Where do you stand politically?

[ed_jaxon]

Normally I am loathe to put any test out there that divides people but this one made me really think about where I stand on a number of issues.

While I hate the Briggs-Meyers and other personality tests, I actually got something out of this exercise.

Be interesting to see where others lie.

http://www.politicalcompass.org/

[Prospero]

No one who reads the stuff I post will be surprised to see I am even further "left" by this little test's criteria than the OP.

[trish]

Here's mine ->

[Faldur]

Ya, doubt there will be many surprises here, holy crap i lean to the right. Who'd a thunk.. Thanks for posting Ed, fun stuff.

http://www.politicalcompass.org/facebook/pcgraphpng.php?ec=6.25&soc=0.15

[Stavros]

I am in the same square as Prospero and Trish, but further to the right of the former and the right of the latter, but lower down. It becomes problematic when you look at the other charts, for example the one with the composers. I do not think Beethoven can be put on the left, I have always thought him a boring German nationalist as far as his politics are concerned -and he wasn't that interested in it anyway, and the same is true of Shostakovich -who joined the Communist Party in 1960, and Prokofiev -a man I thought well-known for his conservative attitude. Putting Wagner on the authoritarian right ignores his hostility to modern industry and his latent/partial homosexuality, I suspect he is there for his half-baked political ideas rather than the manner in which he lived his life, most of it on borrowed money. If he was anything, he was an anarchist.

Even more controversial is the idea that Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot are on the left, their fixation with state power has nothing to do with equality of opportunity, or equality of any kind, if that is a cardinal value on the left. Whatever. I did the Ichonochasms test and got 30 right out of the 49 questions. And apparently, if I was an American citizen, there would be noone for me to vote for!

Anyway, thanks for the link Ed! But where are you on the chart...or is it a secret?

[Prospero]

One of the difficulties with anything of this sort - in the modern world - is that simple definitions of right and left break down all the time.

The Right in the US, for instance, accuse liberals of sharing common ideological ground with islamists. (Whether this is a genuine belieby the Right or simply a smear it is hard to tell).

If they really examined that claim it would be obvious to them that it is palpable nonsense. The real authoritarian viewpoint of the radical Jihadist with his reactionary view of the role of women, his faith in God and his divine laws actually has far more to do with some on the religious right than anyone on the liberal left spectrum. That is just one example.

Equally those on the Liberal left who are accused, by Tea party supporters of being communists, have virtually no shared ground with the classic Marxist-Leninist ideas which define state communism.

And then on the Left many believe that radical free market defenders are also automatically racist or of the religious right. Of course there is an overlap and you do find far more racism on the right than on the left.

But again it is a distortion and a simplification.
All too simplistic.

[Prospero]

Surely that first chart was Eds?

[onmyknees]

No one who reads the stuff I post will be surprised to see I am even further "left" by this little test's criteria than the OP.


No....really ? Understatement of the decade.

I got well into the test , and while I understand the attempt....I found many of the questions to be too absolute. Life's decesions and answers do not lend themselves one sentence questions, rarely are things that black and white, but it was interesting.

[iagodelgado]

Fun.

I ended up more or less beside Trish.

[SammiValentine]

lots of questions have double points or examples that you want to agree with one bit and disagree the other. its tricky to complete. :P

[SammiValentine]

i hang mostly this way it claims.. interesting more or less bang on the nose for "old labour" on this page http://www.politicalcompass.org/ukparties2010 . interesting but i classed myself as an old labout voter anyway even though i didnt exist then, new labour, pah. theyre all pretty much the same now.

[Dino Velvet]

I took the test.

http://www.politicalcompass.org/facebook/pcgraphpng.php?ec=1.25&soc=-1.33

[trish]

Fun.

I ended up more or less beside Trish.Sliding over and patting the bench, here have a seat. :)

[trish]

No....really ? Understatement of the decade.

I got well into the test , and while I understand the attempt....I found many of the questions to be too absolute. Life's decesions and answers do not lend themselves one sentence questions, rarely are things that black and white, but it was interesting.
Do you usually give up when you have to make difficult decisions or just when they have no consequences? :roll:

[BellaBellucci]

While probably not a shock, here's mine:

~BB~

[Prospero]

.

I got well into the test , and while I understand the attempt....I found many of the questions to be too absolute. Life's decesions and answers do not lend themselves one sentence questions, rarely are things that black and white, but it was interesting.

I'll agree with that actually !!! In many cases I could not really say I agreed or disagreed so went with someone thing that was not my real conviction. There are usually exceptions.

[Quiet Reflections]

....

[GoddessAthena85]

some of those questions could have had used more then 4 options to anserhttp://i1173.photobucket.com/albums/r589/travelingtess85/tumblr_mbphx7eGH61qb0n0k.gif

[DCGuy343]

Here is mine, starting to notice a trend here.

[buttslinger]

If thou cuttest me, do I not bleed red white and blue??

[be2378]

I know where I stand, and its all over the map. I like to think Im right with some left qualitys. But when you are jammed full of contridtions, its hard to put them on some box.

