The center doesn’t hold

“Asymmetrical polarization” was an overused term among political scientists during the Obama years, defined as a situation in which one party moved to the radical fringe while the other stuck close to the center.

More specifically, a combination of evangelical influence on social issues and Tea Party movement influence on economic ones was thought to have pushed the Republican Party sharply to the right, leaving the Democrats to occupy the sensible, moderate and presumably more electorally advantageous middle (which also happened to be where most Democrat-leaning political scientists saw themselves).

There was always a great deal wrong with this view—Barack Obama’s policies were far more leftist than centrist (although often disguised by his soothing demeanor) and there were few positions that Republicans took in 2012 that Ronald Reagan would have disagreed with in 1982—but it at least had the virtue of inadvertently capturing a fundamental political truth, which is that electoral defeat and opposition status tend to produce not recalibration but ideological radicalization (just as electoral victory and the holding of power tend to produce ideological moderation).

The Democratic Party moved leftward, away from Bill Clinton’s successful “New Democrat” triangulation, after the disputed election of 2000, with that movement accelerating in tandem with opposition to the war in Iraq. Republicans then demonized Obama largely to the same extent as Democrats demonized George W. Bush, with Obamacare playing a role therein comparable to the role Iraq had played for Democrats.

In any event, by 2016 asymmetrical polarization, to the extent it had ever really existed, had been replaced by the plain old symmetrical kind, with the Democrats further to the left than they had been when Clinton had left office and Republicans further to the right than when Bush had.

More important for explaining our current predicament, neither side saw any fundamental reason to try to enhance their electoral appeal by moving back toward the center (as Clinton’s New Democrats did in the early 1990s)—the Democrats had won the past two presidential elections and were supremely confident that demography was destiny and that their “coalition of the ascendant” would propel them to still more victories. They (and most everyone else) assumed right up to the night of Nov. 8, 2016, that the Clintons would be moving back into the White House.

Republicans, for their part, had exploited anti-Obama sentiment to pick up more than 1,000 elected offices nationwide during his watch, including both chambers of Congress, putting them in a stronger position than at any time since the 1920s. Lest we forget, at least before they were hit by the perfect storm that was Donald Trump, the GOP had also put forth what was widely thought to be a fairly impressive field of contenders for 2016.

The result was a two-party system in which each party increasingly fell back on its base over time and, with the ironic exception of Trump, de-emphasized appeals to those who weren’t part of it.

Lost in the polarization that has only worsened in the past two years has therefore been the likelihood that a majority of Americans are neither hard-core liberal Democrats nor hardcore conservative Republicans and consequently feel neglected by both parties; that they view both Trump and the “Resistance” with equal disdain and are shaking their heads in embarrassment at the ugly spectacle.

If anything, the Democratic ideological shift has now become the more extreme, with the embrace of a host of positions that were once confined to the radical fringe—abortion on demand without restriction at taxpayer expense, abolition of ICE, Medicare and free college for all, a $15 minimum wage, a spectacularly expensive “Green New Deal,” and so on.

Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and what has come to be called “Trump derangement syndrome” has produced an increasingly toxic Democratic mix of unabashed socialism, environmental hysteria, and divisive identity politics.

In short, while the Republican problem is Trump, the Democratic problem is now Democrats; more precisely, a party base that demands ever more radical policies (including Trump’s impeachment) and which is likely to further radicalize the party as the 2020 primary approaches and the various contenders seek to “outbid” each other for base support.

No Democratic candidate will want to run the risk of being outflanked on their leftward flank, with the ideological space between their positions at any given moment and what amounts to sheer wing-bat nuttiness sure to shrink.

As soon as one Democratic aspirant embraces that 70 percent top marginal tax rate proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as will surely happen, another will go higher, to 80 percent or more. If one candidate pushes reparations for slavery as a means of corralling the often decisive black primary vote, as will also surely happen, the rest will have to embrace it as well.

Donald Trump has made the Republican Party as ideologically incoherent as he is. But he has also made the Democratic Party both more ideologically coherent and radioactive.

As the Democrats are about to painfully discover, the problem with being “woke” is that you can never be “woke” enough. So you must remain a constantly leftward moving target, with no stopping point.