Democrats today are more likely to say they want their party to become moderate than they were four years ago, Gallup found, with 45 percent saying they want the party to moderate.

Democrats today are more likely to say they want their party to become moderate than they were four years ago, according to a Gallup poll published Thursday. The survey, conducted in the first week of President Trump’s second term, gauged partisan preferences on the ideological direction of respondents’ respective parties. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 45 percent say they want their party to become more moderate, while 29 percent say they want the party to become more liberal, and 22 percent say they want the party to stay the same.

  • @TheDemonBuer
    5•2 days ago

    Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 45 percent say they want their party to become more moderate, while 29 percent say they want the party to become more liberal, and 22 percent say they want the party to stay the same.

    These words are meaningless. In many countries, to become more liberal is the same thing as becoming more moderate. It’s confusing to me because liberal and moderate mean one thing in the US and something else in the rest of the world. And I live in the US! After all these years, I still don’t quite understand what people mean by liberal, moderate, and conservative. Liberalism is an actual ideology with an actual definition, Conservativism is an actual ideology with an actual definition.

    So, what do the American people want? If it’s some kind compromise between actual Liberalism and actual Conservativism, what would that look like, specifically? Which aspects of Liberalism do they want, and which aspects of Conservatism, and in what proportions? And what about ideologies other than Liberalism and Conservatism? Why are those two ideologies our only choices?

    Oh wait, I already know the answer

    • @PugJesusEnglish
      7•2 days ago

      These words are meaningless. In many countries, to become more liberal is the same thing as becoming more moderate. It’s confusing to me because liberal and moderate mean one thing in the US and something else in the rest of the world. And I live in the US! After all these years, I still don’t quite understand what people mean by liberal, moderate, and conservative.

      In casual US discourse, liberal is left. In context, more moderate means becoming more right-wing.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•1 day ago

      It’s confusing to me because liberal and moderate mean one thing in the US and something else in the rest of the world. And I live in the US!

      In the US, “liberal” is associated with New Deal era social liberalism and today is basically used as a synonym for “the left side of the political aisle”. This is complicated by two other factors:

      • On many (though not all!) topics, I’d say that the center of the European political spectrum is further left than on the US political spectrum.

      • Due to sheer chance, the colors are also the reverse of the European conventions. Europe has a set of political colors that get used to “bin” political parties across countries. Light blue is conservative, for example, light red is social-democratic, and so forth. The US used to use red and blue interchangeably, just because red, white, and blue were the colors on the flag and it had a nice theme around elections. They were often used when color-coding maps showing which state each candidate had won in Presidential elections, but there was no consistency. Around, I think, the Bush Jr elections, it became convention to use “red” and “blue” the opposite way they’re used in Europe – “red” is associated with the Republican Party, which is the right side of the aisle, and “blue” with the Democratic Party, the left side of the aisle.

        kagis

        Yeah, Wikipedia says that it was the 2000 elections where we got the colors assigned, so Bush Jr.:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states

      Oh, and another good bit: while it’s not as common in mainstream political discourse, an unqualified “libertarian” in Europe tends to refer to left-libertarianism, and an unqualified “libertarian” in the US tends to refer to right-libertarianism. And making it even more complicated, some people who would probably be called “libertarian” in the US today, like Cato, prefer to identify as “classical liberals” and are grouchy that they got the “liberal” label taken away from them by the social liberal crowd.

      If the question of what “liberal” one is using is really confusing – like, if I’m writing for an audience that is pretty European, and writing something for which this really matters and is talking about the center-left in both the US and Europe, I’ll sometimes go out of my way to use “progressive” rather than “liberal”, which has more-or-less the same meaning in both Europe and the US.