BBC news and political reporting (the thing politicians care about) have a massive bias towards the current UK government - for the last 5+ years that means a pro-austerity xenophobic anti-EU bent. If they veer from that they get their funding cut.
BBC radio and drama/comedy/kids' TV studio content is generally very "politically correct" left-wing as the vast majority of employees in these industries are left wing. The stereotype of the BBC show with exactly one gay, one black and one disabled kid among its three-strong casts is not far off the mark...
Take a list of countries in the world that have the best HDI rankings, press freedom rankings, universal healthcare and so on. Almost all are run by parties who are described primarily as being center-right or center-left.
Thank you. Do these people not realize that centrist basically means stable and successful? Probably just sad sacks who want things to go sour.
And I want to be clear, in the U.S. Dems are a center-left party and GOP is a (increasingly) far-right party. You can see this objectively by the percent of the time each member flips. Approx. around 80% GOP never flips versus only 20% Dems.
The Democratic party as an institution is not very left at all.
There are people who identify as Democrats who could be described as extreme left, and they may get a lot of airtime, but they do not represent the party and do not influence it's policies.
> Everything I've read and heard about US politics would seems to suggest that the Dems are being pulled increasingly towards the extreme left
We are either reading very different news, or your use of “extreme left” is highly out of sync with anything approaching common usage. Wake me me up when they start nationalising pensions
> Almost all are run by parties who are described primarily as being center-right or center-left.
They're described like that by the local standards of the country they're in. But if you were to transplant e.g. some "right wing" parties in certain European countries to a country like the US you'd have an extremist left wing party by local standards.
So it's no more evidence that things move towards the "center" in general than people in Venice and Mexico city saying "uphill" and "downhill" being evidence that those two cities are situated at the same altitude.
Most developed European countries have a tax to GDP ratio 10-15% higher than the US.
Fiscally conservative right wing parties in those countries typically run on a platform of at most reducing that by 3-5%.
If you then take what they'd do to military spending (at most 1/2 or 1/4 what the US spends per capita), social services (maybe a bit less spending, but not dismantling it), the state's regulatory role, fuel taxes etc. I don't think this is a far-fetched assertion.
Eisenhower's idea is attractive, but incorrect. The extremes are where the most enthusiasm is. People in the middle who lean one way or the other can find themselves pushed to go further and further that way, or risk being treated as unreliable allies. The "gutters", in turn, are thus encourage to drift further and further from the center.
People don't turn out for centrists. They turn out for extremism. You'd like to think that sooner or later people would find that they've veered so far one way that the only correction is to jump over the center line, and restore Eisenhower's faith, but I don't see much evidence of that.
If you consider the current leadership of the United States to be "centrist", then you and I have irreconciably different definitions of "center".
It has has a history of veering more and more wildly to each side. The previous leader was an exciting cipher when elected -- he turned out to be centrist, but was only elected because a lot of people imagined he was more to the left than he turned out to be. And at that, he was completely stymied in his progressive platform by an extremely right-wing legislature -- which turned out to be so popular that their party repeatedly increased their power in the legislature. Before him, the country elected a clear idiot, and then re-elected him after starting a war on clearly false provocation.
People were more likely to appeal to Eisenhower's approach in the 20th century, but in the 21st, the extremes have better access to mass media, making them better able to cast the center as extremist and shifting the Overton window. I see this only increasing. It's possible that it won't succeed this November, but even if it doesn't, I don't believe that the trend will change.
America is an abomination, but it’s very far from the only country, and the vast majority of rich, free countries are run by centrists who were voted into power
I find that America tends to export its culture. Its genius is its willingness to appeal to the lowest common denominator, which others find repulsive and yet, gradually, succumb to.
Already I find hints that other English-speaking countries are studying the effectiveness of our extremist tactics (goaded, in part, by our geopolitical opponents). I think you'll see more of it elsewhere in coming decades. They'll do it because it works.
It's not a foregone conclusion, but watch out for it. I don't know how to tell you to prevent it; it works inexorably. I hope they figure something out, even if it's just having a national character that's more repulsed by it than ours turns out to be. But do not rely on that, because we're just 65 years removed from Eisenhower ourselves.
The best thing about the BBC is that people on both the right and the left think it has a political slant against them