Reply #26: So you're saying you want the Dems to oppose gay rights, is that it?

[Donald Ian Rankin]

After all, none of the people you list supported gay marriage...

I'm all in favour of the Democratic party moving left, but I think the idea that doing so is a matter of going back rather than going forwards is a misguided one.

There was no "lost golden age" when the Democratic party was significantly more liberal than it is currently*. The core values of the Democratic party were... I want to make a pithy and cutting remark about bimetallism or supporting Napoloeon or some other no-longer-relevant issue here, but I don't actually know what values the Democratic party was founded to support (although I do know that back then it was the Republican party, confusingly...).

As to nowadays - the values of the Democratic party are, by definition, those its elected leadership espouses nowadays - which is to say, centrist rather than liberal, in the main. They are *not* those of the liberal wing of the Democratic party - no one wing is any more the "true" democrats than any other.

I think the question you should probably be asking is "what *shoud* the values of the Democratic party be?"



*One could at least make a case that the Democratic party was further left economically for a period of a few decades in the mid-late 20th century than it is now, but I don't know enough either to do so or to refute it, and I would distrust anyone who tried to do so on an internet discussion forum. And socially, the Dems are currently far further left than they've ever been before.