… Conservatives genuinely believe themselves to be confronting an ever-changing, ever-expanding list of progressive demands backed up by the left’s considerable cultural and political power. The right would be far less politically effective if the left did not continually provide it with evidence to verify the accusation.
This doesn’t at all mean the left should surrender in the culture war in the hope that it will deprive the right of fuel for its own crusades. But it does mean that the left’s actions in the culture war actually have an effect on what the right does, and vice versa. Too often progressives treat their own cultural commitments as following from self-evident and nonnegotiable moral imperatives rather than strategic political calculations. CONTINUED
Damon Linker, The Week
“That takes us up to 2017, by which time Democrats were quite obviously farther from the median voter than they had been in 1994 or 2004.”
It would only be obvious if we knew where the overall median voter was on the scale. This information is never provided. You can’t assume the median voter is at the midpoint of the scale. Take gay marriage as an example. The 2021 median is somewhere between 83 (Democratic position) and 55 (Republican position). Considering the independent position is closer to the Democratic position, it would be reasonable to assume that the 2021 median is closer to 83 than 55. There is no reason to use 1996 as a benchmark.