00a0 The Democrats cannot pull their party left and leave a void in the middle.\u00a0 They can only pull left if the Republicans are malleable enough to slide left and fill the gap.\u00a0 This is more like a tug of war where one side can move only if they can budge the other.<\/p>\n

The GOP has made ideological purity a concerted goal, and has succeeded in pulling the Democrats to where they are spread across a wide ideological spectrum.\u00a0 Now on the one hand, it might seem that conceding all that real estate to the left was a bad strategy.\u00a0 However, the result has been the ability for the right to adopt an almost unified policy stance on almost every issue.\u00a0 Meanwhile, the left, and its ever growing and unwieldy big tent, struggled to find a position they could all agree on.<\/p>\n

The result being a focused Republican party up against fractured and divided Democrats.\u00a0 At this point, the GOP is entrenched.\u00a0 They will not be drawn over their lines.\u00a0 The only way Democrats can redefine the center is if the GOP breaks ranks.\u00a0 Something increasingly plausible as the Tea Party Coalition’s new strength in Congress is now threatening a suicide bomber approach by trying to hold the country hostage over raising the debt ceiling.\u00a0 If they are able to detonate that bomb (not raise the ceiling), the economic impact would be devastating<\/a> to everyone, regardless of ideology or party.\u00a0 While many Republicans recognize and enjoy the increased power of party purity, far fewer are willing to die for the cause.<\/p>\n

Yet for Democrats to exploit this opportunity means they would also have to be willing to die for the cause rather than move the line.\u00a0 Recent history suggests this isn’t remotely true, and the GOP knows this all too well.\u00a0 This is far more likely to result in yet another step to the right for the political center of the two parties.<\/p>\n

Where does all this lead?\u00a0 I’ll defer to this allegory<\/a> that uses crayons to illustrate where we are headed.<\/p>\n

Once upon a time there was a box of crayons, one for every color of the rainbow.\u00a0 Green was widely known as the middle of the spectral set, with Red, Orange, and Yellow to one side and Blue, Indigo, and Violet to the other.\u00a0 People recognized the value of the diversity of colors and accepted that to behold the world in all its glory all the colors played a role.\u00a0 Sure, people had their favorites.\u00a0 Some loved the bold hues of the reds, others the compassion of the blues, while many gravitated to the natural greens of the center.\u00a0 There was balance and harmony.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But one day things began to change.\u00a0 The Reds began by chiding the Greens, and eventually the Yellows as well, for not being Red enough.\u00a0 Some, compelled by the pressure, began to change their hue.\u00a0 They shifted red over time and melded with the Red crayon causing it to grow.\u00a0 But this left a spectral void.\u00a0 So the Greens and Blues began to divide and shift their own hues until eventually, the group that used to span from Violet to Blue- Green, now encompassed all the Green and the Yellow as well.\u00a0 Each crayon was smaller, but the void was comfortably filled such that the world could retain its full color.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Reds, still confident they represented half the spectrum, even if only by weight, decided the new middle must be somewhere in the neighborhood of light Orange.\u00a0 This made even a nice shade of Aqua seem distant and radical.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Before long, the Reds became so emboldened by their uniformity and enormity they started advocating that the world exist only in shades of Red.\u00a0 Their followers, even those whose world depended on tints of all types, began to paint only in Reds and eschew other colors as evil.\u00a0 They mocked the other colors for failing to agree on a single shade.\u00a0 They relished their monochromatic view of the world.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For awhile, the Reds seemed an unstoppable force.\u00a0 Their unity, their single mindedness, their size made them formidable.\u00a0 Over time, the sun, the skies, the grasses, the seas all became Red.\u00a0 But red suns burn cooler, and red chlorophyll doesn\u2019t photosynthesize as well.\u00a0 The world cooled and the air became foul.\u00a0 The vibrant spectrum of life dwindled until eventually the world was, as the Reds had envisioned, a uniform color.\u00a0 But not red.\u00a0 Rather, an amalgam of all colors\u2026 lifeless brown.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tea Party’s new strength in Congress is threatening a suicide bomber approach. Dems expected to fold rather than capitalize.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[89,22,41,15],"class_list":["post-3119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-democrats","tag-political-ideology","tag-republicans","tag-tea-party"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3119"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3121,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3119\/revisions\/3121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}