Has the pendulum stuck over on the right side?

[sleigh]

Been musing on politics a bit... I'm increasingly disheartened by the Obama administration, which appears to be so solidly Centrist that they might as well be Republicans, except that the Republicans have shuffled desperately away to the right toward their loud and paranoid fringe. I don't think I've changed my social/religious/political views all that much, but somehow -- without me moving -- the political tide seemed to have gone out, leaving me mired to the ankles in the wet sand of the far left.

Damn. A decade or two ago, I used to place myself somewhat left of the middle in the political spectrum, but certainly nowhere near the left fringe. I felt myself to be mostly in the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Now, I need binoculars to see the middle. I listen to the Tea Party advocates howling that Obama is a "socialist/fascist/communist" and wonder what in the hell they're raving about. Thus far in his first term, Obama has shown himself to be about as socialistic and leftist as Eisenhower. And the right side of the spectrum -- the Palins, the Huckabees, the Bachmanns, the "Christian" fundies -- well, they scare the hell out of me.

Right now -- through my spectacles -- I see a Democratic party that is no longer liberal, but decisively Centrist. I see a Republican party that is cloaked in the mists well off to the right, and I see a vocal faction within that party that wants to drag it even further that way.

And over here on the left, there are the sand people, stranded by the receding political tide.

Is that the landscape others see? Or have I unknowingly walked left away from the center and stranded myself?

Comments

[spaceoperadiva.livejournal.com]

I used to consider myself a Republican and a Centrist. I agree entirely with your assessment of the rightwards drift It's heavy in all of the GOP, with a huge faction of people who probably consider Mussolini too liberal wishing to move beyond "right" and into some hyper-right re-imagined out of an Orwell or Atwood novel.

I used to think the GOP was: "let's not have too much government or meddle with State's rights, let's everyone mind their own business and not have government poking their noses into private lives, and let's have government support business". Maybe I was delusional and that GOP never really existed. Maybe I stranded myself in the center by having a wrongheaded notion about what the GOP was all along, or maybe the GOP betrayed its core values when it signed on with the radical evangelical right.

Even so, I know I've moved to the left as I've gotten older. I think I've grown more compassionate, and in my experience the left has more compassionate social policies. I understand economies of scale a lot better now. However "rugged individualist" I was raised to be out in the last of the wild west, I'm not so whacked as to think that I can, all by myself, ensure that my food supply is safe, my water is clean and shared equitably, and I know it would not be a good thing if everyone on my block had to fix the street in front of their houses like subjects of the Roman empire.

I've also learned (from Facebook, of all places) that there are a lot more people in the center than one might be led to believe. It seems like most everyone in the center is afraid that everyone else on earth is over there on the hyper-right and so they're afraid to say anything that will get them labeled left-liberal. Eh. These days keeping your mouth shut gets you labeled left-liberal as well, so I might as well talk.