Required Reading for Democrats and Republicans

David Brooks

Our democratic republic's politics are foundering as never before. Why? Here are two analyses. The first comes from New York Times columnist David Brooks and asks why today's conservative Republicans are light years apart from the conservatives whom Brooks revered a few decades ago. In "The G.O.P. Is Rotting," Brooks says:

A lot of good, honorable Republicans used to believe there was a safe middle ground. You didn’t have to tie yourself hip to hip with Donald Trump, but you didn’t have to go all the way to the other extreme and commit political suicide like the dissident Jeff Flake, either. You could sort of float along in the middle, and keep your head down until this whole Trump thing passed. 

Now it’s clear that middle ground doesn’t exist ...

Read the rest of the column to learn more about why Brooks, a center-right pundit, is in a state of despair.

Thomas B. Edsall

In "Liberals Need to Take Their Fingers Out of Their Ears," New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall offers his own despairing analysis of why liberal Democrats such as the ones I personally support aren't much better off:

For the moment, the left is both stunned and infuriated by the vehement animosity it faces from red America ... Many Democrats continue to have little understanding of their own role — often inadvertent, an unintended consequence of well-meaning behavior — in creating the conditions that make conservatives willing to support Trump and the party he is leading.

Edsall quotes Karen Stenner, author of "The Authoritarian Dynamic," who Edsall says is "no fan of the president," to the effect that:

... liberal democracy’s allowance of these things [such as unfettered freedom, diversity, multiculturalism, etc.] inevitably creates conditions of “normative threat,” arousing the classic authoritarian fears about threats to oneness and sameness, which activate those predispositions ... and cause the increased manifestation of racial, moral and political intolerance.

I admit I find some of the discourse that Edsall cites in this column a bit too nuanced for my full comprehension. Yet since Trump's electoral upset in 2016, I've found myself thinking a lot about what Stenner calls "normative threat." It's a good explanation for what's happened in our politics of late. However, it's anything but clear to me what we liberal Democrats can do about it without backpedaling away from our current commitments and constituencies.

*****

Roy Moore

Meanwhile, check out this Real Clear Politics polling aggregate page concerning tomorrow's special election in Alabama. There seems to be a lot of variability in the individual poll results between the two candidates vying to replace Jeff Sessions in the U.S. Senate. The Republican, Roy Moore, leads the poll aggregate by a whisker, +2.5 percent as I write this.

Doug Jones

His Democratic opponent is Doug Jones. Given that Alabama is a solid-red state, the fact that Jones is even close in the polls surely has something to do with the allegations several women have made that Moore, then in his early 30s, had inappropriate sexual involvements with them when they were teenagers a few decades ago. If Moore does manage to eke out a victory tomorrow, it will mean that many of his supporters simply looked past his misdeeds ...