Most have been branded Never Trumpers and mostly kind of lie low on policy differences (perhaps) in the interest of making common cause - which is not terrible overall. I'm thinking of Patrick Chovanec.
Yeah I assume most of these people are just conservative Dems now
Although it’s interesting because you’d think you’d see a legitimate non-astroturfed movement to like, shift Dems right on certain issues that you’d expect Republican never-Trump party switchers would be concerned with
I know the left loves to claim this is happening constantly, but I feel like even in cases like Manchin or Tester or whoever, right wing Dems are usually highly individual, you don’t see a ton of legitimately calculated right-leaning Dem candidates, nor a lot of demand for them
Which to me unfortunately suggests that a lot of people who appeared to be “reasonable” conservatives 10 or 20 years ago may have just been hiding their power level.
This actually concerns me a little on things like LGBT rights. I genuinely would expect there to be quite a few people(not just mainstream contrarian journalists, but large numbers)going like “look Trump is a toddler who wants to dynamite humanity,so I’m a Dem, but I’m not crazy abt the queer stuff”
You see people claiming these people exist! I’m sure they actually do, in some number, but I see no evidence that there’s like… the right wing Dem equivalent of the leftists who really do think Biden is bad bc of Israel/Palestine and covid but are going to vote for him anyway.
And you can say that like, I am selecting against these people, but I go out of my way to try to read center-right stuff, I have always had weird edgelady affection for “honorable enemies” etc and I do look for this stuff, and I truly can barely find any of these people, at least on the internet
I think a lot of people aren't wild about the latest expression of gender theory or for that matter feminism but they keep voting on purpose for the party of gay rights and workplace equality and it's not some weird gritted teeth thing.
I think this is because it actually is what it looks like, people really can, pace Jesse Signal, have quiet concerns about the bleeding activist edge without it being a sign of crypto fascism.
You would think there would be… idk, like an actual blue dog wing
I remember in college there were a ton of guys,who were politics majors,who absolutely despised the people who vote for Trump now and held in group views of them that were outwardly contemptuous, but had like, Mitt Romney beliefs
You raise an interesting point that this past decade of a bunch of former conservatives getting resorted into the "Dem" pool has seemingly paradoxically accompanied a rapid decline of blue dogs.
I think what's happening is the Rockefeller Republicans are getting turned into Dems and while they're more conservative than the median Dem it's not the same way as the Blue Dogs were.
I could see the Dems having a big-ish Hawk wing on foreign policy if this holds, for instance.
Yeah I’m increasingly wondering if I’m actually just the not-quite-Republican I’m thinking of
Like maybe I’m just the right wing of the Democratic Party now
That sounds like a hot take and I don’t mean that exactly literally…. It’s more like it feels like the axes of politics shifted
The last few decades of American political life have been about all the freedom movements going into one party, and all the people opposed to those freedom movements going into another.
I think this is a good way of thinking about it. Both domestically and internationally modern politics are very much divided into liberalism versus illiberalism.
when you don't get that sorting, you get something like the UK, where (for example) neither Starmer nor Sunak are really on the side of trans people as such, but OTOH they're not defined by their opposition to them the way Ron DeSantis is.
It's still a pretty sharp cleavage over there. One of Sunak's preferred attack lines on Starmer has been "he can't even define what a woman is", including delivering that in the House while the mother of a murdered trans woman was visiting. Starmer otoh met with that mother and pledged his support.
transphobia is a weird issue in Britain. as I’ve mentioned, I have very negative expectations from society (it’s one reason I transitioned very late, I expected even more bigotry than I faced by a lot) but even i feel like they’re bizarre and obsessive culturally in a way that surprises me
I grew up when movies like Ace Ventura were considered hilarious by everyone, I’m not shocked to find out an entertainer or writer is prejudiced
but the degree to which in the UK in particular *obsession* w transgender people has taken off is so weird to me. trans people care less about us than JKR
Yeah, it's fucking weird. I think it's a pincer movement. From the Right, it's the only culture war issue that's still seen as somewhat 'acceptable.' While the Centre/Left are more deferential to established voices, like second-wave feminists.
yeah like on transphobia, as I was saying to a friend on Discord DMs, I think the reason for the cultural shift in the US is in very large part because the Republicans decided to get high on power and go straight for us as SOON as Roe fell, and by doing that made everyone understand the link
I’m less clear why there aren’t like, I guess more national-level “I support the gays but I want tax cuts” Democrats, or “I oppose a coup at the capital, but I want massive military pork” Democrats
it's me, i'm the massive military pork Democrat, massive military pork is one of the few ways America's ever managed income redistribution
screw tax cuts though. unless we're feeling Georgist in this Chili's tonight
I think current political realities allow some Dems to publicly oppose tax cuts and pork while privately benefiting from them, or even supporting them.
Does anyone believe Tim Kaine and Mark Warner meaningfully oppose military spending?
There's a ton of "I love cops, think homeless people should disappear, and approve of cruelty to immigrants" Democrats, maybe that's where they're all coalescing.
Right! Like, homophobia doesn't even play with conservatives anymore, and abortion rights (while never really enshrined in law) have never been such a big battleground.
So you can lay that at the feet of a very specific group of women who're either columnists/politicians or the wives of columnists/politicians, and who all know each other - they basically kickstarted the whole current mess in response to Theresa May floating the idea of making self-ID a thing.
It then snowballed from there, but it's very much that specific group who're to blame (especially given the fact that they took out full-page ads in a series of national newspapers which pushed their talking points to a whole lot of folks who'd never really considered them before)
(We also have a massive problem on the left with cis men who're trying really hard to be Good Men falling backwards into transphobia because 'we can't speak over (cis) women about this, and it's their lived experience that should be prioritised' and oh gods do the TERFs ever capitalise on that)
Anecdotally, the average person on the street couldn't give two hoots about trans people (in a very 'eh, you do you, doesn't bother me' kind of a way). But enough of our major newspapers are just actively and outwardly transphobic that that's been changing for the worse recently, and I hate it.
Never having been to the UK I can’t actually say if this is the case or not but I have heard things to make me believe there’s also just…alot more gendered social stratification that people are attached to and view as political in a way that…also exists in some subsets of the US but not secular ones
I think that's broadly correct (though I've not lived anywhere else long enough to know different, so this is slightly me trying to think my way into someone else's head). Definitely there's a whole pile of mostly-middle-class cis women whose identity is squarely 'mum' in a very odd way.
As a concrete example when it comes to 'this change is relatively recent', here's Theresa May, the /Conservative/ PM at the time, talking about her party's policies on trans rights in 2017: www.theguardian.com/society/2017...
