While political scientists like Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal have demonstrated the various ways in which US politics has shifted rightward over the years, this work lacks a crucial rhetorical component that would allow people to make actual meaning of this rightward shift. Statistics and charts say 'more right,' and journalists report it this way; but what does this actually mean? 'More right' from what? From 'the center'? What's 'the center,' then? I'm going to give it some meaning here.
Let's consider, to start, a broad political spectrum. On one side of that spectrum, the left side, is the belief that if we privatized nothing and had the government run all major institutions, we could live in a perfect utopia in which resources are distributed equitably, no inequality exists, and no poverty exists. This is, in other words, a communist utopia.
On the other side of that spectrum, then, is the belief that if we privatize everything, have the government run no major institutions, place no regulations on commerce, and leave everyone to his or her own unfettered business, we could live in a perfect utopia in which everyone has what they want, and no poverty exists, because the 'rising tide' of unregulated freedom 'lifts all boats.' This is, in other words, a libertarian-capitalist utopia.
Let's put these extremes aside for a moment and look at where our political discourse actually stands today in the US. Though conservatives call Democrats things like 'socialist' and 'communist,' actual Democratic policies tend to focus more on regulation than publicization of private institutions. Taking healthcare as an example, Democrats have employed in Obamacare a free-market solution to the problem of an out-of-control, under-regulated healthcare market. Notice that the move by Democrats isn't to render healthcare a state function--to render insurance, doctors, hospitals, and bidding on medical technology, devices, innovations, etc. functions of the government. Obamacare actually does the opposite: it finds a series of complicated work-arounds to address the problem of out-of-control healthcare spending precisely without bringing these under government control. Despite the amped-up rhetoric about Obamacare, it's a totally private-sector solution.
In fact, if you look at any other major Democratic policy, you'll find a similar trend. In 'finance reform,' for example, Democrats propose merely to follow through on regulatory laws already in place. On marriage equality, Democrats propose to scale back government regulation imposed upon same-sex couples. Democrats won't even touch campaign finance reform because it could introduce more government regulation into a very expensive marketplace of 'ideas.' These are just a few examples.
Broadly speaking, then, the function of Democrats in US political discourse is fundamentally conservative: Democrats simply try to put the breaks on processes that have spun out of control in the absence of effective government regulation. The Democrats are not communists--not even socialists; on the political spectrum, they're little more than soft regulators.
This is what conservatives used to be, too, by the way. The big differences between Democrats and Republicans for so many years in the 70s and 80s has been about whom to regulate more versus whom to regulate less. Even the 'rising tide lifts all boats' idiom is typically mis-attributed to Ronald Reagan and 'trickle-down economics,' though it was first a phrase used by John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Today's conservatives, however, bear little resemblance to even the Republican party of the recent past. With policies aimed at radically redistributing wealth upward through regressive tax policies, attempting to eliminate the income tax, slashing basic, previously uncontroversial government provisions (like Medicaid), attempting to privatize social security, attempting to abolish the IRS, the EPA, attempting to privatize huge tracts of government land and national parks, voting to shut down the government and allow the US government to default on its debt, rejecting minimum wage hikes or even the concept of a minimum wage, today's conservatives very clearly occupy a place farther to the right of center than do the Democrats left of center.
In fact, the political ideology of today's conservatives, by these policies I've listed above, which none of them will deny, is a near-perfect recapitulation of libertarian-capitalist utopianism.
Let me illustrate this another way. Democrats today acknowledge the reality that neither a far-left utopia nor a far-right utopia is tenable. Democrats aren't trying to put an end to the private sector. And in calling on the government to do some basic things for people in need--and to regulate markets that produce costly and dangerous negative externalities when left unregulated--Democrats are neither proposing to hand it all over to the government, nor pretending like clearing the government completely out of the way will produce a utopia. Conservatives, on the other hand, truly are proposing that if we get the government out of the way, we will have a utopia. Not just a better society; a utopia.
You might think I'm overstating this, but try this sometime: ask a conservative how they plan to address the reality of neediness, of the inevitable losers in the free-market system. If on one hand your conservative says it's not the government's role to dole out welfare for the needy, and on the other hand they say it's not the private sector's role to provide living wages or care for the poor, then who takes care of those who, whether out of laziness or personal defect, or out of circumstances (health, poor circumstances of birth, disability or injury, etc.) that get in the way, can't take care of themselves? If your conservative answers you not with a practical plan for what happens to these people and how to care for them, but with moralizing and abstract thinking (they 'should' be able to take care of themselves; they 'shouldn't' need handouts, etc.), you're talking to a utopianist. A utopianist doesn't want to recognize the reality of poverty and need and dangerous externalities IN ANY SYSTEM. They want either to moralize about what 'should' be the case--which ignores the reality of what IS the case--or they want to gloss right over the question and pretend like poverty and need and pollution and usury and monopolistic markets don't exist.
Either that, or they'll tell you that 'a rising tide lifts all boats.'
So here's the thing, the part about conservatives lying: the only way a conservative utopianist can get around the poverty of their ideology and sleep at night is by convincing themselves that taking away the welfare safety net, keeping wages low, flattening out the tax curve so poor people pay as much as rich people, giving tax breaks to rich people but punishing employment with payroll taxes, allowing insurance companies to discriminate against and deny services to sick people, and keeping those without insurance or access to basic healthcare uninsured and without access to healthcare, all of these policies are actually helping out the poorest and most vulnerable members of society.
This is the number one, biggest lie in contemporary US politics. Rather than admitting that a conservative utopianist ideology is bad for the poor and downtrodden, and that subscribers to a conservative utopianist ideology simply have no answer to the question 'how would you care for the inevitable losers in any system,' and simply care nothing for the poor but to moralize about what they 'should' and 'shouldn't' do, the conservative utopianist tells himself (and the rest of us) an enormous lie: it's all for their own good.
I could summon a shred of respect for a conservative utopianist who just comes out and says 'look, people should have to take care of themselves, that's their freedom and their responsibility too, so if you can't cut it for one reason or another, fuck you, you deserve to go hungry, get sick, and die, and so do your kids, because that's all on you.' I could. But I can't summon any respect for a politics that amounts to this crude dismissal of the needs of the indigent, but then, in some thin act of dissemblance, claims that all of this blatant disregard is in the service of the people being disregarded.
So the challenge stands to the conservative utopianist: even if you can convince yourself that a utopia could exist in which there are no poor people, no mentally ill, no sick or injured, no needy...and you sure as hell can't convince me of that...who takes care of these people, if not you, not the businesses you idolize, and not the government? Who sees to it, systematically, that our society doesn't systematically let people fall ill, mad, cold, hungry, drunk, and dead by the wayside?