[BellaBellucci]

I know where I stand, and its all over the map. I like to think Im right with some left qualitys. But when you are jammed full of contridtions, its hard to put them on some box.

It's life that's full of contradictions, not you. :geek:

~BB~

[trish]

The world is perfectly consistent. It's our attempts to describe it, model it and deal with it that are full of contradictions. If you're plagued by contradictions, go back to the drawing board.

[broncofan]

The political spectrum is useful insofar as you can identify common themes and get a sense of where a person fits along a continuum. The problem is that it keeps people from engaging in independent thinking and makes it easier to take a reactionary stance in opposition to a person's views. It's as though someone's opinion must be understood in the context of where they fall on this spectrum. As such it is reductive and makes a person think they can understand someone without engaging their individual views.

That said, there is sometimes a consistency or commonality to the views falling on one side of the spectrum rather than another. This is a good exercise I just couldn't get myself to figure out whether I agree or strongly agree with a statement. I'll finish when I get that worked out but in the meantime, lower left quartile.

[broncofan]

It's life that's full of contradictions, not you. :geek:

~BB~
Yep, life is sometimes to complicated for that!

[be2378]

It's life that's full of contradictions, not you. :geek:

~BB~



Life is full of them, and I got more. It's hard to explain them sometimes to people.

[iagodelgado]

Schroedinger got it right. Hundgevils tells the truth.

[lumberjack]

The Political Compass


Economic Left/Right: 1.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.56

http://www.politicalcompass.org/facebook/pcgraphpng.php?ec=1.38&soc=-2.56

I'm fairly close to Dino's position, I'm checking into therapy.

[BellaBellucci]

I really want to see Erika's these days. :lol:

~BB~

[broncofan]

I really want to see Erika's these days. :lol:

~BB~
To the left of the entire spectrum. Why do you ask:D?

[speedking59]

in my opinion, the whole left vs. right debate is a smokescreen encouraged by the power structure to keep folks from recognizing that the real enemy is the leviathan state, in all its permutations, federal, state, and local.

[Quiet Reflections]

in my opinion, the whole left vs. right debate is a smokescreen encouraged by the power structure to keep folks from recognizing that the real enemy is the leviathan state, in all its permutations, federal, state, and local.
always has been ,always will be

[onmyknees]

I really want to see Erika's these days. :lol:

~BB~


Why ? She's self medicating and in therapy ......in other words, she's veering sharply left. lol

[Cecil Rhodes]

I stand in front of the line at the Voting Booth after showing my Voter I.D. Card . I am always the 1st in line at my polling place .:wiggle::wiggle::wiggle:

[winston93]

anywhere but the left, but if i lived in the us i'd probably be considered a liberal

[Prospero]

Some people don't get it. The leviathan state? Rather the threat is from unnnalloyed markets and capitalism - big business. Put simple we need regulation of business to stop the mutlinationals steam rollering ordinary people back to feudal times - put simply if Government doesn't stand between business and ordinary people, a new form of slavery is in the wind.

[Cecil Rhodes]

Some people don't get it. The leviathan state? Rather the threat is from unnnalloyed markets and capitalism - big business. Put simple we need regulation of business to stop the mutlinationals steam rollering ordinary people back to feudal times - put simply if Government doesn't stand between business and ordinary people, a new form of slavery is in the wind.

Darn Prospero, i thought most of your posts were Communist leaning but that last post was definately Fascit in nature .

[broncofan]

I don't think fascistic because fascism uses corporate power and bureaucracy as a means of stripping individual rights. He is advocating a left of center position that recognizes that there will not be an effective worker's movement, a revolution of the proletariat, and equal ownership of the means of production. Rather you need a government to break barriers to entry and whittle away market failures that the wealthy use to their advantage because of their superior market position.

[BluegrassCat]

A centrist. :)

[Stavros]

Surely that first chart was Eds?

Oops! It is now obvious. I probably thought it was just a sample.

Some of the questions I answered would probably have put me in the right-wing libertarian block, there was only one page when all of my answers were the same, on the others they varied a lot and mostly it was either a choice between strongly agree/disagree -on some issues I don't feel strongly about it was either agree/disagree but there was no option for 'don't know', which probably would have created a small circle or fence in the middle for people to sit on, and in my experience there are usually a lot of undecided voters, or voters who want something both parties have to offer, than voters committed one side or the other. Or that's what they say.

[Prospero]

Thanks for your post Bronco. Indeed. I do not want a proletariat revolution etc... for we have seen from history where that leads. What I feel the West needs (not just America) is a re-assertion and revitalisation of the rights of ordinary working men and women to organise in unions if they wish, to resist the worst excesses of capitalism and for the Government to act to place some regulations in place to prevent a repeat of the economic crisis we saw a few years ago - bought about by a long period of de-regulation of the financial markets and by unconstrained bad behaviour across the financial sector. That de-regulation, of course, happened under both Democrat and Republican administrations.

I don't see the prospect for this under a re-elected Democrat administration, but i see the further removal of any controls on the free market and much else in the wind that is catastrophic for America and the wider world if the GOP in it's present extremist configuration are elected.

