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December 27, 2005
Parties and Positions
Dave Schuler, in commenting on a list of "conservative" blogs posted by Kevin Drum, asks a very important question: what do the American political parties actually believe in?
It’s becoming harder and harder for me to understand the positions of the two major political parties. Abortion on demand is pretty clearly an article of faith among many Democrats. And the Democratic Party is very clearly the party of Fordism (mass consumption, mass employment, government fine-tuning of the economy, state provision of essential services). If Fordism weren’t collapsing everywhere, I’d have more sympathy with it, myself. It’s been the prevailing political ideology in America for most of my life.I honestly have no idea what Republicans believe these days. Not in small government; not in the market; certainly not laissez-faire. It’s a mystery.
American political parties, like mature political parties in any mature representatively-governed nation, are simple to understand: the only goal of any political party is to take and hold power. Everything else — everything else — is secondary. That is why the political parties, in circling for a permanent majority, end up flipping their positions periodically (as seems to be happening at the moment on the utility of deficits and other economic issues). What both Republicans and Democrats — and by that I mean the partisans of those parties — believe in is getting and keeping power.
There is a secondary question, that I believe would go further to answering what Dave is really looking for, and that is, "How do the political parties arrive at a particular position."
Americans as a whole (excluding the hardest core of partisans, who would never schism or disagree with the corporate position of their label, even when it flips 180 degrees) do not affiliate with political labels as a primary consideration; political affiliation is generally a second-order effect. The primary affiliation of most Americans is to positions on issues of substance. Issues that people cluster around right now include abortion, the right response to 9/11 (Iraq is a subsidiary issue here), how much control of the domestic and international markets should be exercised by the government, fiscal policy, the drug "war", what should be done about illegal immigration, response to criminal behavior, and how much income should be redistributed through programs like Medicare and Social Security. Each of those policy questions claims a variety of opinions — far more than can be encompassed by two labels — and different people assign different levels of importance to each issue. For example, my position table would look something like this1:
| issue | position | importance as a political issue |
|---|---|---|
| abortion | morally wrong, but the government should stay out of it prior to the point that the baby can survive outside of the mother's body | low |
| response to 9/11 | Utterly destroy jihadis and the governments that support them with every means at our disposal. | highest |
| markets | Markets should be almost entirely free both domestically and internationally, with no subsidies except for defense-critical industries that wouldn't survive otherwise, and should be regulated only to the extent needed to ensure that there is not an asymmetrical information problem between producers/suppliers and consumers. | medium |
| fiscal policy | The government should run no deficits except in wartime, and should consume as little GDP as possible, even if that means that some current government activities would have to be stopped or curtailed. | medium |
| drug "war" | See my policies on markets. If people want to kill themselves or destroy their lives, it's certainly not my business to contradict them. | low |
| immigration | Legal immigration should be much easier. Illegal immigration should be much harder. | low |
| crime | In general, fewer things should be criminal, and those things that are criminal should be treated strictly. Strictly does not mean "lock 'em up and throw away the key" (except for those that actually need killing); rather, we need to focus on fixing problem behaviors where possible (locking up drug users is a particularly pointless exercise, for example) and on removing from society those not fit to live within it. | low |
| income redistribution | There should be virtually none. Let's not go back to having people starving in the streets through no fault of their own, but let's also not run headlong towards the European model. | medium to high |
Every person, in addition, has their own list of issues that don't fit into the general societal arguments. Furthermore, there are minor issues that may become major, or may have been major in the past, about which there is currently little controversy.
But in the US, it so happens that our electoral system is rigged in such a way that only two stable and widely-supported political parties can exist. For that reason, people will be forced to choose from a limited list of candidates at the polls. So people choose based on which parties or candidates come closest to their positions on the most issues. (And they do this in a vacuum of information: most Americans know little more than the candidates' labels and major positions, even at the Presidential level.)
