What is it that really separates Democrats from Republicans? Is it a disagreement about the size of the government or of its deficits? In the last twenty-three years the Democrats have demonstrably been better at shrinking government than the Republicans have been. Does that mean that the Republicans are really the liberal spenders and the Democrats the flinty fiscal conservatives? It doesn't matter what they say. Look at what they've done.
Is the real difference about values? Is it that the conservative Republicans are for traditional American values whereas the Democrats are libertarians? But aren't principled conservatives against governmental social engineering projects? Don't they want to keep government uninvolved with what should be the proper domain of the churches and other institutions in the private sector? But how else should the moralistic, quasi-theocratic program of the religious-right Republicans be characterized if it is not governmental social engineering?
Does the difference lie in foreign policy? When Clinton went into the Balkans, the Republicans objected. When the Republicans went into Iraq, the Democrats objected. It's almost as if the difference between the two parties has more to do with the way one roots for the Yankees or the Red Sox. It's not what one does or thinks; it's that one just hates what the other does because, well, they're the Yankees. Whatever they do is just wrong.
Is it about the economy? What did the Republicans really object to about Clinton's economic policies in principle? Was it NAFTA? Was it his support of free trade and the WTO? Just what was it? Or was it just that Clinton was on the other team?
The truth is that principle or philosophy has very little to do with it. It has to do with interests. The Republicans have traditionally supported the interests of big money and the Democrats the interests of labor, minorities, and the environment. It used to be that big money wanted small government because the smaller the government the less powerful any potential opposition to prevent it from doing what it pleased. But if big money can control big government and make it do what it wants, there's nothing wrong with big government anymore.
It used to be that the Democrats represented the interests of ordinary working people, but since the gradual diminution of the power of unions since the eighties, the Democrats have slowly drifted into the orbit of big money. Clinton supported NAFTA despite intense union opposition. Even business-minded independents like Ross Perot were further to the left on that than were the DLC Democrats.
For this reason a lot of people have come to see that there is very little difference between Democrats and Republicans. There is no longer any counterweight to the influence wielded by big money. And the bottom line has been since Reagan, that if big money isn't for it, it won't happen. If big money is for it, it will.
The central issue of our time is not the divide between Democrats and Republicans or liberals and conservatives–it's the divide between power wielded by a relatively small, relatively unified group of people with enormous wealth versus a second, far broader range of people divided by all of the numberless things that fragment American society.
I don't, of course, think that the first group has purposefully engineered the social fragmentation that afflicts the second group, but social fragmentation clearly serves its interests. The political leader that will be the greatest threat to the interests of big money is the one that can unify the second group.
That's not going to happen soon; there are just too many obstacles in the short run. But the best that can be hoped for in the next presidential election is to buy some time, to slow down this inexorable shift toward plutocracy until more people in the second group catch on to what's happening. And then, it is to be hoped, a popular movement will arise to redress the balance.
[This post was written in December 2003—plus ca change . . ]
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