I am convinced it would be better for Obama to be re-elected and the Democrats to regain control of both houses than any other possibiiity.

All the airy-fairy libertarian nonsense that is puffed around this forum by some posters - old and new - sometimes in a haze of drug smoke is just pie-in-the-sky.

And a refusal to face up to the reality of the political scene - and just saying voting makes no difference, they are all the same etc - is always a gesture towards allowing the worst to happen. It's deeply immature.

[Ben]

I'm not sure where I stand politically.
I support gun rights, gun ownership. So, am I a so-called conservative?
I waver on the death penalty. Does that make me a Liberal-Conservative? :)
I don't support abortion. I mean, no one is for abortion. Nobody. But I support a woman's right to choose. Does that make me so-called Libertarian?
I'm in favor of gay and transgender rights. Does that make me a radical lefty????
I support public healthcare. Now I must be left on that issue.
I support protecting the natural world. Does that make me liberal or conservative? I mean, Republican President Richard Nixon started the EPA.
So, Republicans did move left in the 70s because of what was going on in American culture at the time. (Politicians are swayed by movements. I mean, they've a dual constituency: the population and the virtual Senate. Here is Noam Chomsky on what the virtual Senate is: "The 'virtual senate' consists of investors and lenders. They can effectively decide social and economic policy by capital flight, attacks on currency that undermine the economy, and other means that have been provided by the neoliberal framework of the past thirty years.")
I don't support free trade. So, does that make me a conservative or a liberal? I mean, isn't free trade and the free movement of capital antithetical to actual conservatism?
And we should remember: conservatism came out of classical liberalism.
So, maybe these terms are meaningless. They are mere distractions and dividing points. Who knows.

[broncofan]

I think de-regulation in general is a bad trend and needs to be opposed. In this country we regulate a great deal of economic activity through delegation to administrative agencies. The reason is because the market does not always provide the proper incentives for decent behavior. For instance, if we did not have a Department of Transportation, we probably would have many cars without airbags and seatbelts would not be a mandate. They would have only been provided when public opinion reached a critical mass and people refused to buy cheaper but less safe cars.

Another industry where we see a lot of "perverse incentives" is in banking. Regulators require banks to have certain capital requirements, and to weight their assets based on risk so that they know how solvent they are. Further, as we've seen when individuals who originate loans no longer have an interest in the creditworthiness of the borrower, the rate of default goes up tremendously. And credit default swaps? The people who purchased these insurance instruments did not have an insurable interest in them. This means swaps provided them a payment in the case of a massive default of mortgage home loans when they did not actually have these home loans in their portfolio. As a result, they were not being used as portfolio insurance because they were not hedging any particular position. So paradoxically, insurance was created to escalate risk.

Why do banks takes risks they cannot afford to take? They are insured by the government. This insurance actually lowers the interest rate they have to pay on checking accounts because those depositing their money have less concern about the bank going belly up, and so a bank's cost of funds are cheaper. This is a subsidy to the bank, and this safety net provides them the incentive to increase the number of loans they make to push the envelope since their losses are insured.

What about the Civil Rights Act? This is a commercial regulation and was passed pursuant to commerce clause powers. The paradigm for invoking the enforcement mechanisms of the regulatory state exist most prominently when you have collective action problems. In the South prior to 1964, restaurants were afraid of integrating and the market was not shall we say promoting the best values of humanity. Perhaps all restaurant would prefer to be racially integrated but were afraid that if they were the first to de-segregate, the public would speak and proprietors would not like what it had to say. How do you break such a bad cycle of behavior without government?

[Prospero]

A good piece of analysis from The New Republic magazine on how the new Hard Right GOP destroyed its moderates.

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/108150/the-revolution-eats-its-own#


How the GOP Destroyed its Moderates
Jonathan Chait
October 5, 2012

Rule And Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party
By Geoffrey Kabaservice
(Oxford University Press, 482 pp., $29.95)

Patriots
By David Frum
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 484 pp., $16.99)


MITT ROMNEY HAS BEEN running for president as the Republican nominee, de facto or de jure, for eight months now, and the grand historical joke of it has not yet worn off. A party that has set itself to frantically, fanatically expunge its moderates, quasi-moderates, suspected moderates, and fellow travelers of moderates chose as its standard bearer the lineal heir, biographically and genealogically, to its moderate tradition. It entrusted its holy crusade to repeal Barack Obama’s hated health-care law to the man who had inspired it and run, four years before, promising to do the same for the rest of America. The man and his historical moment could not be more incongruous. It was as if the Mongol tribes of the thirteenth century, setting out to pillage their way across the Asian steppe, had somehow chosen Mahatma Gandhi as their supreme khan.

Romney’s capture of the nomination required an incredible confluence of good fortune. Any one of several Republicans—Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan—could have outflanked Romney in both grassroots enthusiasm and establishment support but chose not to run. The one candidate with the standing and financial reach to challenge him who did grasp for the prize, Rick Perry, performed his duties with such comic, stammering ineptitude that his final oops-de-grace by that point was not even startling. What remained to challenge Romney was a gaggle of third-raters lacking the money or the rudimentary organization even to get their name on the ballot everywhere. Still, running even against the likes of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum (which is to say, running essentially unopposed), Romney still trudged laboriously to victory after endless weeks.

