Immigration / November 20, 2024
The Increasingly Radical Left
Leftists commonly claim that the Right has become more extreme, but it’s the unhinged Left that has moved the Overton window.
The assessment by John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times was stark: “Whether or not progressives are ready to accept it, the evidence all points in one direction. America’s moderate voters have not deserted the Democrats; the party has pushed them away.”
Readers may remember a meme on X by Colin Wright that Elon Musk made famous; the one where he stands as a liberal whose political beliefs were just left of center in 2008, but by 2022 he was standing close by the conservative while his fellow liberal, now a “woke progressive,” shouted “Bigot!” at the rest of the world. Wright didn’t move a pixel, but the remainder of the political world shifted his position right of center. (Our Nate Jackson talked about this back when Musk made the viral tweet, noting, “It accurately sums up the experience of tens of millions of Americans over the last couple of decades, though it’s little surprise to see the lefties of Twitter come out of the woodwork to yell, ‘It’s exactly the opposite!’ That’s what polarization does.”)
However, this is really nothing new. Sixty years earlier, Ronald Reagan implied the same thing about his former party leaving him as the Democrats of his era moved the Overton window to the left in embracing the nanny state. In an article full of charts and graphs, Burn-Murdoch told a tale of how, on certain cultural issues, the “strong Democrats” have practically fallen off the chart. As Not the Bee puts it, “These data points are wild, and really show how conservatives were able to win so many elections.”
Among the issues Burn-Murdoch touches on are affirmative action and immigration, as they may represent the most extreme shifts. Prior to Barack Obama’s election, affirmative action wasn’t much of an issue, and surely many felt the practice had achieved its goals when we elected our first black president. (Being the stepparent of a Millennial, I can assure you that generation was colorblind when Obama was elected.) Instead, the idea of equality that affirmative action was supposed to promote has regressed into the demand for equity and the belief that past discrimination justifies future discrimination against those who were the oppressors. Given that we’ve also balkanized our culture into camps based on race, gender, LGBT, and so forth, everyone who’s not a white “cis” male can find their way into a grievance somewhere.
In this most recent election, people screamed they’d had enough of that division.
Similarly, immigration was thought of positively until the borders were opened wide, first when Obama was president and more so during the Biden-Harris administration. It was only far-left Democrats who thought this was a positive. Meanwhile, the rest of us grew tired of the increased crime and strife in big cities and small towns alike due to the invasion of thousands of illegals who had dubiously claimed “asylum.” Hence, we elected an immigration hardliner.
But we can’t discount the effect of a polarizing figure like Donald Trump, either. While there were pockets of resistance in the Reagan-Bush years, hatred by the Left of everything Republican began manifesting under George W. Bush during the War on Terror back in the aughts and really kicked into gear once Donald Trump improbably caused Hillary Clinton to bump her head on the glass ceiling. That’s when the world was introduced to what we call TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome. (Cue the bespectacled green-clad screaming woman we’ve seen on a million memes.)
Sadly, it appears that TDS may not go away at the end of Trump’s second four-year term — it will just morph into Vance-, DeSantis-, or some other-named Derangement Syndrome. This election reinforced the notion that America is a centrist nation, with the repudiation of the far left in this election likely followed by a rebellion against the Right if Donald Trump doesn’t explain the benefits of his agenda carefully enough over the next two to four years.
While the Left is convinced that those on the Right are the extremists, having the charts Burn-Murdoch shows, in an organ that’s maybe a touch to the left of center like the Financial Times, might start pulling that side a little bit back to reality. On the other hand, a Washington Post article just noted how difficult it is to move out of America to another English-speaking nation.
