@rojo That’s why I included my parenthetical comment about them self-identifying as more liberal. That said, even as the US has largely moved to the right over the past 20 years, there are some ways in which the electorate has become more liberal in that time. The most obvious issue is same-sex marriage and gay rights in general. In 1996, DOMA was good politics. In 2016, it’s poison. There’s even a significant number of conservatives who are anti-DOMA these days (on the grounds that it constitutes a massive government overreach).
@ARE_you_kidding_me It’s hard to say whether the electorate has moved, but it’s fairly well established that politics has shifted considerably to the right (both in terms of the rhetoric employed and the policies endorsed by the two major parties).
In a 2007 interview with Jeffery Rosen for The New York Times, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens remarked on this phenomenon, noting that “every judge who’s been appointed to the court since Lewis Powell has been more conservative than his or her predecessor, except maybe Justice Ginsburg.” And he would know. He started in 1975 as one of the most conservative members of the Court and retired in 2010 as its most liberal member (though he still considers himself a conservative).
And it goes beyond the Court (as Stevens recognized, despite using a Court-related example). Health care is perhaps the next most obvious example. In the 1970s, Democrats and Republicans agreed that the United States should institute a system to provide universal health care, and members of both parties introduced bills aimed at establishing such a system. What they disagreed about was whether and to what extent such a plan should include cost sharing measures.
By the 1990s, universal health care was supported only by the Democrats, with the party splitting between the Clinton plan and an alternative single-payer plan. Meanwhile, the Republicans forwarded a variety of alternatives, the most popular of which had been designed by the Heritage Foundation. And by the time President Obama was elected, a variation on the Heritage Foundation plan had become the Democrats’ main goal, while Republicans now declared it tantamount to socialism despite how close it was to their own plan during the Clinton years.
The same goes for so many other issues. Reagan supported gun control. Now it’s anathema to the Republicans and something only the bravest (or safest) of Democrats will touch. Environmental issues were subject to bipartisan agreement in the 70s, but has rapidly come to be seen as a concern of only the far left (very rapidly in some cases; look at John McCain, who supported cap and trade in 2008 and then turned around and called it liberal claptrap in 2012). Over and over, the right has moved further right, and the left has followed suit.
Why have both parties moved right? Studies like this one suggest that politicians tend to overestimate the conservativeness of their constituents. Given this impression, actual conservatives have little incentive to compromise and liberals have every reason to take what they can get—something that we can see reflected in the rhetorical and political strategies of the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively. (That their impression is mistaken also helps explain a number of putatively “surprising” victories on behalf of Democrats more willing to express ideas further to the left than the pundits find advisable, though said Democrats typically moderate themselves significantly after taking office.)