But there is another way to make at least some sense of the Romney nomination.



IT HAS TO DO WITH the strange and sad fate of Republican moderation. After all, moderates, or at least relative moderates, do continue to exist in the Republican Party. They merely do not exercise power in any meaningful, open way. They provide off-the-record quotations to reporters, expressing unease over whichever radical turn the party has taken at any given moment. They can be found in Washington and elsewhere rolling their eyes at their colleagues. The odd figure with nothing left to lose—say, a senator who has lost a primary challenge—may even deliver a forceful assault on the party’s uncompromising direction.

For the most part, though, Republican moderation is a kind of secret creed, a freemasonry of the right. It lacks institutions that might legitimize it, or even a language to express itself. And since conservatism is the only acceptable ideology, the party has no open arguments with itself. Thus the “debate” in the Republican Party is entirely between genuine ideological warriors and unwilling conscripts, with intraparty skirmishes generally taking the form of hunts for secret heresies.

In this sense, Romney’s capture of the nomination is perfectly emblematic of the state of the party. Conservative activists spent months resisting Romney, sometimes furiously, despite the fact that he was defending no positions that they disagreed with. Across the entire ideological spectrum—in social, economic, and foreign policy—Romney stood shoulder to shoulder with his party’s reactionary wing. When Romney took on his hapless opponents, he assailed them from the right, as soft on immigration or anti-capitalist. The sole point of hesitation centered on conservatives’ suspicion that Romney did not actually believe what he was saying.



FIFTY YEARS AGO, the conservative movement, far from holding a monopoly on acceptable thought within the GOP, was merely one tribe vying for power within it, and not even the largest one. Geoffrey Kabaservice’s fine book tells the story of the slow extinction of the party’s moderate and liberal wings. The conservative movement, he shows in often gruesome detail, took control of the party in large part due to an imbalance of passion. The rightists had strong and clearly defined principles and a willingness to fight for them, while the moderates lacked both. Meeting by meeting, caucus by caucus, the conservative minority wrested control of the party apparatus. Sometimes this happened through physical force or the threat thereof. (Anybody who recalls the “Brooks Brothers riot” during the 2000 election imbroglio in Florida, when a Republican mob shut down a vote recount in Dade County, will find many of Kabaservice’s scenes familiar.) More often, the conservatives won out by packing meetings, staying until everybody else was exhausted, and other classic methods of organized fanatics. The moderates lacked the ideological self-confidence to wage these fights with equal gusto, and battle by battle they lost ground until finally there was nowhere left to stand within the party.

Republican moderates in the early 1960s held a place of influence and comfort within their party that is hard to imagine today. The worldview of the party’s Rockefeller faction was formed and propagated with the help of organizations such as the Ripon Society, Republican Advance, and the Committee on Economic Development, and publications such as the New York Herald Tribune, Confluence, and Advance. And when the great wave of the Goldwater movement arrived in the early 1960s, with the explicit goal of cleansing the party of moderates and re-making it in the image of monolithic conservatism, the moderates fought back, albeit using more gentlemanly methods than those often employed against them.

Moderates at the GOP convention in 1964 proposed a resolution condemning extremism of all varieties. Goldwater supporters voted it down, their position echoed by the candidate’s famous declaration that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and that “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Many moderates stalked out of the convention, including Michigan Governor George Romney and his teenage son, Mitt. Romney subsequently penned a twelve-page letter to Goldwater explaining why he had not endorsed him. When conservatives defeated moderate California Senator Thomas Kuchel, he lashed out at what he called a “fanatical neo-fascist political cult” in the grips of a “strange mixture of corrosive hatred and sickening fear.”

Following the climactic showdown in 1964, the demise of the moderates is the story of a very long bout with a terminal disease. The moderates enjoyed a brief renaissance in the wake of Goldwater’s crushing defeat by Lyndon Johnson, and they counted disproportionately among the party’s new faces in its successful comeback in the midterm elections of 1966. Richard Nixon helped to heal the party’s internal breach by straddling its wings. But once in office, Kabaservice argues, Nixon eventually settled upon a populist strategy that set him irrevocably against his own party’s moderates, even plotting to deny funding and support to insufficiently conservative members of the party, including Lenore Romney (of whom Nixon bitterly noted in private that “she’s not one of us”).

The moderate Republican tradition had always leaned heavily on elitism, which abhorred demagoguery and the crude appeals to self-interest that they correctly identified with the machine hacks and Southern racists of the Democratic Party. Nixon’s strategy of counting upon white resentment began to identify the party as a less congenial place for thoughtful, educated people. One momentous episode centered around Nixon’s Supreme Court nomination of Harrold Carswell, who was not only a reactionary segregationist but an obvious lightweight. Moderate Republicans refused to support him, one of Nixon’s aides reported, because “they think he’s a boob, a dummy. And what counter is there to that? He is.” Senator Roman Hruska defended Carswell, in a comment that would grow infamous, by asserting that “there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?”

