More thoughts about the fragmentation of the parties

[womzilla]

My longish post from yesterday has continued to echo around my head and aggregated more thoughts.

First thought: This was posted today in another friend's Ljournal. Said friend friends-locks all hir posts, so I won't say who it's from. If I had seen this yesterday, I would definitely wanted to incorporate it into my post.

"...if a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power." --Dwight D. Eisenhower, Remarks at Fourth Annual Republican Women's National Conference, March 6, 1956.

(This is the second germaine Eisenhower statement here in the last two days--in a comment, calimac referred to Eisenhower's coinage "the military-industrial complex" as an exemplar of regulatory capture. It isn't, quite, but it's definitely closely related.)

Second thought: I'm sure there are other elements in the Republican coalition besides the four I identified. The neocons, for instance, are not exactly plutocrats and not exactly jingoists, but they have deep sympathies towards both camps.

Also important on the electoral level are the racists. For this purpose, I'm using a sense of "racism" to mean "supporters of the entrenched racial inequalities in the US". There are other senses, obviously, but that's the one which is poltically important. As long as the Democrats are the party which wants to use governmental power to support the weak against the powerful, the racists are not reachable. Racists are sort of low-class plutocrats, and again are subsumed by Phil Agre's sense of the word "conservative", which, as Burke coined it, meant "supporter of a political system which elevated fixed groups above others". For the plutocrats, the aristocracy is that of inherited wealth; for the racists, the aristocracy is a skin color. Many people believe that racists are not a significant voting block, but I've seen evidence that makes me believe that a lot of lower-class whites vote against Democrats because they associate the party with support for lower-class blacks. The only way to convince a racist to vote Democrat is to make her stop being a racist, or at least to stop voting as a racist. I have no direct ideas on how to defuse racism as a voting issue, although I think that direct appeals to white self-interest on issues of economic redistribution might be a good start. Americans need to stop thinking of "welfare" (specifically, the AFDC, WIC, Medicaid, and food stamps programs) as something that whites give to blacks and start thinking of welfare as something which primarily goes to working lower-class whites. Fortunately for this reframing, it's true; that doesn't make it trivial to promote, but I think it will help.

What other groups are there in the Republican coalition now?

And am I missing something? Is there a unified idealism holding together the Republican coalition, or is theirs purely a marriage of convenience, a reactionary huddle with the only glue a common hatred of Democrats?

Third thought: I don't really have a good sense of what groups there are in the Democratic party and what tensions there are which would drive groups away from what I stated were the core ideal of the Democratic party (as articulated previously, "Government should help the individual in need").

I mean, I understand that there are tensions in the coalition. There are always subgroups jockeying for influence, trying to pull the party this way or that; there are people who think that the environmental issues are more important than the anti-poverty initiatives, or vice versa; and there are disagreements over what particular moves would best result in a stronger party and stronger America.

But I look at the Democrats and I see a lot of groups which are all pointing towards the same goal. The identity-politics groups, the unions, the New Dealers, the greens--they all share an agreement that the government should be harnessed to ameliorate the privations that the individual is exposed to. What tensions pull people out of the coalition?

The last major defection from the party of which I'm aware was the "Scoop Jackson Democrats" moving over to the Republicans and becoming the neoconservatives (who are neither neo nor conservative). What drove them from the Democrats was the belief that the Dems were not taking serious the conduct of the Cold War; what drives them now is the belief that the Democrats are not serious about the conduct of the "war" on "terror". Obviously, they managed to attract enough Democrats away at the polls to give Bush his narrow popular vote victory this week. That's why I think that the Democrats need to concentrate on looking serious as ass-kicking defenders of America; that's a pose completely consistent with the Democratic ideal. What could be more important in the cause of protecting the individual than keeping him alive when other governments are trying to kill him?

