Credit: Creative Commons/dbking.
A striking fact of contemporary politics is the emotional difference between the two parties. The Republicans seem to believe the ideas they advocate, for example, unleash business, lower taxes, roll back government. Even though these ideas are sort of nutty, they are nonetheless convictions. The Democrats, by contrast, lack core principles. They talk about “fairness” but they vote for the banks. Obama as a typical Democrat exemplifies this difference. He insists that the Republicans are irrational fanatics, and that the Democrats are willing to compromise, for example to cut benefits. Of course, there are Democrats like Bernie Sanders who are people of principle, just as the Republicans are full of hypocrites, especially around such issues as homosexuality and “family values.” Nonetheless, there is a difference that needs to be explained.
The difference is this: both parties were originally revolutionary parties, but only one revolution fully succeeded. The Republicans were the party that abolished slavery and in this they succeeded. (Establishing racial equality was a different matter.) Instead of slavery the Republicans stood for markets, small business, opportunity and economic individualism. When Republicans today claim to believe in business, they are relying on around 160 years of history. Today’s Democratic Party is the product of another revolution, namely the New Deal. This revolution, however, was incomplete. Whereas the Republicans wiped out their class enemy– the slaveholders– the Democrats merely weakened their class enemy– finance capital.
As in any on-going, incomplete revolution, the New Deal brought opportunists and “pragmatists” in its wake. These are the men and women who say the original revolution was fine, but “too idealistic,” subject to “excesses.” Now we have to focus on practical problems, above all economics. We saw this in Russia, where Stalin killed the original revolutionaries and built a new Party based on technicians, managers, and engineers. We see it in China, where the technocrats are in charge. They pay lip service to Communism, but their real goal is to enrich themselves.
Since the sixties and seventies and, especially eighties, the leaders of the Democratic Party have been of this sort. They mumble their commitment to “fairness” but they have contempt for the Left that still believes in the original “revolutionary” ideals. Their real god is not so much profit as it is “expertise,” cost-accounting, committees of experts who will decide which medical procedures should be followed and which are too expensive, game theorists, who will tell them how many drones to deploy and all the rest. This is why the charge of elitism directed against the Democratic Party has merit, and why any new Left in America has to turn its back on the Clinton-Obama Party. The most important dividing line in American politics today is not between Democrats and Republicans but rather between those who understand this, and those who think it is “bluster” and “class struggle.”
Mr. Zaretsky is correct that New Deal reforms were left incomplete. What he doesn’t mention is that it was Lyndon Johnson who came closest to completing it. Unfortunately, his obsession with Vietnam sank his Great Society program and helped turn off many Democrats to his New Deal-type vision. But LBJ did succeed in another revolutionary area: civil rights.
Still, I agree that today’s Dems seem lacking in direction and conviction. But I don’t know how they can be replaced by a bolder and more principled left of center party that actually gets elected.
By the way, Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat. He’s an independent who caucuses with the Democrats while declaring himself to be a socialist.
good points. 1) By “the New Deal,” I include many of the reforms of the sixties that completed and reformed the reforms of the thirties.I mean the whole quasi-revlutionary wave that extended from the thirties through the sixties. 2) Bernie Sanders– my senator!!– is an independent but he was a Democrat for ever and caucuses with the Democrats. 3) Now is not the time to worry about winning elections. THe situation in the country is too desperate. We need to start thinking in a new way. This can only happen from small groups not worried about tomorrow’s election.
Excellent points ; if the Democratic Party ever decided to work together the way Republicans do, then we might see real positive change…
In Canada they now pretty much have three parties. If we in the US would stop buying the line that our votes are wasted if they do not go to either the Republicans or the Democrats, then perhaps we could bring another party into the mix, which would upset the stranglehold that is the current system. It is now intentional to keep a two-party system, but this was not originally intended by the founders. As Carroll Quigley said, the two-party system gives the people the illusion of choice: every so often we vote out one party and vote in the other, hoping it makes a difference, but it never does, because the two parties actually work together to continue the dominance. There is nothing but lip service on the mouths of either party, and they work for Wall Street. Unfortunately, we have seen this with Obama, to our great chagrin. We need to begin voting for people, not parties, and voting for non-Republican and non-Democratic candidates if there is a better third party candidate.
when i think left, i think isaiah 58. who of us has bought a second house and given it to a family that cannot afford one? no; in the 80’s, we started buying multiple houses to rent them to the poor at exhorbitant rates, driving the market and thus denying the poor the chance of owning. life is all about the power of free choice that money gives us. screw the poor.