Who Are the Real Extremists?

One of the most prominent shibboleths in the media’s assessment of what ails America is that both parties have become too extreme. We are polarized, we’ve read time and again, because the Democrats and Republicans are equally culpable of hewing to ideological fringes, giving centrist voters no real options when elections rolled around.

Empirical research has long debunked this bilgewater. Fourteen years ago, in their book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, two congressional scholars, Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein, looked at the votes cast by House and Senate members since the 1990s and concluded that while Republicans had shifted to the ultra-right in their voting, there was no correspondingly ultra shift of Democrats to their left. This had no effect on lazier political commentators, who apparently will always be with us, and it has been the constant and primary mission of Fox News and its ilk to find two or three left lunatics whom it can misrepresent as Democratic standard-bearers and a threat to the Republic. But six years of Trump and MAGA governance (most particularly the last two years) seems to have convinced the American public, as a Gallup poll out this week makes abundantly clear, that it’s the Republicans who are America’s real extremists.

The poll’s headline items are the public’s preference for Democrats over Republicans when it comes to “keeping the country prosperous” (a 14 percentage-point lead) and on “protecting the U.S. from international terrorism” (a four percentage-point lead on a question that Republicans have almost always led on previously, despite W’s administration having been asleep at the switch in the run-up to 9/11).

More revealingly (though given the past two years of Trump & Co., not all that surprisingly), Gallup now finds those who view the Republicans as “too extreme” to be at 59 percent, the highest level for either party during this century. Just 43 percent thought the Democrats to be “too extreme.” When Gallup put the same question to Americans in 2022, 49 percent judged the Democrats as too extreme, as against 46 percent who thought the same of Republicans.

What I find most notable about that shift is that it has come at a time when by every metric I can find, the Democrats have indeed become more liberal. When Gallup interviewed Democrats in 1994, 25 percent of them described themselves as liberal; 30 years later, that percentage had more than doubled, to 55 percent. In this week’s poll, 70 percent of Democrats had a favorable opinion of the Democratic Socialists of America (as did 37 percent of independents).

Gallup didn’t seek to measure the factors behind that assessment. It surely reflects rank-and-file Democrats’ revulsion at Israel policy, but I doubt that matters much in this assessment. Rather, I think it chiefly reflects Democrats’ still-growing antipathy to actually existing capitalism and the towering levels of economic inequality it has spawned over the past four decades of deregulation, union busting, and oligarchic domination of campaign funding and, thereby, public policy. It’s of a piece with the consistently high approval ratings Democrats give to Bernie Sanders, whose democratic socialism focuses on economic, rather than cultural, concerns.

The popularity of DSA, of course, is anything but trans-partisan. Overall, 54 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of DSA—which, for what it’s worth, is lower than the 61 percent who hold an unfavorable opinion of MAGA. Fully 82 percent of Republicans actually view MAGA favorably, but the non-Republicans who agree with them are few and far between.

With his Iran war and its attendant inflation, and his domestic war on communities with immigrants, Donald Trump has doubtless driven voters into the Democratic column this year. But on a deeper level, the growing holes in the health care safety net, the unaffordability of housing, the expanding gap between income and the cost of living—that is, the current form of American capitalism, which the rich are fighting desperately to preserve and expand—are prompting a shift in Americans’ assessment of economic policies and the relative merits of our two parties. It’s about time.