The Democrats Have Gotten More Ideological. That Might Be a Losing Strategy.
Ideology cohesion is usually a trait of a minority party.
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For most of my life the rule of thumb was that the GOP was the ideological party and the Democratic Party was the coalitional party.
This always was an overgeneralization. Democrats had an ideological perspective, and Republicans had coalitional interests. But from the New Deal to around the end of the Bush years, it was generally true. I used to think it had to do with the superiority of conservative ideas, but I’m coming around to the view that it has more to do with the way political power works.
There was obviously an ideological component to the New Deal and the Great Society. Stated plainly, the people at the helm of those projects believed in the power of the state or “big government” to steer the whole of the country in a positive direction. But if you look at the members of the FDR coalition, you’ll find a lot of diversity. There were intellectuals and populists, capitalists and socialists, racists and civil rights leaders, isolationists and interventionists, corrupt party bosses and the reformers who hated them, poor farmers, urban union leaders, Southern conservatives, blacks, whites, Jews and immigrants, all swirling about, often battling to win the president’s favor. That’s what you get with majority parties—a diverse coalition of interests all trying to get their place at the trough.
As the saying goes in Washington, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.
The GOP was a minority party for most of that time, and even when that started to change, it still usually thought like a minority party. By that I mean minority parties emphasize ideological cohesion and partisan unity. Always at a disadvantage, they tend to understand that if they don’t stick together, sharing each other’s priorities and leveraging what strength they have, they’ll get steamrolled by the majority.
It might seem paradoxical, but being in the minority makes arguments over principle more important. When you have little or nothing to trade, you argue about ideas. When you have stuff to trade—taxpayer money, jobs, seats on commissions and committees—ideological differences are easily papered over. Moreover, because majority parties in a democracy are by definition governing parties, there’s less reason to get bogged down in debating questions about ideological nuances.
The least ideological politicians in American life have always been the heads of political machines, such as Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall or the mayors of cities like Chicago. In such places, high-minded complaints about principles are easily assuaged with a construction contract or a monopoly on hot dog concessions at the ballpark.
The GOP hasn’t exactly figured out how to govern like a majority party, but under President Trump it’s behaving a lot more like an urban political machine, doling out goodies to members of its coalition with little concern for a coherent philosophic rationale. The role of ideological principles has been decidedly downgraded, as religious and economic conservatives get the stuff they want in terms of policies and jobs.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are behaving more and more like a minority party, putting ideological commitments ahead of coalitional interests. Bernie Sanders is the most obvious and important illustration of this. The de facto front-runner in the Democratic primaries, Sanders is like a left-wing Barry Goldwater—the ideological icon who spearheaded the conservative takeover of the GOP in 1964, in part by losing to Lyndon B. Johnson in a landslide.
Sanders is a pure ideologue who sees no reason to compromise his brand of socialism for the sake of coalitional interests. He wants no help from the rich if the rich expect anything in return. He insists that pro-lifers have no place in his party, and he doesn’t seem to care if things like fracking bans will cost the country jobs and his party votes.
My theory isn’t neat and tidy because politics are never neat and tidy. Sanders thinks he has the majority on his side. He doesn’t.
More broadly, Democrats don’t see themselves as a minority party—minority parties are often the last to realize they aren’t as popular as they think they are. Also, the desire to defeat Trump has a tendency to crowd out ideological arguments. Which is why Bernie, like every other Democrat, leads with the promise that he is the best candidate to defeat Trump.
And that’s a shame, because I’d love to see the billionaire-hating socialist and progressive billionaire capitalist Michael Bloomberg have an actual debate on their ideas. That debate may just have to wait until after Sanders fulfills his role as the woke Goldwater, truly making the Democrats a minority party by losing in 2020.
Photograph of Bernie Sanders by Bauzen/GC Images.
It's depressing. A president that should lose is going to hold on because the Democrats are too dumb to put up someone who at least passes for a moderate. He and his followers will interpret these results as another example of his incredible political abilities instead of phenomenally bad candidates on the other side. They will take it as a mandate for populism and the Republican party will be changed forever. Maybe the Democrats do know what they are doing....
Both parties are afflicted with a massive disfunction: we have one too few major political parties in the USA.
A two party system is ultimately incompatible with our modern optimized markets: experts have figured out that appealing to one side or the other exclusively is the surest way to profits and votes. The Right wing media has figured out how to sell the *coalition* as an end in itself. They are playing upon an ages-old human weakness, which is that people only care about their own particular interests, and don't generally have the mental capacity to understand others and our capitalist system gives them (with a few exceptions) no reason to care.
It's not new that an anti-abortionist, for instance, will side with industrialists who want lighter environmental regulations to maximize their profits.
What *is* new, however, is the marketing machine that trains members of the coalition to say they *explicitly love these things*, and to embrace every aspect of the coalition and exhibit *loyalty* to it. This is done with a relatively new invention of our free-market systems, wherein political ideas are packaged as easily-digested bite-sized morsels, which can be taken in by coalition members in a complete way, not just begrudging acceptance and convenience.
While this trick is a balancing act and not entirely stable either (viz. Tucker's socialist-like stances) this optimization leads marketers the easiest thing for coalition members to remember: a single, actual, physical *person*. In other words, Trump.
It was not a big leap, in other words, for coalition members to suspend their judgement of other coalition members and embrace their ideas fully to embracing a single, easily identified and understood media figure.
In other words, today's Republicans are of the mindset, "I am in favor of policy XYZ and... whatever Trump says".
And note that the specific "innovation" that our free markets have created here are Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and so on. The innovation was to turn political commentary and editorial stance into theater, with actors given a specific script that has no relation to the ideas in their own brains, following it to the note like the orchestra players of an atonal Schoenberg symphony.
Glenn Beck, shortly after the 2016 election, momentarily opened up the fourth wall and had a moment of conscious, explaining that his job was to sell mattresses, and that job required him to present an unorganized sequence of policy ideas as a single unified whole--and some of those puzzle pieces, presumably, made him feel guilty. (But our market being what it is, Glenn Beck is back to his old job).
A serious and viable third party in the USA would break this effect up. Without that I fear the market will "optimize" these effects even further, meaning an even more polarized country.