Now, I can’t be accused of being a political moderate. In fact, I’m so far left that my childhood nickname was Pinky von Redsickle. In high-school I was voted “Most Likely to Defect.”
But it seems to me that the big shift in American politics was not away from the left, but away from the center. The left, after all, is about as big as it ever was, if not as strong or as organized as in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
The extreme right, especially as measured in terms of religious and social issues, is both bigger and stronger than ever. But we’ve got a dwindling supply of people in power who, say, support both lower taxes and the right of a woman to choose, even though there are still plenty who would agree with both those positions.
This is partially the result of the terrifically effective grassroots takeover of the Republican political machine by social conservatives beginning probably with Reagan and coming into its own during the Great Congressional Turnover of 1994. It’s been supported recently by well-funded political action committees. In my own state of Kansas, where I used to joke that there were three political parties, the Conservative Republicans, the Moderate Republicans, and the Democrats, I can now in pretty good conscience say there’s really only one: the Conservative Republicans, who control just about everything except the governor’s mansion.
This last week’s primaries saw a moderate Republican with a strong record for growth and revitalization on the civic level soundly trounced by an incumbent in the state Senate so far to the right that she gained national attention by trying to police what a university professor could teach in his human sexuality class. Her campaign was aided by a good deal of grassroots support, but also by a Washington-based anti-tax group funded largely by Koch Industries, a Kansas-based, privately-held (thus the incentive to abolish most if not all taxes, especially for the uber-wealthy) conglomerate.
This despite the fact that moderate Republicans probably make up the majority of Kansans when it comes right down to it. The conservative/moderate split is so severe in local politics that we actually elected a Democrat to the governorship because the Republican vote was so fractured (and, admittedly, Sebelius ran a damn good campaign).
While the shift to the extreme right is a bit satisfying since it tends to split votes on the right wing, it demonstrates the lengths the conservative ideologues will go to to wield power, and how ineffective merely being the majority can be when you’re politcal machine gets hijacked out from under you.
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