In a NYT op-ed, Peter Wehner, a Reagan and double-Bush appointee, presents a thesis: "In the last two decades the Democratic Party has moved substantially further to the left than the Republican Party has shifted to the right. On most major issues the Republican Party hasn’t moved very much from where it was during the Gingrich era in the mid-1990s." That Republicans "have become more extreme over the years" is but a liberal myth, he insists; it is a "self-flattering but false narrative."
After suffering Wehner's torrential survey of political, social and cultural changes over the past 20 years, one comes to appreciate that Democrats are now bomb-throwing Bolsheviks and Republicans are still the mild, modest Gingrichites of the 1990s. A most convenient timeframe Wehner has chosen. Had he compared the conservative-progressive policies of the Obama administration to those of FDR, he would have found the same sort of conservative-progressive incrementalism; and had he compared today's GOP to President Eisenhower's era, he would have found that the radical right's "stupid" and "negligible" numbers, of which Eisenhower warned, have assumed control of the asylum.
Wehner adopts Bill Clinton as the gold standard of Democratic wisdom, which is odd. For I recall 1990s Republicans casting President Clinton as a far-leftist villain come to tyrannize America with his intolerable and malignant rule. The fact that the actual left often opposed Clinton and came to defend him only upon the mild Gingrichites' attempt to unseat a legitimately elected president never persuaded the right that the second millennium would end in anything but Clinton's Stalinist horror. Then Al Gore became the stalking emblem of the right's eschatology, then John Kerry, and then Barack Obama.
Just wait. In 24 months, with another far-leftist Clinton in the White House, the right will be looking fondly on the reasonably staid Obama administration and wondering why Hillary can't be like Barack.
Wehner also plucks some rather peculiar generalities from their contextual settings. For example, "Mr. Clinton cut spending and produced a surplus," he observes. "Under Mr. Obama, spending and the deficit reached record levels." Notice anything missing? Like, say, the intervening chasm of the Bush administration? — its insane tax cuts, its multitrillion-dollar wars, its staggering debts, its plunging of the economy into what essentially became the Second Great Depression? In short, the Bush administration's complete and utter break with the conservatism of yesteryears? And yet what does contemporary conservatism demand as a complete and utter break with W.'s transgressions? More insane tax cuts, more multitrillion-dollar wars, more staggering debt, and yet another Great Depression, courtesy of not minding the national store.
Wehner proceeds to concede that "In some respects, like gay rights, the nation is more liberal than it was two decades ago." But, however, nonetheless "it is more conservative today than it was in the mid-1990s. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that Republicans have opened substantial leads over Democrats on dealing with terrorism, foreign policy and taxes. They’re competitive on the economy, and a good deal more competitive than in the past on traditional liberal issues like immigration and health care." Yet what Wehner gauges here is less a conceptually modern-conservative trend than rather familiar sociopolitical phenomena: there's an electoral lag in understanding the economy's upticks; there's also an electoral misunderstanding of the Affordable Care Act (whose individual components voters overwhelmingly find agreeable); and, above all, outlandish fearmongering on terrorism and promises of painless tax cuts remain effective pseudoconservative tricks of the political trade.
As for Wehner's notation of the "two enormous losses by Democrats in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections" and that "Nearly half of Americans now live in states under total Republican control," about all we're left with is a shocking reminder that Democrats don't vote in the political Oscars of supporting roles. This is a matter of mobilization, not prairie-swept tea partyism.
And that, it seems to me, is where America actually stands. It's no more conservative than it was under Eisenhower and no less liberal than it was under FDR, who, as noted, was indeed a conservative-progressive, just as President Obama is. This, broadly, is what today's Democratic Party reflects. The GOP? Its reflection can no longer be seen in a mirror.