JK: Yesterday's post-election roundup was heavy on present and former Democrats. Today, we hear from an ex-military red state cleric and long time blogger. Want to see what the view looks like from the other side?
Navel Gazing - A Guide for Democrats
by Donald Sensing
What now for the Democrats will occupy the attention of countless pundits around the country for some time to come, so I figure I should get my shot, too. Here are some trends and factors that I think the Democratic party will have to address in the next four years.
- The movement of electoral votes away from the northeast to the south and southwest.
States that went for Gore in 2000 lost seven EVs for 2004 as a result of the 2000 census. Bush won all seven shifted EVs Tuesday. Kerry's pickup of formerly red New Hampshire still left Bush with a net plus-four. Even though EVs won't be reapportioned until after the 2010 census, the party will have to think about this issue for 2008. (It may wind up mitigating against a certain New York senator.) Although the final EV tally won't be official until the states certify them anyway, the party has to face the demographic shift that has given red states more electoral votes.
Furthermore, my Mark One eyeball tells me that the blue islands are shrinking in the red states. James Joyner posted the by-county red/blue map, and it look to me as if there were fewer blue counties in red states this year than in 2000. In 2000, Bush won 229 counties by five percent or less; this year 162 counties.
- The social conservatism of the electorate.
About 20 years ago, Democrat Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill said that if his party existed in a parliamentary government, it would be five parties, not one. But that was when there was such a thing as a conservative Democrat at the national level. With Sen. Zell Miller's retirement, there aren't any left. As one commentator said Tuesday night, what happened to the Reagan Democrats was that they became Republicans.
The party has lurched steadily leftward for many years on issues such as abortion and homosexual rights. Although abortion didn't explicitly figure much in this year's race, 11 states passed referenda banning same-sex marriage. Social liberalism is an albatross around the party's domestic politics.
- The coattails effect.
The Republicans picked up seats in the House and in the Senate now hold a decisive majority. Bush is the first incumbent president since FDR in 1936 to pick up seats in both chambers while winning reelection. The red states pretty much voted for Republicans right down the ticket. Does this mean that the Democrats have to pay more attention to the strength of their own coattail candidates?
- The shifting base.
According to the Political Junkie (via email) President Bush gained three percent more votes by black Americans than in 2000, of which black blogger Michael King says, "anything beyond a single percentage point increase is something that must be considered a total victory for black voter outreach by the Republican Party." Bush also gained three percent among Hispanics (some sources say four percent). He also gained three percent among union members, six percent among Jews, seven percent among Catholics, four percent among all men and five percent among all women. No longer can the Democrats take their traditional base demographics for granted. Certainly these demographics are not now solidly part of the Republican base, either, but the voters the Democrats have counted on for decades seem to be slipping away.
- Tax and spend government programs alone = a losing slate.
To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, in presidential races the messenger is the message. Kerry's promises of something for everyone laid an egg, almost certainly because Kerry never connected with voters at a personal level (until, ironically, his concession speech). As columnist (Mark Steyn, I think) wrote late last week, there is no there there with Kerry, personality-wise. A surfeit of government handouts on one hand, coupled with doses of envy politics on the other, were not enough to fill an empty suit. Inside the voting booth, people don't vote simply for a platform, but for a person and a personality. Voters may believe a platform, but they have to believe in the candidate. Bush won the "believe in me" race, just as Clinton did against Bush's father in 1992.
- The compass problem.
Which direction will the party now take? The first thing the party will do is flagellate itself, then the knives will come out and bitter infighting will begin. But insanity, the old saying goes, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Expect that the near term will see the party maul itself over campaign tactics, strategy and packaging. Only some time from now - probably not until after the mid-term elections in 2006 - will its leading lights start to address the real core problem: that voters are increasingly rejecting the party's fundamental political positions.
Since Wednesday morning, when it became clear that Bush won, the party's apologists have heaped invective on the electorate; one pro-Democratic talking head viewed the solid-red Old South and actually said that the South should secede again and reform the Confederacy, a harsh but explicit admission of two things, neither of which bode well for his party. One, the Democrats have abandoned the South except for Florida - recall Kerry's primary-season assertion that the South didn't matter and he could win without carrying a single Southern state. Two, the refusal to examine the party's message itself; those who reject it are painted as dimwits who may be dismissed.
