Has the Democratic Party moved to the left over the last 30 years & if so, do you see this development in a favorable or unfavorable light?

@Elessar On what issues, do you think, have Biden, Harris and the Democratic establishment moved right since (Obama & Clinton) in order to chase the Republicans?

@CedricH International politics since at least 2001 is the king of them, notably: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/08/17/barbara-lee-afghanistan-vote/

The most current examples I can think of are the party's support for controversial bipartisan bills, namely the border one that got sacked by the republicans themselves, and the trillion dollar bailouts during covid.

@Elessar You should clarify where exactly you‘ve detected a rightward shift on foreign policy since 2001.
Immigration is a good example. But wouldn’t you say that stimuli and government deficit spending tends to be a left-leaning policy program, based on the definition I‘ve outlined in my polling question?

@CedricH Well, the party used to be pretty anti-interventionist and suddenly all but one Democrat in the House voted for the invasion of Afghanistan shortly following 9/11. I get that it was an exceptional circumstance but nonetheless it was quite a paradigm shift.

It would be a leftwing program if it was designed with equal repartition in mind, but since from its conception it was clearly a "socialism for the rich" kind of maneuver. It's about as leftwing as cutting taxes only for the upper branch is.

@Elessar Many provisions of the covid rescue packages were specifically targeted at lower income households and in totality the spending has arguably itself benefited less affluent households more while these households contribute to a smaller degree to the overall federal tax revenue which makes these policies redistributive. It‘s just that so far only the distribution has occurred and the re-distrubition would materalize once middle and higher income households would have to pay for the growth in public debt due to the spending.
On foreign policy I‘d have to disagree. Clinton was more interventionist than any of his Democratic successors. He intervened in Haiti, pursued regime change in Serbia, he intervened in Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, used military action on three separate occasions against Iraq (through air strikes), initiated the extraordinary rendition program to apprehend terrorists all over the world and militarily targeted terrorist sites in Afghanistan and Sudan.

@CedricH But they were minuscule; or better, if you just look at the allocated budget it seems a lot, but you have to account that a program aimed at the less affluents has a much bigger target audience than one aimed at corporations.

Good point about Clinton, but in fact I said *at least* since 2001. Clinton was a further step towards the right himself.

@Elessar Well, my point would be that they‘ve moved to the left since Clinton which is when they peaked in terms of pursuing a muscular and assertive foreign policy.

The stimulus part that aimed to keep corporations afloat was also redistributive because guess what part of the US labor force would‘ve suffered most if unemployment had spiked considerably and for a prolonged period due to the covid recession?

@CedricH At most they remained the same, at least in the scope of international politics I wouldn't say they've moved any left.

It's not that the choice was between that program or no program at all. A better program could've been implemented, that wasn't randomly giving "loans" to billionaires, corporations et al, and then "forgiving" it.

@Elessar Yes, the choice could’ve been no ARPA at all. And increased government deficit spending through loans, subsidies or direct transfers to both individuals and companies is a clear market intervention and will have to be paid back through progressively collected tax revenue. I think it‘s pretty clearly a shift to the left compared to a much smaller stimulus package passed by the Obama administration during the Great Recession.

Democratic administrations have since 2001 overseen the first withdrawal from Iraq in 2010, the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2001, have not been actively engaged in Libya after Gaddafi fell or enforced the red line in Syria under Obama, they‘ve been more willing to accommodate Iran than they‘ve been in the 1990s. They have arguably become more hawkish on Russia and on China which has more to do with these countries’ trajectories than with the foreign policy doctrine of the Democratic Party.

@CedricH Hmm no, I wouldn't define that anywhere left. If they had truly turned left, those companies that were deemed too critical to be left to their natural destiny would've been nationalized, instead of being given "loans" that didn't have to be repaid. The only recipients of the relief funds would've been the workers, and those who lost the job as a consequence of the pandemic. Handing out money to for-profit entities for the sake of keeping them alive and autonomous, while also creating a massive inflation, is purely a rightwing policy; neither left nor even neo/liberal.

Even Republicans have become increasingly isolationist, I wouldn't say any of those withdrawals have anything to do with the Democrat party going anywhere left or right.