I think you know me better than that, Dick. I would not make such an elementary mistake.
Whatever the left used to be, it is not that now. It has shifted far left, and become something that is now worse than the right. That is why Trump is winning. ;I wrote about this more than two years ago when I first noticed it. Medium chose to remove the piece. I'm going to quote from various articles on the web.
QUOTE: But there’s a paradox: since the early 1990s, according to Gallup, Democratic voters have shifted more to the left than Republican voters have to the right. By 2022, the second year of Joe Biden’s presidency, the picture had entirely changed. An outright majority of Democrats—54%—now called themselves liberal, while the share of conservatives fell to just 10%. Moderates, who once outnumbered the party’s liberals by 23 percentage points, now trailed them by 18 points.
QUOTE: Everyone knows that the country is more politically polarized than ever, but most don't know why. Data from the highly respected Pew Research Center provides a definitive answer. It's because Democrats have moved sharply to the extreme left. Given the way politics gets reported these days, it's easy to conclude that the widening gap is the result of Republicans become more extreme in their views. That is, after all, a mantra among Democrats and the press. The GOP is the party of racist, sexist, xenophobic, right-wing extremists, we hear over and over again, while Democrats are but humble centrists. The Pew data, however, make it clear that the shift toward the extreme has happened among Democrats, not Republicans.
QUOTE: Democratic voters moved sharply to the left in their ideological identification and policy preferences on a range of issues between 2012 and 2020. As a result, for the first time since at least 1972, ideological congruence is now as high among Democratic voters as it is among Republican voters.
https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/both-white-and-nonwhite-democrats-are-moving-left/
QUOTE: What stands out is the North Korean/Marxist absolutism of the party: You need to sign up for everything, or you’re a racist/homophobe/fascist/scumbag. Weirdly, many people whose bible isn’t the New York Times feel this is… crap. They wonder what happened to the Left as the champion of the working class. They wonder why they have to have an electric car. They wonder why their party doesn’t care about illegal immigration. They wonder why inflation isn’t front and center. Or crime. Or education. And perhaps even more oddly, they wonder how it is that the party they’ve been told is anathema — the Grand Old Party — does seem to care about those things.
https://www.aei.org/articles/wth-have-all-the-democrats-gone/
QUOTE: After living half of his life as a registered Democrat, Justin Roth, 42, re-registered in 2016 as an Independent — and then switched sides entirely to become a Republican in 2020. “The reason I registered as a Republican has more to do with the Democrats than it does with Republicans,” said Roth, a single Staten Islander who teaches English as a second language. “I still consider myself liberal in a lot of ways, but I’m no longer a registered Democrat. They’ve just really gone off the rails for the past several years.”
https://nypost.com/2022/09/24/some-registered-democrats-sick-of-the-left-are-switching-sides/
QUOTE: Roth is in good company. The social justice obsessed, ultra-progressive, increasingly illiberal Left is even alienating liberal celebrities. Once feted as a progressive darling, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted in May that he can no longer support the Democrats. “In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party,” he wrote. “But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.”
https://nypost.com/2022/09/24/some-registered-democrats-sick-of-the-left-are-switching-sides/
QUOTE: YouTube podcaster Dave Rubin resigned from his post in 2015 at The Young Turks, a popular left-wing news channel, after his own political awakening. He now dubs himself the “Why I Left the Left Guy.” In a YouTube video that has garnered more than 15 million views, he made his position clear: “Today’s progressivism has become a faux-moral movement hurling charges of racism, bigotry, xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia and a slew of other meaningless buzzwords at anyone they disagree with. The battle of ideas has been replaced by a battle of feelings, and outrage has replaced honesty. Diversity reigns supreme unless it’s that pesky diversity of thought. This isn’t the recipe for a free society, it’s a recipe for authoritarianism.”
https://nypost.com/2022/09/24/some-registered-democrats-sick-of-the-left-are-switching-sides/
QUOTE: In November last year, HBO host Bill Maher echoed these same thoughts when he told Chris Cuomo on CNN that the Democratic Party was “toxic” because it had become “the party of no common sense.” He said he expected the Democrats to get “thumped” in the midterm elections this year. He might just be right. According to an Associated Press report in June, more than 1 million voters in 43 states have left the Democratic Party for the Republican Party, especially in the suburbs, where swing voters can sway election results.
https://nypost.com/2022/09/24/some-registered-democrats-sick-of-the-left-are-switching-sides/
Dick, I could put it in a nutshell for you but I have to watch my tongue now so as not to trigger my being shadow banned again. It cost me two years of income, and I only came out of the cold a few months ago. So, unfortunately, I cannot.
Sorry that we cannot agree on this.