If the party continues to hold red voters in contempt and veer leftward it will lose worse than ever in 2008 no matter who its candidate is. The Democrats' challenge is to expunge in fact, not merely in image, the socialist leftism that is so deep seated in their party. But this will take many years and more than one election cycle. It will be very difficult because there really is almost no one in the party who can do it. True Believers of leftism control the party apparatus, anyway, and those leopards can't change their spots.
The centrist Democratic Leadership Council was once thought to be the answer, but its influence has gone a glimmering. It is highly informative that newly-elected Sen. Barack Obama is being hailed by some commentati as perhaps the Democrats' brightest star when he hasn't even taken office. There are precious few non-left stars shining in the Democratic constellation. (Joe Lieberman might become a wise old sage of the party, but I'd guess not.)
But the most difficult issue facing the party is that it needs to face some pretty basic facts, such as that the Republican party is not going to destroy social security and voters are not won by claims they are. Robert Reich has already said that the party must return to its basic message, which he then defined as raising the minimum wage and providing health care for everyone. But Karl Rove himself couldn't devise a surer way to keep the Dems on the losing side of elections. It's 2004, not 1964, and renamed or recycled Great Society government programs don't fit into the American polity anymore.
Polling showed that the top single issue for voters was moral values, mattering most to between 1/5 and 1/4 of voters; just under 80% of them voted for Bush.
There was a time when the Democratic party stood for moral clarity rather than relativism and uncertainty. There was also a time (say, 1960) when its internationalism was liberty based rather than accommodationist, and its national leaders jealously guarded America's sovereignty. But none of the above pertain anymore. Grappling with this dead-ended nature of the party itself will be its greatest task, but it is the task that the party is least likely to undertake.
Another interesting stat: more than 20% of all of the counties that Kerry won were won by 5% or less. Fewer than 7% of the counties that Bush carried were won by 5% or less.
Look at you guys! You would be singing a completely different tune is just a hundred thousand votes had shifted sides in Ohio.
This election is NOT a fundamental shift in power base towards either side. What is remarkable is that the election was even close, considering it was happening in the middle of an election.
Ask Ann Coulter if you doubt that.
On what grounds is Obama non-leftist in a way that other Democrats are not? I think he's great, and I'm thrilled you all like him too, but he did initially oppose the decision to go to war in Iraq.
"On Any Given Sunday"
The Republicans can easily lose the Presidency and the Congress. I remember the euphoria in 1992 when the Democrats added the Oval Office to their control of Congress. The Democrats should ask Newt Gingrich about the genius behind the "Contract with America".
I think the Democrats need to do two very important things.
1) Scrape Michael Moore and his ilk off their heels and don't look back.
2) Come up with a short list of five to ten items that people really care about, then ALL of the party hammer away at those ten items.
This makes sure ALL the Democrat candidates are making the same case, spreading the word, getting out the message... it worked for the Republicans in 1994 and it can work for the Democrats in 2008 (or even 2006).
So what it boils down to is that we're going to keep Social Security and all the rest of the existing welfare state and get a heaping helping of social conservatism?
Now I'm depressed...
I think vj has the right of it.
Shift around a few hundred thousand votes, moving them from safe-enough blue states to Ohio, and the Republican party, America, and friends of America and freedom throughout the world would be coming to terms with a calamity of historic proportions: the Spanish Surrender writ colossal.
So let's can the hubris. And I call giving the other team free coaching tips after the game hubris.
Most of the factors that went right for the Republicans and wrong for the Democrats can change, easily. At least two are bound to.
(1) The Democrats' professional ground game will get better in 2006 and 2008. Compared to paying crack cocaine for bogus registrations, how can it not?
Peggy Noonan is right: the amateurs beat the mercenaries this time. That's romantic, but history says money has the edge in the long run. A lot of people won't want to get up for a protracted, brutal election like this over and over, but money stands for staying power and practice makes perfect.
(2) Don't misunderestimate George W. Bush, and how hard he'll be to replace.
The Republican coalition makes sense, it does not have any inherent deadly conflicts, but you still need the right person to lead it. Otherwise you have to reshuffle your base. And an expendable "base" is not quite a base.
If you agree with the Democrats that Dubya is a moron (even though you resent their being rude enough to say it about a sitting president), representative leadership at the top level is not an issue that needs much thought: anyone you select will be better than or as good as Bush. I think that on the contrary this will need much careful thought as the party moves center and left, which it will have to as that's where the leaders are.