Nixon’s re-branding of the party helped set in motion a long-term political swap, in which Republicans slowly lost support among white voters with a college education while gaining traction among the white working class. The transformation is now so complete that Rick Santorum can proudly announce “we will never have the elite, ‘smart’ people on our side”—“smart” referring not to native intelligence, but to those who aspire to a certain level of intellectual respectability. The party’s ideological and sociological evolutions have run in tandem, driving a progressively wider gulf between the Republicans and the technocracy.

Ronald Reagan supplied to conservative activists proof of the hypothesis that they had eagerly put forward through Goldwater: that a natural conservative majority existed among the public. For the last three decades, Reaganism has dominated the party’s self-conception to the degree that it is not possible within the party to dispute an idea identified with him. Intra-GOP arguments often divide over which side can more rightfully claim to be his heir, but like a religious text the merits of Reaganism itself lie beyond dispute. Alumni of the Ripon Society—the most influential of the moderate Republican organizations of the 1960s—took an informal poll of themselves in 2002 (a year when the GOP’s prestige had reached a recent apogee in the wake of the 9/11 attacks), and they discovered that three-quarters identified themselves by this point as independents or Democrats.

What remains of “moderation” within the party has taken on a definition very distinct from the meaning that it held originally. Unlike the moderate and liberal Republicans of yore, today’s “moderates” generally identify themselves as conservative. They are simply less so. The most recent wave of ideological re-making, undertaken since 2002, has seen a series of primary challenges largely replacing conservatives such as Bob Inglis, Richard Lugar, and Robert Bennett with even more implacably conservative Republicans.

What stands out in these contests is the lack of open ideological conflict. In debates within the party, both sides inevitably grasp for the conservative mantle. The virtues of the anti-government creed (except, of course, for the military and some aspects of social regulation) have no recognized limits. An incumbent challenged from the right can survive on other grounds—familiarity, likeability, the persuasive recantation of any past heresies; but the ideological ground on which he can stand has disappeared. Moderation can be successfully denied, but it cannot be defended.



DESPITE THE MISERY of continuous political defeat, moderate Republicanism—moderate by contemporary standards, at any rate—is not intellectually dead. Quite the opposite, in fact. The movement in recent years has seen a flowering of bright, creative, deeply empirical thinkers, who grapple with liberal arguments rather than retreat into an ideological cocoon, and attempt to re-fashion a program for their party that responds to real-world conditions rather than treat anti-government dogma as an eternal and axiomatic truth.

This collection of figures might seem like the promising core of a real reform movement, with the policy chops and prestige to slow down, if not reverse, the party’s deepening radicalism. Alas, any evidence of their influence at work is hard to detect. And a closer examination reveals why this is so.

In the waning years of the Bush administration, as the Republicans lost control of the Congress in 2006 and squandered its foreign policy credibility in Iraq, conservatives swiftly turned against the president they had once treated with something close to worship. The vast majority of them settled upon the same indictment that they had leveled against Bush’s father: he had failed because he had abandoned the anti-government faith. What had been tiny caveats in the right’s fulsome embrace of Bush in 2004—his passage of a prescription-drug benefit and education reform, his self-identification as a “compassionate conservative”—blossomed into evidence of a wholesale betrayal.

But the small handful of moderates developed a very different critique. They noticed that a wide chasm had opened up between the party’s increasingly working-class voting coalition and its policy agenda centered around regressive income tax cuts. The Republican economic agenda under Bush had not delivered income gains to its constituents, and it had ignored festering social problems like health care. Both political necessity and the weight of the evidence, they argued, required that the party alter its course.

As the Bush administration came to a close, and the party set out to decide its way forward, the moderates may have been hopelessly outnumbered and outshouted by the Rush Limbaughs and Wall Street Journal editorial pages and other voices of right-wing purity, but they had a relatively coherent analysis and at least a small place at the party table. In the wake of two consecutive election wipeouts, the last developing amidst the humiliating and almost surreal anti-intellectualism of Sarah Palin, it seemed possible to imagine, as the Obama administration dawned, that Republican elites might at least consider the proposition offered by their moderates.

But instead of halting or reversing its long march to the right, the GOP accelerated it, on every item of the Obama domestic agenda. In 2008, John McCain advocated a cap-and-trade bill to control climate change, but McCain and all his GOP allies abandoned it, and even turned against the whole notion of attempting to limit carbon emissions. (Among the public, the percentage of Republicans saying they believed that there was “solid evidence” that the Earth’s temperature was increasing fell from 59 percent in 2006 to 35 percent in 2009.) The party had previously advocated monetary and fiscal stimulus in response to an economic slowdown, but under Obama it dusted off obscure theories previously associated only with Ron Paul and the party’s fringe. The health-care reform approach developed by Romney in Massachusetts, which Romney himself had advocated as a national model during his 2008 presidential campaign to barely any complaint from within his party, now became a socialist horror.

CONSERVATIVES exerted enormous pressure on their party to follow its new and more radical line, and the pressure quickly grew unbearable not only for Republicans in elected office but for many moderate intellectuals as well. The most high-profile of these figures was David Frum. In some ways he is also the most surprising.

