The Changing

There has been substantial change in the political positions of those in our two major parties over the last quarter century.  Since 1994 the Pew Research Center has been asking the same set of 10 questions to the electorate (will update the post once I relocate the questions - FOUND IT!  See end of post) and measuring that change.  Below are the results:

Notice what has happened?  The Republican electorate has move right but the Democrat electorate has moved a lot to the left.  Where there used to be considerable overlap in the middle is now substantially diminished.

The move to the Left is so dramatic that on a personal note, I'm so old I was a Liberal back when we believed in free speech, freedom of conscience, equal protection and due process under the law.  I still do.

If you look at the charts over time you will see the biggest shift of the Democrats to the left occurred during Pew's 2012 survey (I'm searching for the time lapse charts I've seen and will add to the post when I find them).

This coincides with my own observation that it was in 2011-12 the Obama Administration decided to "unleash the crazy" building within the Democratic electorate.  It was during this period that same-sex marriage was transformed from an issue that could be discussed to one where opposition branded one a bigot and hater worthy of losing your job (soon to be followed by banishing any discussions of whether boys should be allowed in girls' bathrooms).  It was when bureaucrats in Obama's Department of Education hyped issues of sexual assault on college campuses and issued their guidance depriving Americans of due process.  It was when the Obama administration decided, with some success, to convince apolitical young single women that Republicans would ban all contraception if elected in 2012. 

It was when Obama, concerned he might lose the 2012 election, set out to convince America that race relations were worsening, treating every voice who opposed Democratic policies as racist (also enabling Democrats to avoid discussions of substance), hyping the Trayvon Martin case with a deluge of falsehoods (a tactic since repeated with Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and Omar Mateen), using Al Sharpton, who made his bones as a race man and Jew-baiter, as their go-to guy on civil rights, when Joe Biden was telling black audiences that Mitt Romney was "going to put y'all back in chains", and when the poisonous doctrine of intersectionality entered the discussion.

The strategy allowed Obama to fully embrace the bizarre theories of the academy, which had been slowly cooking at colleges and universities over the prior three decades (and which I mistakenly dismissed as so crazy, no one not on a college campus could ever take seriously) and which can be seen in his use of rhetorical tropes used by progressive academics.

After that the floodgates opened with the Democratic dominated news media, academia, and in tech.   Look at this chart on the explosion in the use of the term "white privilege" since then.  For more examples go here.



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