One option that won't work is to take a high quality candidate like Rudolph Giuliani, who is justly respected as a liberal, and have him do a Dennis Kucinich in reverse, quickly recanting his core beliefs to pick up conservatives as well. As far as Dubya's voters are concerned, you are what you is. I think they would find it disturbing to see Republicans taking up the familiar Democrats' ritual of selling your soul for power. I am sure the Republicans can win with great candidates like Giuliani, but they have to accept the costs as well as the benefits.
Remember also that the Democrats' weapon of choice is neither the executive nor the legislature but the judiciary, and especially an unaccountable super-legislature known as the Supreme Court. If Democrats can get the right appointments, by any means including luck and Republican aid, Bad Things on which there was no prior warning can become constitutional law, easily. This should sensibly diminish complacency.
Demography is destiny. This is the one long term item that really pulls heavily for the Republicans. As long as certain aspects of "red" culture hold out, reapportionment is going to aid the Republicans decade after decade.
However culture can be cracked. This is what the social battle is about.
Besides, the repopulation of America by vast numbers of hispanics of hopeful but unproven potential to assimilate (in such numbers and within a malign framework of political correctness) is a wild card.
In sum I do not think Republicans need to be teaching Democrats how to win elections by appealing to a secure, permanently conservative new American mainstream. It does not exist, and the Democrats are more than capable of turning things around unaided.
I'll take issue with your "coattails" effect. The House was due to redistricting, the Senate due to the cultural conservatism problem.
Also, regarding black voters, I'd check your math.
Say there are 100 black voters in 2000, and 93 of them vote for Gore and 7 of them vote for Bush.
In 2004, there are 110 black voters, and 99 of them vote for Kerry and 11 of them vote for Bush.
How is that good for Bush?
No, vj and David Blue, you've got it wrong. The war in Iraq has depressed Bush's numbers. As Ray Fair's model suggests if people had been voting their pocketbooks Bush would have won with 57% of the vote.
Carl Fenley, I think you've got it about right. But remember what Will Rogers responded when asked if he was a member of an organized political party: “Nossir, I'm a Democrat”.
Praktike, while you're not too wrong, I think you are more wrong than you realize. The black vote didn't quite get "into play" this election, but Bush gaining 2% (from 9 to 11) is a pretty big increase.
Bush gained more among the Hispanics -- whose pro-life Catholicism is quite strong.
Actually, I think Dems need a new message for "majority rich" population. Taking from the Super-Rich to give to the Rich doesn't strike me as particularly noble or visionary.
And what poor folk need are jobs -- jobs created by those rich, greedy capitalists who just want to expand profits by producing more junk that people pay money for, and need to HIRE MORE WORKERS in order increase their profits. Of course, if all the profit is gonna be taxed away, why bother?
Also, the MOST important thing for the Dems is to start standing for "the Good".
It seems like too many don't even know what is good and what isn't.
Dave, it's possible, and this is just a W.A.G., that while the Iraq war in and of itself is a net negative for Bush, its presence actually helps remind voters about terrorism, which helps Bush and may well have fallen off the radar screen without the war.
I'd take the whole 'it's now a conservative country' rap a little more seriously if government spending had dropped at some point in the past four years. Americans have shown a willingness to borrow against future growth that can hardly be considered 'conservative.' Incumbents have little reason to strip the system of pork, since pork is part of what keeps them in power.
Here's a serious and non-rhetorical question: How many people expect Bush to cut the deficit in half in the next four years without raising taxes?
On Obama, I've heard and read him speak very credibly about middle east issues.
He is clearly not a bury-your-head-in-the-sand democrat that distrusts American military power. He lived for some time in Indonesia and I believe his parents were involved in the international community. I think he falls in the internationalist camp of the Democratic party, but probably to the left of Liberman and Biden.
Patrick
Interesting article Rev.,
One correction though, the Senator from New York is actually a midwestern southerner, don't you know? Its also worth pointing out that she's methodist and we've known for some time that the party with the most methodists on the ticket ends up winning. Its a longer tradition than that Red Skins football thing.
