About 7 in 10 Voters Favor a Public Health Insurance Option. Medicare for All Remains Polarizing https://t.co/wepUdxYuMR via @mg_galvin pic.twitter.com/KDwwEHZ9GG
— Morning Consult (@MorningConsult) March 24, 2021
I reject the term “far right.”
Obviously, I consider myself a centrist, a moderate, an economic populist, a nationalist, a social conservative and an advocate of restraint and non-intervention in foreign policy. I’m an Independent voter. This is the perspective that I have always written from on this blog.
“Does Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 represent the last gasp of an exhausted moderate tradition or does a potentially powerful center lie dormant in our embattled political system?
Morris Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford, argues in a series of essays and a book, “Unstable Majorities,” that it is the structure of the two-party system that prevents the center — the moderate majority of American voters — from asserting their dominion over national politics …
This issue is the subject of intense dispute among strategists, scholars and pollsters. In Fiorina’s view, polarization has been concentrated among “the political class: office seekers, party officials, donors, activists, partisan media commentators. These are the people who blabber on TV /vent on Facebook/vilify on Twitter/etc.” This process effectively leaves out “the general public (a.k.a. normal people)” who are “inattentive, uncertain, ambivalent, uninvolved politically, concerned with bread-and-butter issues.”
In support of his position, Fiorina has marshaled data showing that there are large numbers of voters who say that neither party reflects their views; that many of the most polarizing issues — including gay rights, gender equality, abortion and racial equality — rank 19 to 52 points below voters’ top priorities, which are the economy, health care, jobs and Medicare; and that the share of voters who describe themselves as moderate has remained constant since 1974. …
In practice, the study found that polarization is driven in large part by the left flank of the Democratic Party and the right flank of the Republican Party, which together make up roughly a third of the electorate. …”
I agree with this.
Everyone in the middle needs to team up against the extremes. It is the wealthy and the highly educated who are deeply polarized and who are vastly overrepresented in Congress.
It is the “Solid Liberals” among the Democrats – the wealthy, highly educated, White upper middle class professionals who push toxic culture war issues – and the “Business Conservatives” or True Cons among the Republicans – essentially, the Scrooge Cons or the performance art deficit hawks – who are the problem. The system caters to these two groups and neglects everyone else in the middle. These two groups of voters are the bipartisan constituency for neoliberalism.
If you were to fire everyone in Congress and hold a lottery and pick random people off the street to be our representatives, the result would be a Congress that is far less wealthy, less educated and less ideological and which as a result would be less polarized and more capable of getting things done. The system that we have today which doesn’t work is the direct result of something like a third of the public having a college degree which as Peter Turchin has convincingly argued has led to elite overproduction.
Note: The obvious solution is get rid of political correctness and restrict immigration, which is the source of the cultural toxicity in the system, while also getting rid of our current maldistribution of wealth, which is the source of economic toxicity in our system. The governing wing of neither political party will stand for this compromise though. Most people could live with it.
To my mind, the diminishing ‘Centre’ is composed largely of people who, knowing something is gravely wrong, cannot bring themselves to divest themselves of the very ideas, identifications, and habits that brought us thither.
On an ancillary note, I am reminded of an Irish Nationalist who, lecturing in Latvia several years back, said the following : ‘The 21st century will be a battle between Nationalists and Globalists/Socialists, and it will be fought over the heads of those in the Middle.’
“I reject the term “Far Right.””
Without a doubt it is a canny and wise thing to do, for, in reality, those who coined this term, ‘The Far Right’, did it only to make sure that White Gentiles who were determined to defend their nations from a Globalist takeover would be so stigmatized that their brethren would not wish to join them.
To that end, I have begun to think that a more appropriate term, for those White Gentiles who, at this time in history, wish to persist with the processes of allowing their own people to be undermined, and that term is, ‘The Extremist Centre’ …
Perhaps even, ‘Statusadistick Quoists’. Yes, let’s make that term, ‘Statusadistik Quoists such a hot one to hold that, by the time another decade elapses, even ‘Centrists’ will be afraid to mention that they are such in all good society…
“The Center”…now…is more left of center.
Most centered Americans favor amnesty, more money for minorities, think the economy is great, and are just happy as larks.