"There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos"

[villager]

Every once in awhile, you just have to dust off that Jim Hightower quote.

[Trust Buster]

1. A very stupid quote. America has prospered by staying in the middle of the road and by avoiding

extremism on the left or right.

[Nye Bevan]

2. +1. By and large, America is economically center-right and socially center-left,

not coincidentally, similar to President Obama.

[Ferd Berfel]

51. Bullshit. Just tired right wing propaganda.

http://act.boldprogressives.org/survey/pci_bigideas_poll_results/
Then click the pdf.

Here's part of one page out of 14 pages total from this study:

[Nye Bevan]

54. .

http://www.gallup.com/poll/180452/liberals-record-trail-conservatives.aspx

[quakerboy]

55. your point being?

My brother in law is a self identified conservative.

Who believes in liberal policy on pretty much every single issue except guns, and votes for the Democrat nearly every election.

Self identified doesn't mean much. Its who they vote for and what they actually believe. And whether we can someday get to where we start to sync the two.

[Nye Bevan]

57. OK, Barack Obama won the last two elections,

and I consider him to be (like me) center-right economically and center-left socially.

If OTOH Obama is an unambiguous leftist liberal, by your definition, then I take back my earlier post and acknowledge that Obama and I are both leftists.

[quakerboy]

62. Thats where that dichotomy comes in.

[Ferd Berfel]

56. Gallup?

Gallup Poll: Romney Leads Obama 52-45

Update: Gallup Oversampling White Voters?

Gallup is Still Oversampling Republicans !
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2470205

[villager]

3. Somehow, I trust Jim Hightower's analysis of American politics vastly more than either of yours. nt

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

5. What they meant to say was, "I got mine."

[villager]

9. How dare he be a liberal in a dysfunctional state!

Damn him for sticking to principles!

[villager]

14. Well, we might each "suspect" a lot of things, which might be different. But I'm glad we share...

...a mutual admiration of Hightower!

[villager]

22. But when you look at the kind of Congress-folk Texas used to be able to elect...

...and what they could espouse (versus the hyper-cautionary, collapsing-to-the-right approach of most self-described "centrist" Democrats now), you can see that the right has engineered a vast, destructive change, or shift.

Which won't be countered by the aforementioned hyper-caution.

[Jim Beard]

50. I was never so shocked in my life

when I learned that my congressman in the days of my youth, George Mahon, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee voted against every single Great Society program. May the bastard rot in hell. Good ole conservative Lubbock.

[Hortensis]

23. Of course they'd both be Clinton supporters.

We know that because of their very well known records, and oh how I also wish they were still with us.

[ananda]

15. Same here.

He got it exactly right!

[mountain grammy]

37. Yes!

[Trust Buster]

59. Except for the fact that he blatantly ignores U.S. history, right ?

[RufusTFirefly]

10. Bzzzzzzzt! Thanks for playing

Almost without exception, America's milestones of political progress were so far from the middle of the road that they weren't even on the shoulder. Examples:

Social security: Originated as a kooky idea from a retired dentist named Francis Townsend
Civil Rights: A bunch of uppity socialist types aided by a gay organizer
Labor Rights: Spearheaded by leftists, communists, Jews, and other swarthy subversives.

And, oh yeah, American Independence. You can be damn sure it wasn't led by a bunch of Tories!

[villager]

12. +1. For use of "swarthy subversives," especially! nt

[villager]

20. Actually, Bernie has articulated a wider acceptance of democratic socialism that at any time since

...the 1930's.

He's been profoundly successful in that regard, which is what makes so many of us profoundly skeptical of self-pronounced "centrism" (putting aside the fact that centrists seem unable to cop to the fact that the "Center" has been moved so far right...) trying to tell us that nothing can change, or is changing.

[villager]

24. Not this cycle, true. I suspect this century will remain full of surprises.

Sadly, I'm not counting on all of them being good ones.

[RufusTFirefly]

25. FDR didn't follow the yellow line. He asked for a 100% top tax rate.

Congress "compromised" and gave him a 94% one.

[Trust Buster]

60. Exactly, they conveniently ignore inconvenient truths.

[Hortensis]

28. These were all ideas whose time had come, and then

they were enacted by coalitions of people from various groups, with the large mainstream liberal group as their core. Radicals and reactionaries, easily inflamed with desire for change certainly have a hand and are normally eager to tip over the establishment table, but history shows that most "revolutionary" ideas do not originate from outside the broad range considered mainstream and also that they happen when large enough numbers of people agree it should happen, not just a few deciding for everyone.

Independence, shocking as rebelling against the king was to many, was nevertheless also supported, not just by liberals at all economic levels but especially the top, but by a good number of upper class and middle class establishment conservatives, who, after 250 years of being carried by taxes on the backs of workers back in England, resented being told they were going to be taxed themselves and that the king was going to have a much stronger hand in running the colonies, and also because they feared for the safety of their investments, especially in lands to the west which the king might just give to someone else.