And that is where we come to what political parties believe in. Political parties believe in gaining and keeping power. The only way to do that is to get a plurality of voters to vote for your candidates. And the way to do that is to stake out a position on each issue, such that you can get the most voters to whom that issue is of critical importance. No party has a truly fixed position on any issue, and each will rotate about the issues trying to gain more votes. (As noted earlier, this is why sometimes the parties exchange positions on some issues.)
It happens, at the moment, that the Republicans have a slim electoral majority, premised on their fiscal position held when they were out of power (fast eroding now that they are in power), their position on abortion (and gay marriage, which I did not include in the list above), their position on markets, and primarily their position on the war. The Democrats held power essentially unchallenged for 40 years on their positions on income redistribution, the use of the military before and after (but not so much during) Viet Nam, and civil rights.
But the Republicans are grasping for a bigger slice of the vote pie by altering their fiscal position (losing libertarians, gaining moderate liberals), while Democrats seem to be trying to hold lose voters as fast as possible with their positions on the war, gay marriage and the markets. Given that the current trends in the Democratic Party are unsustainable, the party will likely either schism or isolate the hard Left. The only alternative is to give up on what the Democratic Party truly believes in: getting and keeping power, just like the Republicans.
This continuous ebb and flow means that the positions the parties will be taking ten years from now is not predictable beyond broad outlines or key issues (abortion for the Democrats and free markets for the Republicans). It also means that at any given time, the party that is out of power (and not-infrequently the party that is in power, too) is incomprehensible and jumbled. Ironically, the only time when political parties have such a fixed position that it's possible to determine a corporate position that they hold "on principle" is when they are on the way down.
UPDATE: Apparently Hugh Hewitt's blog software doesn't do trackbacks, but he comments here, and includes a list of lefty blogs he reads. Hewitt also lists the different 6-7 factions that he sees, and they map in an interesting way to the issues I noted above. I wonder if the prevalence of economic and foreign policy issues I list, and the fact that I would fall into the seam between Wealth and National Security on Hewitt's faction list, are related? That is, would a person falling into, say, the License faction list different issues, breaking up the two I listed (drug "war" and abortion) into further subdivisions?
1In actuality, I could write complete essays about each of these (and have about many of them), and there is a great wealth of detail and hedging in all of them that cannot be represented succinctly in a table.
As a side note, Dave seems to be amused that Kevin Drum listed mostly "conservative" blogs that are libertarian or heterodox conservatives. I'm amused as well, but not surprised. While Kevin Drum is one of the most readable of the left-of-center blogs, primarily because he's willing to question the left-of-center orthodoxy, Kevin is still fairly partisan. And there is a strong temptation to any partisan to see people outside of the party more as a threat than as a potential convert, or sometimes even as more than technically human. I suspect a list of "liberal" blogs that Hugh Hewitt would find worthy of reading would be similarly non-representative.
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Comments
I haven't read the whole post yet, but some thoughts:
Power is not an end, but a means to an end. What point does power serve if not used to accomplish something? If a party wins every election for 20 years, but does nothing of significance and accomplishes none of its stated goals, then what has that power acheived other than bragging rights? Are men so shallow? Are egos so in need of validation? Is this why one goes in to politics to begin with - to give the Sally Field Oscar speech?
Posted by: Brian Medcalf at December 28, 2005 11:41 PM
Excellent post Jeff. Of course he fact that we have a tremendous overlap in our beliefs might have *something* to do with that evaluation - but nice job nonetheless :o)
And Happy New Year !
Posted by: mark safranski at December 30, 2005 10:16 AM
Um, well, yes: some people are that shallow. Most, though, actually believe that they are accomplishing something important, and that's why people run for political office. But that is different from the party, whose entire rationale is power-seeking. I mean it. I've worked on fundraising for the Oklahoma state Republican party during a gubernatorial election, and on the national staff of an independent presidential campaign, and I guarantee you that the only urge for a political party is power. (The politicians themselves, of course, have varying motives, of which power is only one. And in our system, we have far more politicians seeking "power to" than "power over", which is a good thing.)
Posted by: Jeff Medcalf ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.caerdroia.org/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at December 31, 2005 7:55 PM