Patrick
The "we almost won" folks are great. Let's see- Gore and Kerry both fail in attempts to draw inside straights- and party loyalists blindly proclaim that it may work next time. Jim Rome says it best, "SCOREBOARD, folks, SCOREBOARD". As long as Coach Shrum keeps getting hired, things won't change.
God I love mixed metaphors.
Dave Schuler, #35204 -
So what you're saying, if I understand you correctly, is that even though the Democratic Party can and surely come out with a better machine in 2006 and a better one still in 2008, and even though the Republicans are likely to have troubles with their leadership and/or base, you think George W. Bush is likely to end his war on acceptable terms (which given George's way of doing things means victory and democracy, nothing less) and you think the removal of that negative factor is likely to outweigh any gains the Democrats can make by incremental changes and straightforward, number-crunching machine politics. Result: the Democrats would still lose.
Therefore, even though the Democrats can see before them a non-controversial path to an acceptable level of performance for 2004, they shouldn't bother with it. They should accept that the model they are using has a performance ceiling below what will be required in the tougher environment after the Republicans win the war, stop tinkering, and go for radical changes aiming at a radically higher level of electoral performance.
If I understand you correctly?
The original post is off-based. America may becoming more socially conservative, but it is nowhere close to a majority. The reason they won is they get out the vote (Rove), but the big picture is that the Left is out of touch. America will not elect liberal northeastern poliiticians because by and large, we don't like them. A guy that was smart enough to figure that out was Clinton, he even told Kerry to support the gay marriage amendments this year. Until the left puts somebody on the ticket that is in touch with the value of America's center, they will continue to lose. I am not, by the way suggesting the gay marriage is the center, but it's just an example of how Clinton has a better feel of the electorate the left did.
David Blue:
Actually my point was a little narrower than that. However I don't think that Democrats are going to improve their national political prospects a great deal by just doing more of what they're doing now. They may win the states they're winning now by larger majorities that way but they won't win more states. This time around they spent more than the Republicans, stuck to their core issues, put out their best ground game, had the MSM pulling for them (if not in the tank for them), had a weak opponent (because I do believe that Bush is a deeply flawed candidate) and they still lost.
They can blame Terry McAuliffe. They can blame the stupid electorate. They can spend even more money. They can register more voters in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. They can turn out every single voter in all of those cities. And it won't win them one more state.
It's not fine tuning that's required.
vj,
U.S. Senate elections are state-wide. They can't be gerrymandered. The Republicans have made significant gains in consecutive off-year and presidential elections. This rarely happens. The Democrats have a problem.
All this thought from R's about what Dems should do seems off-kilter to me.
The general tenor of the advice seems to be that the Dems should become more like the R's.
Even if (doubtful) that won more elections for the Dems, would it be a good thing for the US? To me it would be a step towards one-party rule, with no real alternative offered to the voters.
Even if the voters consistently choose one alternative, I do not believe that democracy would be well served by removing the other alternative.
One point from this election, voters aged 18 to 29 voted for Kerry by margins of 65% to 35%. If a similar cohort (questionable, I know) reachs voting age in 2008, that alone would be enough to erase the 3% R popular vote advantage.
Personally, I believe the twin demons of budget deficit and trade deficit (oil dependency) will crash in on the US economy during W's second term, with devestating consequences for the R's.Tax shifting (to future generations) while pretending you are tax cutting can only go on for so long, before the line of credit gets shut off.
The plunge in the dollar is the first warning sign that the US is on credit watch. When the credit card is cut up, whoever is running the show will have a bitter harvest.
According to CNN's exit polls, voters aged 18-29 voted for Kerry 54% and for Bush 45%. I don't know why these kids might not start voting more conservatively once they've had children and a mortgage.
Waiting for demographics to change or for a catastrophe is certainly an option that's worked before, but its a depressing game.
Patrick
PD Shaw, You are right I mis-remembered the numbers.
I would agree that passively waiting for demographics/catastrophe is a losing game plan. Dem's need to do more than that and certainly need to focus on more appealing candidates(however you measure that, Clinton had more and Kerry less).
I just wanted to counter the "gloom and doom" end of the Dem party attitude.
In my home state of Colorado, an R governor and R dominated legislature cut taxes and did not cut spending. They seemed to watch in a slack-jawed stupor as the state headed into a fiscal train wreck.
The result was the first Dem controlled State Senate and House in 30 years elected in 2004.