In 1994, Frum wrote a book called Dead Right, a treatise urging the GOP to return to a more pure form of limited government conservatism. He joined the Bush administration in 2001 as a speechwriter, and two years later left to assume a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and write a fawning memoir of Bush titled The Right Man. Like many conservatives in the waning years of the Bush administration, he turned against the administration that he once supported so fervently. But unlike most of them, Frum did not conclude that Bush had failed because he had abandoned the true faith of the conservative creed. In 2008, he wrote Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, which took a distinctly more pragmatic line than he had advocated before, but still placed him within the bounds of conservative-movement thought, albeit clinging to its left edge.

The GOP’s rightward lurch in response to the Obama administration flung Frum right off. AEI fired Frum in 2010, after he castigated the GOP for launching a holy war against health care reform rather than negotiate with Democrats who were desperate for bipartisan concord. (AEI had very much thrown itself into the holy war cause.) Intellectually, the party had left Frum, as he found himself defending its old positions on health care, climate change, and stimulus and monetary policy against its new ones.

Emotionally, though, Frum had left the party. Patriots, his new self-published novel, expresses in fictional form a sharper criticism of conservatism than his policy tract had done. The story centers on Walter Schotzke, a ne’er-do-well heir who stumbles into a fictionalized version of the Republican Party. Walter takes a job working for a Northeastern moderate “Constitutionalist”—the GOP in this universe—who, working alongside a McCain-like president, attempts to see through the sort of middle-ground agenda that Frum would like. But Schotzke is stymied by a network of cynical movement conservatives spreading their own pseudo-facts, and creating irresistible career incentives for its foot soldiers to comply with the dubious cause.

The first line of the novel (“I didn’t get the job through merit”) subverts the entire Randian worship of Job Creators that has dominated contemporary Republican cant. Frum’s portrait of Washington—and, especially, the precincts of official conservative Washington in which he spent most of his career—is savage. (As a novel, Patriots is at about the level one might expect from a non-novelist like Frum, but the unremarkable story is mainly a vehicle for Frum’s well-informed Washington anthropology.) The self-interest of the right-wing donor base, the sensationalism of the right-wing media, and the careerism of the movement’s foot soldiers come together in Frum’s interesting narrative to create a Republican world the internal reality of which barely intersects with that of the real world, an apparatus more like the Comintern than a properly functioning party in a mature democracy. The only sense of Republican loyalty one can find in Patriots is loyalty to a party that no longer exists and cannot exist without blowing up and reconstructing the current version.

Frum is not the only conservative who has found himself irreconcilably opposed to the GOP and the conservative movement. Bruce Bartlett, a fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, lost his post for his fierce criticisms of Republican budgeting in the Bush era. Josh Barro left the Manhattan Institute. Frum has approached his dilemma in more patient (and perhaps more immodest) fashion, conceiving of himself as the curator of a kind of Republican Party in exile, one whose opportunity to exert influence will come only after the party suffers a sufficiently dire and prolonged setback. A colleague of his once compared Frum’s project to “monks preserving knowledge during the Dark Ages.” For the time being, his wing of estranged moderates has sutured themselves off from their former allies, persevering in their ability to re-think moderate Republicanism, but depriving themselves of any immediate chance to exert influence within the party.



IF FRUM AND HIS fellow exiles have maintained a coherent analysis but forfeited their chance to affect the Republicans, a larger and more influential coterie of moderate conservatives has done the opposite. Columnists such as David Brooks, Michael Gerson, and Ross Douthat have formulated a serious and often stinging critique of the GOP’s radical direction, and, with varying degrees of seriousness and specificity, laid out an alternative path. What they have failed to do is to face up to the cold reality that the alternative they propose diverges wildly from the actually existing Republican Party. They have instead convinced themselves that their reform crusade has succeeded, or will soon succeed. They consign the massive impediments before them to a small corner of their mental space. They invoke the Republican Party that they hypothesize as though it were real, and the real Republican Party as though it were hypothetical.

Brooks has spent most of the Obama administration harping relentlessly for a bipartisan agreement to reduce the budget deficit, with higher taxes and lower entitlement spending. For years he pined away for the Republican Party to come around to his view, and it all came to a head last summer, when Obama offered House Republicans a budget deal far more favorable than even the various bipartisan agreements wafting around the Capitol. Suddenly Brooks boiled over in frustration in one July column. “If the debt ceiling talks fail, independent voters will see that Democrats were willing to compromise but Republicans were not,” he wrote, “they will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern. And they will be right.”

Exactly this result transpired. Democrats had been willing to compromise but Republicans had not. But Brooks proved constitutionally incapable of sustaining his own conclusion. That the Republicans were unfit to govern was something that he could contemplate as a conditional development, but when the moment arrived he could not follow through, and he has since fallen back to wistful hopes for compromise on all sides.

Gerson, like Frum, is a former speechwriter for the Bush administration. Unlike Frum, he has undergone no public re-thinking or disillusionment with the previous administration, of which he remains a staunch defender. He played a seminal role in the development of “compassionate conservatism” as a political slogan and, in a few cases, actual programmatic adjustments. Since the Bush administration, Gerson has settled into the role of keeper of the compassionate conservative flame. His strategy has centered around a resolute insistence, in the face of a total abandonment by the party, that his side is prevailing.

