Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Most Liberal Ever? What Are Conservatives Smoking?
I keep seeing conservative bloggers claiming that the United States has just reelected the most liberal president in its history. This just seems silly to me. While I think it is hard to put modern presidents on the same left/right scale as 19th century presidents, just going back a hundred years, I would judge Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson as being way more liberal than Barack Obama, and I would put Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter ahead of him, too. I would judge Obama to be about as liberal as John Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Not only is Obama not the most liberal ever, he may not be in the top third for the last century.
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The liberal/conservative position of political figures is quantititavely calculable, using the DW-NOMINATE method.
ReplyDeleteSee for example here http://xkcd.com/1127/
Using this method would make your argument stronger.
I've heard it said many times that our last liberal President was Richard Nixon. Can you imagine Obama creating something like the Environmental Protection Agency? Obama has us fracking away. He went to the climate summit in Copenhagen and actively worked to prevent any change to our policy of burning fossil fuels like crazy, driving us towards disaster. That's liberalism? Give me a break.
ReplyDeleteNixon governed as a moderate in the mold of Eisenhower, but his Southern Strategy started the Republican party down the reactionary road that led to the Tea Party.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to see how you make this connection. In the meantime, there is nothing reactionary about the Tea Party. They simply wish our federal government would focus its actions on those which are Constitutionally mandated. If that's reactionary, I'm for it.
DeleteI live in australia, and from my perspective, the Dems are ultra-right-wing, and the Reps are ultra-ultra-right-wing.
ReplyDeleteUSA is a strange country :/
It is sad how very little Americans know about how the rest of the modern world operates. The only thing sadder is how much of what they think they know about how America operates is dead wrong.
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