Democracy is a self-correcting system, although the time constant can be large.
From a Progressive vantage point, the key thing for Democrats to do is to be patient. The massive budget deficits are not going to go away and everything (except judges) on the Republican menu is going to bring more revenue loss or more expenditures to the Government. Except for the judges, none of it should be fillabustered but all of it should be fought procedurally and voted against, for the record.
The official "recovery" began in 2001. It will have to last as long as the Clinton recovery (eight years, the longest in American history) to cushion a candidate in 2008. There will be no slack in the money markets, and no relative quietude in fuel prices, which extended the Clinton recovery for so long.
The pressure on the dollar from the borrowing will become intolerable and the Republicans will be forced to devalue, sending prices spiralling.
The crash, when it comes (not if, when) will be brutal. We will see then how many good Red State folks like eating their "values" for breakfast or watching the "privatized" portion of their Social Security vanish into thin air.
Moreover, the military mess is NOT going to go away. The Neocon international agenda will FORCE the reliance on conscription to "democratize" the Middle East. This is a mere matter of arithmatic. No smoke and mirrors and predator drones of the Rumsfeld Pentagon will make the multiplication table vanish.
Nor will casualties diminish wherever the "WOT" is being fought. Five hundred killed and 4000 maimed a year is the probable baseline. It has already begun to make the Red States run red with blood. By 2008 it will be 3000 dead and 24,000 maimed.
Health care will not get fixed. Nobody on the Republican side is interested enough in it--when it reaches 30% of an average person's income and 100 million of us have no insurance, you'll see some notice taken of it in the Red States.
Everything George W. Bush has done and everything he wants to do will place ever increasing strain on the fundamental sources of wealth and well being in this country. Sooner or later it will crack and the backlash will be quite satisfyingly devastating.
I just hope I'm still alive to see it.
"Sooner or later it will crack and the backlash will be quite satisfyingly devastating.
I just hope I'm still alive to see it."
If you wonder why the left has lost whatever intellectual appeal it once had, sentiments like this are a good place to start looking - eagerly anticipating the suffering of average people so that your political ideology is satisfied. If these defeated, morally bankrupt leftists stayed ouf of the political process would anyone be worse off?
Patrick:
Last I looked Park Ridge, IL isn't in the south. As a southerner I can tell you her stint in Arkansas doesn't really qualify her as an honorary. Some call her carpetbagger (for going to Arkansas) others call her a copperhead (for moving back north). Regardless, she sure isn't viewed as one of us by us.
And last I heard Bush is a Methodist.
kreiz - Gore and Kerry both fail in attempts to draw inside straights- and party loyalists blindly proclaim that it may work next time.
I really think that neatly sums up the mindset of the "no change" Democrats. The inside straight is all the new voters that groups like ACORN are supposedly going to register - you can just ignore the wishes and values of the current electorate, because these guys are going to go out and literally recruit a whole new country whenever needed.
And this new electorate will supposedly be on board with a full-blown "progressive" agenda, while the old electorate can just go screw itself.
And surely this will work next time, they argue, if we raise enough money, organize enough PACs, and spew more propaganda.
voters aged 18-29 voted for Kerry 54% and for Bush 45%
It would be interesting to see the results of a poll of this portion of the electorate on how many believe that there will be a draft under Bush, and how that correlated with their vote. I don't know for sure, but the draft scare was aimed right at this age group, and younger voters who have seen fewer campaigns may be more susceptible to Big Lie techniques like this than older voters.
In other words, this may not mean that cohort is going to vote for the Democratic candidate in similar numbers in 2008.
The COMPASS problem. Is it a morality issue?
I noticed the link to heaped invective was broken and my curiosity got the better of me. The link provided should get you to it without a problem. The link points to two articles one from the Boston Globe and one from the New York Times that provide some insight as to why major metropolitan areas are completely out of touch with mainstream America.
Statements such as these in the Boston Globe article set the bells ringing,
I wonder if people in Massachusetts know what it takes to put the milk, beef, poultry, pork, corn, wheat, salad and beans on the table. These are the epitome of the working middle class that look down upon those who have the sense and know how to provide the very food they eat. These are the people who look down on the back breaking work of the providers for America. They look at these people as though they are the servants that warrant a meal only after the master has eaten. Don’t get me wrong I love their clam chowder but their politics I can do without.
