Welcome to Income Inequality Kos.
Join us Thursdays, at 9:00 p.m. eastern. We discuss income inequality, concentration of wealth, and related issues.
Previous diaries in the series can be found by the tag Income Inequality Kos, or by a series history.
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Republicans in Congress have been on a steady rightward march, ever since the election of Ronald Reagan.
Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist interested in income inequality and the political divide, tells us that in the new Congress, in January, we will be seeing an additional rightward lurch:
[T]he new House of Representatives will be much more conservative and much more ideologically polarized than the old House. The location of the median member will shift from slightly left of center in the 111th Congress to well to the right of center in the 112th Congress due to the replacement of a large number of moderate Democrats with conservative or very conservative Republicans. In addition, the total number of moderates in the House, almost all of whom were Democrats, will shrink from 75 in the old House to 28 in the new House. As a result, the ideological distance between the median Democratic representative and the median Republican representative will increase dramatically.
Alan Abramowitz, Get ready for the most conservative Congress ever, Salon.
We have been seeing an increased political polarization for three decades now, and the new Congress will see an extra rightward lurch, an extra jump.
The election that produced the additional rightward lurch was held under conditions of extreme unemployment.
Robert Jackman and Karin Volpert are political scientists. They said, back in 1996, and looking at Europe, that right wing parties thrive under unemployment. Unemployment fuels them.
A bit of of exasperated WTF? attitude leaks through about this. Liberal and leftist European parties stress full employment. But unemployment drives support in the other direction, to extreme right wing parties. What the Fuck?
Azazello has been talking up The Spirit Level. That large income gaps in a nation come with a whole long list of social ills, in addition to the economic unsoundness. Unemployment driving right wing ugliness in a nation, seems along those lines.
Karl Trautman, in a diary yesterday, pulled out a couple of interesting quotes from Barack Obama about the partisan divide, and how to deal with it:
Ultimately ... I believe any attempt to pursue a more sharply partisan and ideological strategy misapprehends the moment we’re in. I am convinced whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose.
A polarized electorate—or one that easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate—works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government. After all, a cynical electorate is a self-centered electorate.
To my thinking, this is attention on the right place, a relation of increasing concentration of wealth and increasing political divide, and has a strong a desire to get us out of the bind. But it's an attention to the symptom and not the cause. I don't think we can talk or tone ourselves out of the bind, out of the cycle. The causes are systematic.
American political opinion has been drifting rightward for long decades now. It's not a one dimensional picture. We have the 65-31 repeal of DADT this week: a longtime progressive goal. Also, a 71-26 ratification of the new START arms-limitation treaty: another encouraging accomplishment.
But the ugly rightward drift of the conservative side is just unmistakable. Not so much It Can Happen Here, as It Is Happening Here, in a slow trainwreck sort of way.