There are many of them, of course, and one of the the most prized among the Village media is the Eternal Truth of Party Polarization. If conservatives favor tax cuts and de-regulation, the argument goes, liberals must favor tax hikes and increased regulation. If conservatives favor hawkish national-security policies, liberals must be more dovish on the subject. Conservatives oppose abortion under any circumstances, liberals favor abortion in all circumstances. You get the picture. It's been the gold standard for charting the ideological shifts along the political landscape for as long as I've been alive, perhaps longer.
Of course, people who live in the real world outside the Beltway understand that politics, like life itself, is rarely as simple as black-and-white arguments such as these, and that much of what happens in the political sphere is neither policy nor process but simply posturing. It's the inability to discern the differences between actual policy and mere posturing that has degraded our discourse and made much of our journalistic establishment irrelevant. Unfortunately, old habits die hard, and we're bound to be subjected for many years to come to more examples of simpleminded policy analysis, where conservatives who eagerly intend to return the country to a 19th-Century economy, and liberals who fret about income inequality in a 19th-Century economy without proposing anything substantive to remedy it, are portrayed as warring factions in a "clash of visions" instead of what they really are: Joint defenders of the failed and undemocratic economic model known informally as corporate capitalism.
---Vitelius
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