The Democratic Party has moved too far to the left.

[Dill]

(12-02-2019, 03:16 PM)hollodero Wrote: I still prefer the term "Trump tolerators" though, or maybe "neverdems". I guess many would have preferred any other GOP candidate, but the masses decided otherwise. Still, there is a conservative future to shape, especially through judges apparently. And regarding your strict duality on all political matters, one still needs to stick to the own team and vilify the other side. Singling out AOC and calling her the party's real face - and proof it's unelectable because of some folks like her that are "too left" -  is a tactic to do that, and I'd guess it's more self-affirmation than anything.

But sure, five years ago I would have laughed at anyone who had suggested a Trump could become a president with considerable support. I would have said, no way, 95% of Americans would condemn behaviour like that, Americans are too big patriots to tolerate that constant defilement of the country and the WH. Now I see this as a result of me being used to having multiple alternative options. There are none. One can claim to go libertarian or McMullin or whatever in "protest", but in the end of the "real world" it boils down to something like Trump or AOC, and then Trump is not all that awful, cannot be. E.g. he is still well-behaved enough to pick a name from a list handed to him for the SC instead of appointing Ivanka or Judge Jeanine.

In conclusion, again never change a letter in any of your traditional democratic mechanisms that are all untouchable bedrocks of the system. It got you in a really good place.

How about "never 'Lefters,'" with the obligatory quotation marks to signal dubious application?  Never "leftism" seems to bring with it a congenital blindness to Trump damage at the constitutional and policy level, though it concedes his vulgarity. Whatever Trump does, the "real" danger is still, as always, "the left," and how Trump might shift votes that direction. So disqualifying "the left" just has to continue, whatever Trump does.

The "strict duality" you refer to seems to me rather new.  40 years ago both parties were more evenly leavened with liberals and conservatives. No party had its own cable news network presenting "alternative facts." Both those conditions countered intra-party extremism, forced compromise already, at the party level before candidates were chosen and party planks selected. These conditions also made it almost impossible for either party to enforce the discipline currently exercised by Republicans. "Country first" still resonated with the WWII generation and early Boomers. Hence no surprise that in the mid 90s Dems could vote for Clinton impeachment and other bi-partisan actions highly improbable today.  Until Clinton's second term, the "strict duality" had not really been there since 1936.  By 2009, McConnell could order all Republican Senators to vote against the ACA and then define the bill as therefore "partisan" because it had no Republican support. 

If you are suggesting a link between the narrowed voting options of our two-party system and the apparent constitutional crisis in which we Americans now find ourselves, then I agree there is plausibility to that view. The current crisis seems irresolvable as the current party-goverment system is configured.  I am unconvinced the problem is truly structural.

Nixon/Agnew began studiously undoing intra-party balance in the GOP, and Reagan, then Gingrich, effectively continued it, shifting the party ever rightward. Certainly, the long term result has been that by the new millenium, compromise on most important issues short of direct national defense was impossible. But was it inevitable that, because there are only two effective parties, one should concentrate so many illiberal tendencies within itself, leaving the other to absorb the leftover (lol no pun intended)?