I think its perspective. Drawing a parallel to Elon Musk. He says his political leanings haven't changed. Draw a line marked Far Left, Left, Sort of Left, Middle, Sort of Right, Right, Far Right. He says he was Left or Sort of Left, but somebody dragged the line way to the left. He is where he always was, but the line has moved.
Nah. We live in an age of asymmetric polarization. XKCD has a good rendering of the DW-NOMINATE data. Look especially at the US House since Reagan: https://xkcd.com/1127/
The right has moved far more than the left. Just looking at today's news, we find a prominent right-wing activist was convicted of plotting to overthrow the government: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63802649
The only area I think you could unequivocally say the US left has progressed on is civil rights for LGBT+ people. But in terms of things like labor rights, a social safety net, environmental conservation, gun control, election integrity, and business regulation, I'd say the center of the US left hasn't moved much in decades, much to the frustration of the more activist portion of the left. Note that people from other countries often see the Democratic Party as a center-right party.
The Democratic party deliberately moved right under Clinton. What was at the time called "triangulation" was Clinton adopting republican policy positions and one-upping them (e.g. welfare reform, NAFTA, Glass-Steagall). This drove the republicans crazy (remember Gingrich's Contract with America) and ever further right.
Agreed. And a later example is how the Affordable Care Act is essentially a Republican idea. But it's wild to think "they agreed with us too much" is seen as a plausible reason for radicalization.
Further, I think the Pew stuff is flawed in a number of ways. One, it comes after the Reagan era, missing a time DW-NOMINATE shows as important to right-wing polarization. Two, it doesn't include the Trump era, when polarization hugely spiked. Third, and most important, 9 out of the 10 questions are not suited for directly measuring ideology. The one I think is actually a decent measure of ideology is "Homosexuality should be discouraged by society" vs "Homosexuality should be accepted by society". The rest of them are practical questions relative to the circumstances of the day. E.g., "The government today can't afford to do much more to help the needy" is a question that's explicitly about the current state of the budget. If the budget improves, then more people should answer that as yes regardless of ideology.
The measure I'd rather see is the extent of ideological litmus tests for access to power. E.g., look at the way the right's orthodoxy on abortion has hardened over the years. In the 1970s it was possible to be a pro-choice Republican and a pro-choice evangelical Christian. Now neither is acceptable, so much so that the most prominent Republican pro-choice group just gave up a few years back: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/24/opinion/abortion-rights-r...
Or you could look at the way large portions of the Republican party have polarized around things that are provably false, like that Trump won the 2020 election, that January 6th was a left-wing false flag, or that ivermetcin is a good way to treat covid. That is wildly asymmetrical polarization, and it drove litmus tests for Republican candidates across the country. Nothing similar exists on the left.
DW-NOMINATE didn't create the buckets "far-left", "left", etc. DW-NOMINATE is just a method of marking plots on a graph [1]. The categories of far-left, left, etc. come from drawing boundaries on that graph and giving everyone inside that region a label. Where to draw these boundaries hugely influences the results. Give someone else task of defining the boundaries and you can easily achieve the completely opposite result: like gerrymandering, you can define boundaries on the DW-NOMINATE chart to fit your desired outcome.
Furthermore, there's only 535 members of Congress, out of 300+ million Americans. DW-NOMINATE only examines a very very narrow segment of the population.
By comparison, the Pew survey was based on directly asking people their positions on various issues and measuring political uniformity. This didn't involve the highly subjective task of drawing regions on a chart and deciding these people are center left, these people are far left, etc. Instead it examined how likely people were to have uniform versus heterodox views. It also didn't exclusively study on politicians, it used representative sampling of the general population.
I think it's pretty funny you're acting like looking at the unrandom sample of elected officials is worse than grabbing assorted randos when trying to study politics. It's even funnier that you're taking people's off-the-cuff opinions given to a stranger stranger more seriously than you're taking the actual political behavior of passing laws. Believe what you like, I suppose, but I have a hard time taking you seriously here.
Pew is one of, if not the most respected polling organization in the US. By comparison, that XKCD chart is all just someone drawing boundaries on a chart. Just make the far left zone larger and shrink the far-right zone and voila you have the opposite result.
It's worth pointing out Elon is being disingenuous. He was pro-Democrat (not Left) when they were kowtowing to the tech industry and handing out green technology subsidies. Now that there's scepticism of Big Tech oligarchs and easy money has dried up he's pivoted to extreme right-libertarian to try and dismantle any regulation and dodge as many taxes as possible. He's also realized there's a marketing opportunity to rebrand his electric cars as alt-right. All those dudes with "fuck your prius" stickers on their f150s can now buy a model y to virtue signal to their pals.
"rebrand his electric cars as alt-right"? Seriously? I can see why there is such a division in society. I don't know anyone I'd consider alt-right, or alt-left for that matter. But you are able to channel his intentions. And you just branded pickup drivers as alt-right and characterized them as people who would buy electric cars for virtue signaling. I do know many pickup owners. Most do hard work, requiring pickups to transport tools, crews, equipment. Of those, the ones disparaging Priuses typically do so because they get stuck doing 10mph below the speed limit in the left lane while they are trying to get to a jobsite.
I don't know, has he always been a cheerleader for Trump? There are some things he is doing now that I don't remember him doing before that suggest his political stance has changed.
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