So, for instance, Gerson wrote a typical column earlier this year positing that the GOP was divided between (bad, radical) Rejectionist Conservatism and (moderate, beneficent) Reform Conservatism, the latter epitomized by Paul Ryan. According to Gerson, the latter “would replace Obamacare, for example, rather than simply abolish it,” when in fact the budget plan designed by Ryan would repeal Obamacare, not replace it, and leave no fiscal place for any substitute. Likewise, Gerson wrote that “in exchange for serious Medicare reform, for example, [Reform Conservatism] would certainly accept a higher portion of GDP taken in taxes to ease cuts in discretionary spending.” This would come as news to the staffers on the bipartisan deficit commission who tried to forge just such an agreement, only to have Ryan shoot it down.



DOUTHAT represents the most tragic case. He is at once a deeply religious social conservative (and thus unalterably attached to the Republican Party) and a rigorous analyst of American politics. Unlike Gerson and Brooks, who fill the gap between their moderate dreams and the hard realities of a radical party with gauzy rhetoric, Douthat bracingly engages with criticism. It is an admirable willingness that leaves him exposed to constant repudiation by reality.

In 2005, he and Reihan Salam wrote an attention-grabbing cover story for The Weekly Standard that presciently identified the exhaustion of Bush’s agenda, still three years before the end of his term, and acutely laid out the possible paths the party could follow. The first was to follow its path of tax cuts and spending, especially on defense; the second was to “return to a purer, more fiscally austere faith, even if it means ceding political power, and wait for the looming entitlement crisis to convince Americans of the wisdom of repealing the New Deal”; and the third was to address the economic dilemmas that had festered under Bush. They urged the third course, which would revolve around expanded support for working-class families and “a serious effort to extend health insurance to all Americans,” of which Douthat and Salam offered Romney’s successful reform in Massachusetts as the most promising model.

But the direction chosen by the GOP is unequivocal: it has rejected their advice, in its broader contours and in its particulars. Rather than deepen their commitment to policies such as tax credits for families with children, Republicans have suddenly turned against their own handiwork, complaining that they created parasites free of the income-tax rolls. Rather than commit themselves to universal health care, perhaps based on Romneycare, the party has recoiled against the goal as socialism and the program as unconstitutional. It has embraced exactly the “purer, more fiscally austere faith” that they warned against.

Douthat has hardly ignored these developments, but he has persisted in reading the gale-force ideological headwinds as a faint crossbreeze. He has admirably implored Republicans not merely to repeal Obamacare but to replace it with a genuine alternative. “If the Republicans win the White House and the Senate and then somehow manage to repeal Obamacare without putting any significant reforms in its place,” he wrote in July, “it will represent not only policy malpractice, but a moral scandal as well.” But there is no “if” about this. When Douthat wrote those words, the Ryan budget that the entire party had embraced had already laid out its governing vision, and it did not include allocated resources to expand coverage. Romney has since stated that the fifty million uninsured Americans do not need access to regular medical care, since their ability to get treatment when they reach the emergency room is sufficient. Douthat can muster outrage against this decision, but only by imagining it as a hypothetical possibility.

In August 2008, Douthat saw potential in “Tim Pawlenty or Eric Cantor, both of whom seem much more in sync with the broad thesis of Grand New Party [the book that grew from his article] than your average Republican pol, even if neither of them are running around screaming about wage subsidies or the weighted-student formula.” He subsequently enthused about the potential for Sarah Palin to take up his crusade: “Sarah Palin looks like a perfect face for the sort of Republican Party I want to support: She’s a pro-life working mom; she’s tough on corruption and government waste without being a doctrinaire Norquistian on taxes; she’s more supportive of gay rights than the current GOP orthodoxy (while stopping short of backing same-sex marriage); she has a more conservationist record than your typical GOP pol, but supports drilling in ANWAR.”

ventually Douthat concluded that neither Pawlenty nor Palin had really tried to run on the sort of reform ideas that he advocated. Palin “became the caricature” her critics had seen in her all along, and Pawlenty, who ran an orthodox campaign of Bushonomics, “had no one to blame but himself.” (In the most recent sign that he may not be destined to lead a new pro-reform, working-class-friendly conservatism, Pawlenty has now signed up to head the banking lobby.) But as soon as one potential champion disappeared, a new one would replace him. Douthat has developed a qualified but persistent enthusiasm for Paul Ryan. He sees past Ryan’s deep roots in Ayn Rand and supply-side economics, his extensive record of supporting spendthrift tax cuts for the rich and sabotaging bipartisan compromises, and his extreme vagueness about everything save his specific intentions to cut tax rates for the rich and slash spending for the poor and the sick—Douthat sees past all of this to envision, hidden in the massive gaps in Ryan’s proposals, a wonkish compromiser who will lead his party toward the center.

