Michael Barone‘s latest full-length column for the Washington Examiner focuses on the “golden age of centrism”:
It has been widely noted that every Republican member of Congress has a voting record to the right of every Democrat and every Democrat is to the left of every Republican. There is no partisan overlap any more.
This is bemoaned by celebrators of centrism, who look back to a golden age when there were lots of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats.
The funny thing is, when you look back to that time in midcentury America, the decades on either side of 1950, high-minded thinkers didn’t like that partisan muddle at all.
Midcentury political scientists disliked the ideological incoherence of the two political parties. It would be better, they argued, to have one clearly liberal and the other clearly conservative. Then voters would have a real choice and could be confident about the consequences of their votes.
Political scientists then as now were mostly Democrats, and they evidently hoped that the Democratic Party would emerge as the clearly liberal party and that it would continue to be as successful as it was in winning the five presidential elections in the 1930s and 1940s.
