Daily Clips: October 20th, 2015
Jim Webb to drop out of Democratic race: Say it ain’t so, Jim! Your debate performance last week was a tantalizing glimpse into your mind and, frankly, I’m disappointed that you gave up so soon. Yesterday, you were flirting with an independent run and now this? My heart can’t take it.
Canada lurches to the left: Why is the Western world’s politics shifting to the left? The author examines this trend:
Canada’s election on Monday was something much bigger than a local Canadian story. It’s another indicator of how Bill Clinton/Tony Blair-style liberalism is veering sharply to the left across the English-speaking world. Along with the surge of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary in the United States and the nomination of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in the United Kingdom, must now be reckoned Canada’s election of a Liberal government under Justin Trudeau.
The NRA will fall: I’m not a huge fan of calling political trends “inevitable.” However, this piece in the Washington Post does an excellent job of showing how the long-term demographic trends do not favor the NRA’s positions on gun legislation. The decline of “white, rural, less educated Americans is generally well known,” the author contends, but this trend is rarely examined in regards to gun legislation.
Polls show that whites tend to favor gun rights over gun control by a significant margin (57 percent to 40 percent). Yet whites, who comprise 63 percent of the population today, won’t be in the majority for long. Racial minorities are soon to be a majority, and they are the nation’s strongest supporters of strict gun laws.
That’s not good news for the NRA. The author concludes, “Unless the organization begins to soften its no-compromises stance on gun safety legislation, it’s likely to become increasingly marginalized in a changing America.”
