The Republican Rage Bubble Is Now 30 Years Old

In the New York Times today, Sahil Chinoy presents this chart, which compares Democrats and Republicans with political parties in western Europe and Canada. As you can see, the Republican Party is very far to the right:

The impression this leaves is that Republicans have moved to the right while Democrats have stayed close to the middle. But that’s not actually what the chart tells us. All it tells us is that America is generally more conservative than western Europe. But this has always been true. Republicans were calling Medicare “socialism” decades after nearly every country in Europe had adopted national health care.

It would be interesting to see what this chart looked like in, say, 1960 and 1990. For now, though, you can get a sense of what happened to America’s two big political parties by looking at purely American data:

As you can see, back around 1900 the parties were pretty polarized. Democrats spent the next 40 years moving to the center, but ever since the Depression they’ve become steadily more liberal. Democrats are now back to where they were in 1900.

Republicans showed a similar pattern: the party moved toward the center for 75 years, but ever since the Reagan era they’ve become steadily more conservative. By 1990 they were back to about where they were in 1900.

In other words, everything is fairly normal all the way until 1990. The two parties moved back and forth but they both ended up at about the same place: their 1900 position. The difference is all in the years since then.

It’s only since the early ’90s that the Republican Party has become so extreme. As usual, I blame this on Newt Gingrich, the man who invented modern Republican politics. It’s a politics of rage and personal destruction, and the only way to keep that up is to become ever more extreme. It hardly seems possible that this can keep up much longer, but then, we liberals have been saying that for a long time. As Keynes said in a different context, “The market can stay irrational a lot longer than you can stay solvent.” Still, it can’t stay crazy forever. At some point the rage bubble is going to break.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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