Do Republicans not believe in evolution because they don’t know how to evolve along with American attitudes?
Since 1999, Gallup has been tracking the ideology of Americans, asking them whether they consider themselves socially conservative or socially liberal. This year, for the very first time, the same number of people identified as socially liberal as socially conservative.
The same poll also asks people whether they consider themselves fiscal conservatives or fiscal liberals, and while there are still more fiscal conservatives, the gap has been slowly shrinking and is the smallest since the poll began.
Meanwhile, there are no Republican presidential candidates who would (or could) describe themselves as liberal. In fact, there aren’t any who could call themselves social moderates, which is ironic since the country is exactly split between social conservatives and social liberals. But Republicans are still fighting tooth and nail for the right of social conservatives to discriminate against gays. Get over it!
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Fortunately, what people mean when they say “fiscally conservative” bears very little resemblance to the way “movement conservatives” approach money.
Do “movement conservatives” approach money by moving quickly toward it and stuffing it in their pockets? 🙂
Yup. And their friends’ pockets, too.
One reason that there are no moderate candidates is obviosuly because of our 2-party nomination system. Both parties pick the candidate THEY like, then independant have to hold teir nose and vote against the one they think will do the most harm.
Moderates/centrists are major underdogs in the nomination process. It’s too bad we don’t have strong independant candidate. For example, Ross Perot was a major influence in 1992. Just KNOWING that there is a major 3rd party candidate will force the other partis to choose a more mederate candidate (ie, one less likely to loose votes to the third party).
And the reason we have a two-party system is because of our “winner take all” election process. There are lots of countries that have political parties, but have vibrant and powerful third (and fourth, …) parties. We have no concept of a “coalition government”.