Some Old Posts, Newly Relevant

I find to my surprise that I have a post on Rick Santorum from 2005.  It arises from an article quite critical of him.

Also, chiefly for Cassandra, an old post on Democratic purges and the danger they posed to the party.  I came down on what I take to be her side; but the year was 2006, and the Democrats did well in the next two elections.  Maybe 2010 was the point at which purging the ideologically impure began to harm them; but I doubt it, all things considered.

So, my analysis was wrong:  but why was it wrong?  Do the facts imply that purges were helpful in achieving the wave elections of 2006 and 2008?  Or are they just irrelevant, noise in the face of greater matters?  If so, what are the consequences of that?

3 comments:

Cass said...

Well, I don't think it could be fairly said that the purists in the Dem party have prevailed. Neither taking Congress nor getting a D in the Oval Office resulted in moving the party or the country wildly to the left.

If anything, I would argue that the base are increasingly feeling ignored by the folks they elected. But then that's a feature, not a bug in my view :p

RonF said...

I had only been living for a year in Chicago when at their national convention the Democratic party unseated a delegation of party regulars led by Mayor Daley I and seated a group led by Jesse Jackson. How did that work out for the election of 1968?

karrde said...

I don't know what to make of most political prognostication.

Usually they are made with an unspoken caveat of "assuming nothing else changes".

And the "nothing else changing" part is rarely entirely true.

With that in mind, I think the general level of discontent with the status quo dominated the outcomes in 2006 and 2008...and in 2010.

But those purges from half a decade ago likely did deepen the hurts to the Democratic party in 2010.

(I'm told that certain portions of the Democratic Party felt as if they were the subject of a purge in the early '90s when Bob Casey, Sr. was snubbed. Since then, there hasn't been any voice for the pro-life movement in the nationwide Democratic Party. Does this mean that there have been successive purges in Dem-party history?)

How this will play out in the future is beyond my abilities to predict.