The Great Realignment: the Prequel

A comparative look at the four graphs below makes me suspicious that the Obama Administration might be on the verge of engineering the biggest party realignment since the Republican shift of 1966 -1994.

The top chart breaks down Democratic Party members by ideology; the third chart does the same for Republicans.  The graph between them shows the relative percentages of liberals, conservatives, and moderates from 1992 to 2008.

The graph at the bottom displays polarization among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents respectively.

Compare the first two charts:

While weighted towards the liberal side of the spectrum, the ideological spread within the Democratic Party is not much out of balance with the country as a whole.

Now compare the relative composition of the ideology among Republicans in the chart below:

As the Right becomes more concentrated withinthe Republican Party, it tilts the GOP into an unstable position, relative to the electorate as a whole.  This is already accelerating within the GOP as its Leninist tendencies accelerate and infect downballot races.  The Republican will pick up both Congressional and Gubernatorial seats this cycle, but the damage is done.

While the United States is self-referentially a center-conservative country, it is not a Right nation.  (Indeed, I would argue that much of  the “conservatism” is actually populist anti-leftism, but that can wait for another post.)  What is occurring on the macro level is the beginning of an anti-Right realignment, based in civic conservatism.

It is not (David Broder note) based on split-the-difference centrism.