Is anyone else sick to death of the "Liberal Smugness" snarl that's going around lately?

[Scootaloo]

53. I'm not sure you actually have any idea of what you're talking about

You seem to be running off that college freshman wisdom of "man, like, you know, left and right are, like you know, totally the same thing!"

The trick is that the Republican party was already a strongly right-wing reactionary party before its "purity" movement got going. That is to say that its "conservative purity" was already well-established by the late 70's - there were no more Eisenhowers, and certainly no Roosevelts or Lincolns in the party after Nixon. So rather than a "quest for purity" that movement has become a Lord of the Flies-esque spiral into extremism.

Democrats, on the other hand, are not a terribly liberal group. The party itself is center-right, favoring some civil liberties, carefully-controlled, along with a neoliberal approach to economics and aggressive, interventionist foreign policy. A surprising large number of the party's electorate seems to beleive "Not Republican" and "liberal" are exactly the same thing. Our politicians regularly enshrine bipartisanship as a holy grail - bipartisanship, remember, with a political party that dropped a boulder on Piggy and is trying to set Ralph on fire.

Just by having these two very different starting points, a "purity movement" in one party will get extremely different rtesults than one in the other party. The Republican movement is a pull towards extremism, while the Democratic one is a pull away from the extremism if the Republicans.