Okay, there's another defection--the Naderites in 2000. The Naderites were, I believe, mostly Democrats who thought that the Democrats were insufficiently ideologically pure. Unlike the libertarians (who map badly to the right-left spectrum), the Naderites are definitely like the Democrats but more so; there are very few specific policies of the Naderites as expressed in their official party platform for 2004 which are incompatible with the 2004 platform of the Democratic party, let alone with the stated ideal. The Naderites were also electorially insignificant in 2004, and I think they will continue to be so until such a time as the Democrats have started winning again.

So. What fault lines are there in the Democrats, and what binding ideology is there for the Republicans?

Comments

[armoire-man.livejournal.com]

This post (http://www.livejournal.com/users/wayfairer/456769.html) talks about the biggest Republican group of all - Christians whose spirituality encompasses a holy war against the sins of "the world". Which is all the Souhern Baptists, pretty much, and George Bush himself.

Don't know if you already covered it.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link--I'll read it tomorrow. But yes, that was one of the four main groups I outlined in my first post--theocrats. They're the only group I didn't mention in this post; the others were plutocrats, jingoists, and libertarians.

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if the New Democrats (Clinton, Gore, Lieberman, etc.) really do espouse the ideal that government should help the weak--they may espouse certain corollaries of the ideal superficially, but they fall somewhat into the plutocrat category for the Republicans; ie., they are as upset by the idea of paying more taxes from their stash as the Republicans. A Democratic Party that showed that they unequivacally supported helping the weak through practice and not just theory, which means an embracing of taxation, can lose this constuency to the Republicans.

So I'm not sure if the unifying theme you stated really is there for the Democrats.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

On groups in the Democratic Party: try googling on "Cultural Creatives". I don't think it's anywhere near as cohesive a group as it's alleged to be; but there are people who identify with that label.

'Neo-cons" -- the original neo-conservatives were people who had been anti-Communist Marxists.

[sarah-ovenall.livejournal.com]

I've heard talk from progressive activists that if the Democrats make any effort to reach out to "values" voters, they will split off and form another party (one NC woman called it the "MoveOn Party"). I hope they mean if the dems become too socially conversative, but it sometimes sounds like they're against acknowledging that faith is important to a lot of Americans. (Actually, I mainly hope they're just blowing smoke and it won't come to anything.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The Eisenhower quote is great, but it has this problem: I've heard the Republicans talk, and they think they are advancing a cause that is right and is moral. All their talk about Iraq is this way ("Saddam was evil: THEREFORE waltzing in and blowing him away was good, and nobody will complain except ungrateful swine and evil folks"; even their talk about tax cuts is this way ("if you earn the money, you should get to keep it").

It'd very difficult to get across these lines of reasoning, while valid enough on their surface, rely on underlying premises that are deeply immoral and are based on power rather than right.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Of course each of the divisions of the Republican party believes that the cause it is advancing is moral--I'm not sure I've ever met anyone more stridently moralistic than a moonbat libertarian in full dudgeon. They rival the theocrats that way. The point is that the Republicans as a whole have no ideal, because the constitutent parts of the coalition have actively contradictory ideals.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Isn't that true of the Democrats also? Disagreements of this sort are what have caused many possible Democrats to stomp off and vote for Nader.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I think the parts of the Democratic party coalition differ in approaches but can all be mapped back to some version of the (admittedly incredibly vague) ideal I outlined. Whether it's New Dems, hard-left, racial politics, whatever, the Democratic coalition is more or less agreed that "Government should help the individual in need".

The Republicans don't even have that level of unity. The theocrats and the libertarians have goals which are diametrically opposed to each other; I don't believe it's possible to put together an ideal for them which wouldn't trivially include the political goals of every human being (e.g., "make the world a better place"). The plutocrats's goals map poorly to each of them, but in completely different ways; and the jingoists are orthogonal to all three. That's what I mean when I say that the Republicans as a whole have no ideal.

I could be wrong. Is there a statement of goals for the Republican party which both includes the goals all of the disparate elements of the group and doesn't simply codify the Republicans as the party which opposes the Democrats?