Ross Douthat rejects the notion that the GOP has moved further from the center than the Democrats; in his view, the right is only responding forcefully to repeated provocations from the left. Is he right?
The truth is much more complicated than that, as follows:
- On issues of race, the Democrats only provoked the right by having the temerity to nominate a black candidate for president. The reactionary wing of the GOP became the dominant force in the party as a result, and the rest is history.
- On LGBTQ issues, the decisive blow was struck, not by left-wing politicians, but by a Supreme Court with a majority of justices appointed by Republican presidents.
- On economic and fiscal issues, the Democrats nominated centrists, not Bernie Sanders. The ambitious Democratic agenda in 2020 was largely the product of the pandemic and the failures of Trumpism. In any event, the extreme right doesn’t care about fiscal issues; its thing is culture wars.
- On cancel culture, admittedly a relatively new development arising from the left, the provocations have not come from Democratic politicians with any kind of national profile. In reality, cancel culture impacts the center-left, not the extreme right, which has its own protected media and internet safe spaces. The right has responded recently by approving legislation at the state level which attempts to silence the left on the internet.
This call-and-response analysis misses the essence of the problem, however. Analysts like Douthat almost universally attribute the ideas of a few social media activists to the entire Democratic Party. In reality, the Twitter left has a very limited following, and could not nominate its preferred candidates, none of whom was a dedicated culture warrior, in 2020. To the extent that Douthat is correct, he is asserting that reactionaries have the right to blow up our liberal democratic system in order to retain a monopoly on political power and shut up a few noisy activists instead of trying to win the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people. For the leadership of the GOP to support an illiberal agenda is not on the same plane as for a few left-wing loudmouths to say outrageous things on Twitter.