Then there’s this from the New York Times
I wonder how many people from the heartland the benevolent Dr. has treated in his career. Talk about being obtuse. An entire nation answers the call on 9/11 and then you’re unappreciative and feel they haven’t done enough yet you believe the heartland should have voted for a candidate that they believe doesn’t fit the bill to protect you or us. The heartland doesn’t need a psychiatrist for analysis.
Is it any wonder the heartland feels this way when they are fed this kind of drivel on a regular basis? An outstanding salesman has two things going for him, One a product he truly believes in (clam chowder and deli sandwiches) and two a respect for those that don't buy it. The outstanding salesman realizes the worth of a clients word. If all Boston and NYC have to sell is this then why should it be a surprise that the heartland responds with stop signs instead of a green lights?
I notice nobody has yet responded to Joseph Marshall's comment. Therein lies the bitter fruit of this year's victory. If ever there was a good year to lose the White House, 2004 was it: the Iraq quagmire is NOT going to get better, the yawning deficits will NOT be shrinking, and the inherent tension between James Dobson and Grover Norquist is NOT going to get smaller. 55 seats in the Senate looks better when the coalition holding it is tightly disciplined. Will it be? Will it matter, given GOP policy goals?
Take a look at a map of the 2004 electoral result. Compare it to a map of the 1928 result. 1928 was the capstone of almost a decade of GOP triumph; the GOP had fiscal affairs, public morality, and business-friendly leadership sewed up.
There were a few lurking problems that the pollyanna Democrats howled about, to no avail.
Then you might want to look at a map of the electoral results from 1932.
This analysis is essentially saying that Democrats should adopt Republican positions because they're winning positions. This entirely ignores the question of what we believe in. What it comes down to is this: I wouldnt want my political party to adopt homophobia as a platform, even if homophobia wins elections. I'd rather be a member of a losing party that stands for civil rights, than a member of a winning party that stands for discrimination.
I can certainly see your point, Josh Yelon. Since everyone who voted for any Republican is a racist homophobe, you certainly wouldn't want to soil the pristine sublimity of the Democratic Party with them.
What was the difference between John Kerry's position on homosexual marriage and George Bush's position on homosexual marriage, BTW?
Dave Schuler, guys like you should get a clue. You didn't just vote for a President on Tuesday. You endorsed an entire agenda. It's called "moral values" in an "ownership society" and its a package deal. If you think it isn't a package deal, you just take a look at how fast Senator Arlen Spector had to eat his very mild dissent from it.
The Religious Right and the Corporate Boardrooms between them are in the process of trying to completely remake this country into a radically different place. They have said what they mean, they mean what they say, and they will do what they say. And a majority of Americans just handed them the means to do it. Every Republican in America is implicated in this change, whatever their private feelings about gays.
Folks such as Mark Smith who would castigate my "moral bankruptcy" need to clean out there ears and get a valve job for their brains. We of the left gave you every opportunity to look the economic and military facts of the Bush Administration in the face and you simply refused to do it.
If folks like you who voted for him lose your job to the insane economics of George W. Bush, your health insurance to his indifference to the issue, and your friends and relatives to his inept military strategies, what do you expect? Sympathy?
I didn't vote for him. I don't deserve it. But if you and 58 million like you put arsenic in your sugar bowl in the sublime belief that any white powder will sweeten your fruit, why should I cry crocodile tears over the result?
You decisively rejected the alternative, after all.
Dave: ridicule me if you wish, but there's truth to what I'm saying: the republican party took many active steps, such as the FMA, and the various ballot initiatives, and the flyers that were mailed by the RNC, to court the anti-gay vote.
I would not want my party to do that. I would rather lose an election. I don't want to fight just to win, I want to fight for something I believe in.
