A couple days ago, Ezra Klein called Obama a moderate Republican because the president adopted formerly Republican policies on the environment and healthcare. Kevin Drum differs:
The individual mandate and cap-and-trade may have originally been "Republican" ideas in some technical sense, but they were adopted under duress. They never truly represented things that Republicans supported.
I think this is unfair. As a young Thatcherite, I remember researching cap and trade in the 1980s and found it derided by the left and championed by the pro-market right. Yes, the right has moved inexorably to the fringe, but you shouldn't judge the conservatism of the 1990s by the standards of today's degenerate rump. Dave Roberts follows up:
Republicans have mastered post-truth politics. They've realized that their rhetoric doesn't have to bear any connection to their policy agenda. They can go through different slogans, different rationales, different fights, depending on the political landscape of the moment. They need not feel bound by previous slogans, rationales, or fights. They've realized that policy is policy and politics is politics and they can push for the former while waging the latter battle on its own terms. The two have become entirely unmoored.
So it's not that they "moved right" on some policy spectrum when Obama took office. They just adopted a new political strategy, namely total, unremitting, hysterical oppositionalism.
But this has resulted in certain clear moves to the policy right: climate change denialism, hostility and paranoia around immigration, deeper and deeper hostility to gay equality, and a pathological opposition to tax hikes, regardless of fiscal circumstances or economic reality.
The Dish 