A liberal supermajority--What it really means for the U.S.

[elprincipe]

ssj12 said:

The Ghost of RubangB said:
I don't see how 2009 will be anything like 1933 or 1965. The Democratic Party has changed a lot since then, just as the Republican Party has. Yes the country will be moving left, but considering how far we just moved right and how much it fucked over our foreign policy, our economy, our credibility, and our image, a move left is the smart thing to do. And if we move too far left, guess what? We'll vote them out of office and go center-right again. I think this has been happening for a long time. We take baby steps left and right, and some times huge jumps, and hopefully they add up to some baby steps forward, maybe, some day.

 

when the party system is killed then we will be moving forward.

 

^Amen.

 

Rubang - if you think Bush moved us to the "right," you are for the most part mistaken.  The Republican Party as a whole has been discredited largely because of their abandonment of conservative principles such as fiscal conservatism, non-interventionism, strong commitment to personal liberties and strong resistance to corruption and cronyism.  The Bush administration has been a massive failure on all those fronts, and I think most across the political spectrum can agree on that.

Fiscal conservatism = Bush increased the debt and deficit massively and recently supported $1 trillion+ bailouts for Wall Street

Non-interventionism = see Iraq

Personal liberties = warrantless wiretapping, establishment of the Department of Homeland Security (a vast new bureaucracy not unrelated to the first point above), politicization of the Justice Department

Corruption/cronyism = Michael Brown, Harriet Miers, numerous congressional Republican scandals

The sad thing is that some people think the Democrats will actually be better (these people don't remember when the Democrats were last in power, for the most part).