After Ryan delivered a dishonest and vacuous address before the Republican National Convention, Douthat conceded that “that Paul Ryan—the policy entrepreneur, the risk-taking wonk, the man who’s willing to get out ahead of his own party—is not the Paul Ryan who appeared on the convention stage last night.” But he insisted that just as Sarah Palin’s exposure as an anti-intellectual culture warrior did not vindicate critics who identified her as such all along, so Ryan’s fulfillment of the expectations set by his critics was not “proof that they’ve been right about him all along.” Douthat is genuinely puzzled that the Republican politicians he gazes upon so hopefully turn out in the end to be advocates of an indefensible agenda. The mystifying pattern keeps repeating itself.



THE MODERATES, either in exile or in a state of permanent denial, believe that their day will eventually come. Ultimately, they are probably right about this. The GOP cannot keep moving rightward indefinitely. As the economist Herbert Stein put it, any trend that can’t go on forever, won’t. Stein himself was a paradigmatic Republican moderate, one of the sole figures in his party of any standing openly to oppose the GOP’s embrace of supply-side economics and other forms of magical thinking. He died in 1999 an almost totally marginal figure within the party, so his famous maxim may offer limited comfort.

And eventually is a very long time. By the time the rightward migration of the party has finally halted, the definition of Republican “moderate” will likely have corroded beyond all recognition. Already the extremism of the party has advanced to such a point that its most fervent elements are identified less by their ideology—which is nearly impossible to distinguish any more from that of the mainstream—than by the degree to which their detachment from reality departs from paranoia as a mere figure of speech and approaches actual, clinical paranoia. “Radical” Republicans believe that Obama has created death panels, may have been secretly born overseas, and is plotting a United Nations invasion. The “mainstream” Republicans believe in goldbuggery and a massive plot by climate scientists, and deny the dramatic rise in income inequality in America.

Recently a voter at a forum asked Paul Ryan about “the death panels that we’re going to have.” Ryan framed his answer as a mere semantic disagreement. “That’s not the word I’d choose to use to describe it. It’s actually called. It’s actually called, so in Medicare, what I refer to as this board of fifteen bureaucrats. It’s called the Independent Payment Advisory Board.” When a tape emerged recently of Romney regaling donors with a fever dream that 47 percent of the country had grown irrevocably dependent on government, it later emerged that he had drawn the notion of the moocher half-nation from conversations with Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute. Here, then, was the most moderate candidate in the party’s presidential field, in conjunction with the president of its most prestigious think tank, producing a bizarre worldview of plutocratic hallucination.

It was a horrifying peek into the intellectual state of one of our two major parties, but only a peek. The changes in a party remain largely obscured when it is out of power. Many Americans found themselves shocked by the obstinate, anti-empirical methods of George W. Bush, who seemed in 2000 like a sensible man surrounded by establishmentarians. But in the GOP’s exile since the first Bush administration, the party had determined that its misfortune occurred entirely because its last president (George H.W. Bush) had betrayed the true faith. Through a thousand op-eds and foundation panels and talk radio sermons, the Republicans undertook a vast ritual of purification. But they lacked power to implement their own agenda, and so the full results of the transformation lay mostly hidden from sight until they revealed themselves. This time its radicalization in exile has occurred even more swiftly, the final results awaiting only the party’s chance to exert power once again. How long can the current respite last?

Jonathan Chait is a daily columnist for New York. This article appeared in the October 25, 2012 issue of The New Republic under the headline “The Revolution Eats its Own.”

[loveboof]

This is mine.. not sure how accurate it is though because I don't usually like extremes in these sort of questionnaires! lol

[Willie Escalade]

Here's mine right here. I'm hot linking it, so I might have to repost it when I get on my computer...

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8051/8090393305_cc4536ce6b_o.png

[loveboof]

Here's mine right here. I'm hot linking it, so I might have to repost it when I get on my computer...



Looks like you hold some fairly sensible views on things.. It's almost exactly the same as mine lol

[buttslinger]

T've taken the liberty to scan Onmyknee's chart, here are the results.
He's outr go-to guy when it comes to .......whatever it is he's talking about.

[danthepoetman]

Fun!
Here is mine...

[maxpower]

Here is mine:

[Jericho]

Bunch a bleedin' lefties!

[loveboof]

Bunch a bleedin' lefties!

That has actually made me a bit sceptical of the balance in the test.

Is it weighted to make everyone think they're more to the left than their governments. How impartial are the results? (has OMK taken the questionnaire?)

[fred41]

Of course it can't really be all that accurate,but it's fun anyway.


Here's mine:

[Jericho]

How impartial are the results? (has OMK taken the questionnaire?)

Yeah, it showed he was a leftie.
That's why he hasn't posted it! :hide-1:

[robertlouis]

Here's mine.

Could have been swayed by a perfect holiday in the far east, but it seems pretty bang on....

And the fact that I am more or less aligned with Prospero won't surprise people either!

[Prospero]

Alignment indeed - but lest people get the wrong idea Robert louis and i are not the same person under two different names. Just two Britons who have been vouchsafed the truth about things (lol)

[danthepoetman]

This is my secret wish. But I don't have the tugs to make it happen -nor the tv stations, Fox or CNN, like the Republicans...