I love the old book "Rabble in Arms," but America's aristocratic class was extremely instrumental in getting the lower classes energized and directed in cutting loose from England to retain their establishment privileges and wealth. Radicals and reactionaries were very much involved, of course, but they didn't make it happen, they joined with others to make it happen.

[A Simple Game]

43. You're right those were things who's times had come. The trick is to see it coming and not

wait until it has gone past you and try to catch up to the band wagon.

Also interesting is your mentioning 250 years... how long has it been since our last Revolution?

Anyone with a brain knows capitalism if unregulated will destroy itself, many now think the time has come again.

[Hortensis]

46. Well, yuck to that little idea. We have something

magnificent going, and the fact that it has done well over 250 years of incompetent and lazy management is reason to treasure it, not discard. I wish people talking like you could have a couple years trying to live in economically and socially unstable and troubled nations so you could kiss the wonderfully stable ground of America when you finally got safely back.

[Jim Beard]

63. Well Said

[SCantiGOP]

40. Question, RufusT:

Was Otto von Bismarck a retired dentist named Francis? Because he instituted the first "old age pensions" which is essentially what Social Security is.

On edit after looking up facts: German enactment preceded start of the Great Depression by 40 years.

[RufusTFirefly]

42. Like many programs, Social Security had a number of precursors

Every once in a while there's a truly new idea. But not often.

Even though it attempted a Keynesian approach, Townsend's plan was noble but unsustainable. It proposed to give $200 a month to every citizen 60 or older. The Keynesian idea is that you had to spend that money; you couldn't save it. Theoretically, that requirement would stimulate the economy, generating a multiplier effect. Unfortunately, it would've been almost impossible to enforce. The cost of making sure that everyone actually spent his or her money would've been astronomical.

[sendero]

47. The way it is supposed to work..

.... is that your elected officials are one one side or the other and they hammer out a compromise that is somewhere in the middle.

What he HAVE is a party on the extreme right and a party in the center. The party on the right does very little compromising but when they do the result is still right.

[tenderfoot]

48. bee ess

I find it amusing that there are so many that just can't let go of their shitty ideas that don't work and never will.

Shill

[Fresh_Start]

53. +1 nt

nt

[libdem4life]

4. Forgot about this one. Thanks for "dusting it off".

[redstateblues]

8. Rush Limbaugh has one similar to that as well

[villager]

11. Does he? Perhaps you'd like to post it here. nt

[redstateblues]

29. I don't do that. I didn't mean that as a compliment.

It's a rationale for extremism

[villager]

36. You "don't do that" because you can't. nt

[Yonnie3]

17. and to the right are

empty beer cans and to the left fast food wrappers.

No political comparison intended. Just thinking of Texas highways.

[Shandris]

18. Which makes one wonder why our entire system is built on false dualities that can only be 'met'...

...by collapsing into a synthesis center, huh.

Almost like it's bad by design or something.

[alarimer]

27. Absolutely true.

No more chicken-shit, lily-livered, milquetoast, middle of the road Democratic Party hacks for me. What they forget is that a majorty of people in this country actually favor what could be called liberal policies, but of course our candidates don't have the guts to actually spell it out. They compromise in advance by only considering what they think they might be able to get.

[TIME TO PANIC]

30. K & R!

[muriel_volestrangler]

31. You'll also find the crown there. (nt)

[TIME TO PANIC]

32. This thread is full of moderate republicans.

[villager]

39. I think moderate Republicans self-identify as "mainstream Democrats" now

...and try to tell us what the Democratic party has "always been about," etc.

[TIME TO PANIC]

41. ... and meanwhile cost us elections.

By running to the middle, they've enabled the Republican party to become neo-fascists.

[villager]

44. the old right is now falsely imagined as the new "center"

...and yes, because of this, it has enabled far right fascism to rise and take root...

[Zambero]

33. Exactly

On the other hand, the more extreme and equally dead possums tend to be located on the far right edge of the the shoulder.

[pampango]

34. Glad I don't live in Texas (no armadillos) - or 1930's Germany (no democratic left).

It depended on conservatives pretending he (Hitler) wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis. The radical progressives decided that there was no difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian right and that an explosion of institutions was exactly the most thrilling thing imaginable."

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-dangerous-acceptance-of-donald-trump

[That Guy 888]

61. Maybe at a later date they will explain how America became a center-right nation against the will of

the people because cowardly incremental conserva-dems refused to advance liberal ideas in favor of conservative cast-offs like the heritage foundation based Affordable Care Act.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

35. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice. Thomas Paine

[villager]

38. As ever, Paine knew what was up. nt

[tenderfoot]

45. Moderates = Republicans that are too cowardly to say so

eom

[tenderfoot]

49. It's an excellent quote and totally true.

Glad you riled all the conservative dipshits.

[ReRe]

52. I love that Jim Hightowerism ;-) n/t

[Nitram]

58. Right. Brilliant. And totally meaningless.