“Americans are told that we have only two choices – Democrat or Republican – and that we must subscribe wholesale to policy views the parties hold, views that have been pulled further and further toward the extremes.”
Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema on why she left the Democratic Party and reregistered as an Independent.
Krysten Sinema and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin were considered Democratic “moderates” within their party, at least according to the label they were given by most of the press. With Raphael Warnock’s victory in Georgia, the Democratic Party took a clear majority in the Senate, and as now-Independent Sinema stated that she would still caucus with the Dems, not much really changed by her move to “Independent.” With an abysmal 19% approval rating among Arizona Democrats, Sinema – once a member of the Green Party – faced an almost insurmountable barrier to her generating the Democratic primary vote for her 2024 reelection bid. I wonder why she moved out of the Democratic Party. Hmmmmm?
But her statement above is worthy of analysis, nonetheless. I am trying to picture how a MAGA-dominated party and Democratic Party are equally increasingly reflecting extremes. Perhaps we should look at the salient issues, one by one, to see how extremists have “taken over” these stalwart old parties.
Even as a majority of Americans believe that semiautomatic assault weapons need to be taken off the streets, a basic part of Democratic gun policy, except for a highly ineffectual red flag law, Republicans continue to reject meaningful gun control… even as gun crimes rise (the major upward tick of crime in the United States) across the land. The Trump reconfigured Supreme Court has made carrying concealed firearms much easier, and GOP-controlled legislatures everywhere have loosened gun laws continuously. Stand your ground. Open carry. Concealed carry. Etc. So if they are so concerned with crime rates, why are Republicans complaining about crime when they make the most basic tool of violent criminals easier to access and carry?
But GOP is the main support of the police, hardly the Democrats they claim. Other than to push for equal application of the law to everyone, Dems are not trying to “defund the police”; that is not remotely a part of the Democratic platform even as Republicans pretend that it is. But as the Capitol Police recently received medals for their actions on January 6, 2021, in which some of them died and many of them were seriously injured, they refused to shake the hands of the GOP leaders whose lives they saved, reserving that honor solely for Democrats. GOP policy is to shake off that Capitol attack and case the insurrectionists who inflicted their violence on the police, despite the hundreds of criminal convictions, as “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.” Hardly supportive of police efforts.
Universal healthcare, a Dem favorite? Aside from the fact that we are the only major democracy without it, we all need to remember that uber-Republican Richard Nixon proposed universal healthcare in 1974. Healthcare costs are still rising for most of us. So are costs in general that are attributable to the Ukraine War, supply chain shortages, the higher price for agricultural products because of irrigation water shortages and increases in consumer demand… with no meaningful policy from the GOP to contain those costs. Blame sure. Present solutions. Not so much.
Sure, Dems support raising the federal $7.25/hour minimum wage – unchanged for well over a decade – while Republicans vote consistently against that (as did Sinema), but that doesn’t seem particularly extreme. As Dems continue to support efforts to tackle climate change, despite the tsunami of evidence (more intense tropical storms, coastal erosion, record heat, wildfires from dried out forests, flooding in some areas with crop-killing aridification in others, etc., etc.), Republicans continue to marginalize the threat and vote against legislation intended to counter this existential threat. The GOP has opposed every effort since Ronald Reagan to fix our very broken immigration laws, even rejecting solutions from Republican presidents!
As those pre-pandemic new jobs promised after the massive GOP-led 2017 corporate tax cut (the rate dropped from 35% to 21%) never appeared, the resulting federal deficits did… explosively! As Republicans continue to oppose COVID measures, even school-required non-COVID vaccination mandates we have had since the 1950s, guess which party’s adherents have been impacted the most? One study, for example, published in September by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that so-called excess death rates, or deaths elevated beyond what is expected based on historical trends, were 76% higher in Florida and Ohio among Republicans than Democrats from March 2020 to December 2021.
The GOP is pledged to cut Social Security and Medicare, which sounds a bit strange and extreme given the support the GOP has traditionally garnered from seniors. They embrace anti-abortion laws, have moved the Supreme Court into a becoming a GOP operative which has also supported GOP bills across the land further to restrict voting rights. All of these notions required the Republican Party materially to alter the status quo and impose earth-shattering and unpopular new laws… taking it farther into the extreme.
As the titular head of the Republican Party embraces White Supremacists, antisemites and fierce QAnon/replacement theory believers, his entire party is supporting a backdoor effort – via anti-CRT laws and anti-“woke” cultural war issues – to marginalize minorities even further. With a constitution that favors rural vs urban voters (passed when the US was 94% rural), younger, minority and urban voters are increasingly disenfranchised through redistricting and the equal state representation in the Senate (where Wyoming with under 600,000 voters is the equal of California with 40 million), the tide is turning such that even this anomaly cannot stop the rise of these marginalized voters.
So, if we really want to be objective about which party has veered more to extremes (away from the moderate American middle) and see exactly how Republican legislatures have diluted Democratic candidates by gerrymandering and voting restrictions, take a long careful look at the above charts… and the now MAGA-controlled GOP (with or without Trump) is even more extreme than ever.
I’m Peter Dekom, and please do not mistake Senator Sinema’s true “I need to be reelected” move to become an Independent, described by her as a result of disenchantment with purported (but non-existent) extremists taking over the Democratic Party.
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