Yeah, sure, the parties are exactly the same in their craziness

Here's a CNN poll whose results are, unlike most poll results, genuinely fascinating and illuminating. I'll be interested to see how our winger commenters manage to pooh-pooh this one.

One of themes of this blog has been that today's Democratic and Republican parties are not mirror images of each other -- that while the Democrats certainly contain their extreme element, the Republicans are more extreme and ideologically homogeneous. This shouldn't even be debatable. But somehow it is. So:






This nicely buttresses the point I made in my New York Review piece on the Blue Dogs.

If you want to understand American politics, you have to understand this. These sentiments bubble upward and have a dramatic impact, for example, on each party's congressional caucus. It's just absolutely the central fact of American domestic politics today.