This rightward drift of the movement would probably be more alarming to liberals if it wasn't so objectively risky for GOP.
The whole Labour government – including Alan Johnson – backed the party's rightward drift.
Each of those assimilations marched the party rightward to the point that, according to political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, the party today is the most conservative it's been in one hundred years.
Survey after survey also revealed that political beliefs had, if anything, shifted rightward; cool on immigration, cynical about benefits and, like the thrifty Scots Margaret Thatcher always believed them to be, keen to withhold as much of their income from the state as possible.
All Nippon Airways says 40,000 seats have been cancelled on its China-Japan flights since the row began.With the stakes so high, the LDP's decision to appoint a foreign-policy hawk may be because it thinks there has been a rightward shift among ordinary Japanese in recent months.
But the Republicans' rightward lurch has left them nowhere else to go.
But his legislators were elected on his Lula-esque platform; 13 have deserted him, either because of his rightward shift or over palace intrigues.
In August a Romney adviser said the goal was to win 38% Latino support, but the campaign now appears to be rowing back from that unattainable target.In truth, the Latino Republican victories of 2010 were the result of a national rightward swing and the circumstances of individual states.
Suddenly, the voice of rigorous scientific methodology was coming from the right, not the left.The start of Mr Kristol's rightward drift was assigned various dates, from his (unregretted) argument in 1952 that communists had no claim to civil liberties, to the founding of the Public Interest in 1965.
But he thinks this entails a long-shot bet: they're staking everything on winning the House, Senate and presidency in 2012, which will give them "a two-year window to restore the America they knew and loved, to lock in transformational change, or at least to wrench the status quo so far rightward that it will take Democrats a generation to wrench it back".
The orotund Mr Gove says he wants to "move the Bell-curve rightward", requiring higher standards for all pupils.