I wasn't just referring to the anti-gay stuff, either. Take economics. Here's my view: in any economy, there's always a power struggle between the actors - the energy providers, the tech companies, the industries, the unions, the retail places. Inevitably, one actor accumulates enough power that he can use that power to accumulate more power. The last time we had laissez-faire capitalism, the result was the accumulation of almost all power in the hands of a few big industrialists: John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, etc. I feel that part of the role of government is to simply watch for these huge imbalances, and to dynamically come up with strategies that shift power toward the people. Note that I'm not talking necessarily about income redistribution, I'm talking about tipping the balance of power. The Wagner Act is a good example. Without periodic government intervention to shift power back to ordinary Joes, the result is always going to be the same: a few huge actors dominating and controlling the economy, and everyone else barely scraping by. Now for the last 25 years, the government has been so divided that it has been unable to act forcefully - which means that it has not been able to engage in this dynamic process of monitoring and intervention. Sure, the old laws that were designed to address old power imbalances remain, but this needs to be a dynamic process for it to work. So with a government crippled to the point that it can't intervene, I would expect certain actors to once again grab up all the power and marginalize everyone else. So sure enough, the stats bear it out: with every passing year, wealth is concentrating more and more at the top, a clear indication that it's happening again.
Now given that that's my understanding of how economies work, how can I morally sign on to Republican laissez-faire economics? If my party were to adopt laissez-faire policies, I would be morally obliged to abandon it. Again, I say: it's not just about winning elections. It's about sticking to your convictions about what's right and wrong.
Josh, I wasn't ridiculing you and if you took it that way I'm sorry. What I was attempting to illustrate was that you are caricaturing both parties. There are racists and homophobes in both political parties. Sorry about that. It's just the way it is. Some non-racists and non-homophobes voted for Bush. Some racists and homophobes voted for Kerry.
And you're caricaturing the economic issues as well. The government intervenes in the economy right this second to a degree that would shock people of 75 years ago. For goodness sake we've adopted nearly the entire party platform of the Socialist Party from 1928. We're nowhere near a laissez-faire policy with respect to the economy. That's just humbug.
Portraying one party—either party—as the party of virtue and the other party as the party of evil is just plain counter-factual. And, what's worse, it won't get you anywhere.
When you say we're not currently a laissez-faire economy, I half-agree with you.
I agree with you in the sense that there remain a number of static policies (such as the wagner act) designed to alleviate the power imbalances of the past.
I disagree in the sense that our government has essentially committed itself to not dealing with the power imbalances of the present.
That latter sense is very important. A static set of rules is no match for a powerful actor bent on abusing its power. Enron is a good example. The only way to keep such entities in check is to have an equally-dynamic actor responding in real-time.
And on this point we completely agree. However, I suspect that you've cast government in this role. I've never seen government act this nimbly. And neither have you. What I favor is a reduction in corporate welfare (a lot of what passes for entrepeneurism these days is rent-seeking), removal of protections for high-level managers, greater restrictions on certain methods of corporate governance e.g. interlocking directorates, and more empowerment of minority stockholders. You?
I'm pretty good at seeing the problems. It's harder to come up with good solutions.
1. It's very easy for a CEO to pretend he "didn't know" that his company was doing something illegal. I would suggest that there need to be laws that assign responsibility automatically, using a fairly rigid system of pre-assigned responsibility. That puts the onus on the company to police itself.
2. One of the preferred methods of fraud these days is when a company intentionally creates confusing policies that lead to bookkeeping errors that rip off the customer. Phone companies do this a lot. If you notice the error on your bill, they'll apologize profusely, but somehow, they just keep making the same error over and over. I propose a law that if a company has a track record of making errors that favor the company, that should be legally considered willful fraud.
3. Stock market bubbles are clearly hurting the economy, repeatedly. I'm not sure whether to think of these as "fraud" or not. It's clear that stock market bubbles are essentially diffuse ponzi schemes. What's not clear to me is whether or not a ponzi scheme is really fraud, or just a weird form of gambling. What is clear to me is that the fear of participating in the market is much higher than it would normally be, because people are afraid of being entrapped into these things. I don't know what the right solution is.
4. Employer-sponsored health care is disempowering to the worker. I am intimately familiar with this problem: my wife is keeping an awful job because otherwise, we'd lose our health insurance. We have been waiting a long time for the free market to devise a solution, so far, it seems to be doing nothing at all. I rather liked Kerry's plan for catastrophic reinsurance.
As for the reduction in corporate welfare, I'm with you 100%. I've always hated it when cities try to attract companies away from other cities. It's a zero-sum game, but it steals from the poor and gives to the rich. I don't know if it's constitutionally possible or desirable to ban the practice, but it's worth thinking about.
Now you say that government shouldn't be the one implementing these solutions, because it's not nimble enough. But if the government doesn't do these things, who can?