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The Democrats Are Now America’s Conservative Party
(www.theatlantic.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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Politics
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This article has a very weird definition of the word "conservative."
It argues that Democrats working to restore reproductive rights to women is a conservative value, because it's trying to return to the Roe v. Wade detente that existed prior to this Supreme Court. But that ignores the entire history of the conflict, which is that conservatives, traditionalists, and the Religious Right fought long and hard to undo women's access to reproductive rights... against liberals. Now that they've succeeded, they're not suddenly liberals and Democrats are not suddenly conservatives. These words mean something other than pro-status-quo and anti-status-quo, which this author seems to ... not know I guess?
And even if you were somehow to say "Republicans are anti-status-quo and Democrats are pro-status-quo," in what sense are Democrats protecting the current abortion status quo? Improving women's access to reproductive healthcare is an explicit Democrat goal.
You can use exactly the same framing to claim that Democrats are conservative about LGBTQ+ rights because they fight hard to protect and expand existing LGBTQ+ protections. But that's not politically conservative; that's still a liberal goal.
Anyway, strange framing, Atlantic!
The missing nut graf was "The GOP is nostalgic for the antebellum South; Democrats are nostalgic for 2016."
The point stands that both parties are focused on the rear view, which is pretty much textbook "conservative," regardless of how the term has been intentionally co-opted.
Even that definition is myopic. The Dems only want to return to 2016 in the same way I want to return to 1933 when minimum wage was actually valuable. It's not a focus on the past when your actions wouldn't change even if the past wasn't there.