Thank you for saying what I was trying to say, only much more concisely!
And of course, if 1 and 2 are all there is, then the differences between the two parties are no more than differences in emphasis, rather than any real differences in principle. And that’s clearly not the way it is.
Imagine two tents with the same outer borders, but different center poles.
Imagine two tents that overlap to some degree, but with different borders (in some places, but maybe not all places) and different center poles.
In #2, Abortion happens to be one of those issues where the tent borders are in the same spot, even if the center poles are in different spots.
This thread has become totally too tense.
Suppose the Democratic Party adopts a series of “litmus tests.” Suppose we say that no true Democrat is a) pro-life (or anti-choice, if you prefer), b) against a minimum wage, c) against affirmative action, d) in favor of laws that limit civil rights for LGBT people, e) etc.
Now lets approach this from a simple mathematical perspective. You have just defined a series of sub-sets of the voting public. Each of those subsets has elements (voters) who are in the subset, and elements who are outside the subset.
If these are all adopted as litmus tests, then the ONLY people you are acknowledging as “true Democrats” are those who represent the combined intersection of all the subsets. If those subsets are roughly contiguous, then that may not be that much of a problem. But if they are not (and I contend they are not!), then what you end up with in the intersection may be a substantially smaller group of people than you really want. And there will be a significant number of elements (voters) who fall into most, but not all of the subsets, who would happily identify with your party, except that you’ve told them they cannot consider themselves “true Democrats”.
So what I’m saying is that the mere fact that a person has ONE position that your party DOESN’T agree with shouldn’t make that person not a Democrat. Obviously, at some point, if they disagree with too many of your fundamental positions, they probably shouldn’t be part of your party (unless you’re just into naked power). But if that’s the case, they probably will not want to be part of your party anyway. Meanwhile, what do YOU want to do about the person who is adamantly opposed to abortion, but who supports every other plank of your party’s platform?
I notice that no one has offered a suggestion as to what to do about that person, yet.
I offered a suggestion in the very first reply to this thread: Keep them. Pro-choice need not be one of the “tent borders” of the Democratic party.
Depends on how fundamental that position is. Someone who’s against the very existence of the minimum wage, for instance, is going to be either a libertarian who doesn’t recognize imbalances in power relationships (but I repeat myself) or someone who simply doesn’t want anything in the way of unfettered corporate power over the workforce.
This is not going to be some idiosyncratic stand by someone whose values otherwise line up very well with those of the Democratic Party.
As a Democrat, I’m a big tent sort of guy. While I feel strongly about abortion rights, I am strongly against the Dems making a litmus test of it. While I feel strongly about gun control, I’d be equally against the Dems’ making a litmus test of that. I think affirmative action is still something we need, but again, not the sort of thing you’d want to make a litmus test of.
The right to discriminate on the basis of race, sex, religion, ethnicity? Sure, that’s a litmus-test issue. Any Dem should be against that; why should we want our tent to be big enough for white or male or Christian supremacists? This is a core thing; this isn’t something where we can say that we feel this way, but people of good will can differ on it. And the time is surely near when we add sexual orientation and gender identification to that list.
I am not a true-blue donkey-pin-wearing Democrat, never have been. I tend to vote Democratic especially at the national level, but for every election where I did so because the Democratic candidate enticed me by the brilliance of their political positions and excellence of their skill sets, there were at least two where I was driven to them because the opposition Republican candidates horrified me and repelled me by theirs.
I would not claim that it is a good winning strategy for the Democratic Party to make being pro-choice a litmus-test plank. But I sure as hell don’t vote for any candidate in any party who is not at least passively pro-choice. I prefer those who have an agenda of making abortion available to anyone who wants one and enshrining that availability in as many ways as possible.
Does that mean the Democratic Party locks in my support by doing this? Yeah. Did they have me already? Mmm… shrugs
I have seldom had the opportunity to vote for an Olympia Snowe or a Susan Collins type Republican, and I definitely would have if more of them were out there running for office and soliciting my vote. For most of my voting life, it’s felt like the right-to-lifers have locked up the Republican Party for all intents and purposes.
But those examples are much more about particular policy means to an end. Republicans to varying degrees support tax expenditure to subsidize poor people (refundable tax credits, Milton Friedman’s idea of what should be the only social welfare program) but not unfunded government mandates to private companies saying how much they have to pay, which change the supply/demand balance for labor potentially resulting in negative unintended consequences, ie more unemployment for people the market value of whose labor isn’t worth the mandated level. This is in significant if not large part a practical argument about how labor markets work. A left leaning view might minimize the negative distorting effects of unfunded pay mandates, but it’s a debate about a practical characteristic of the labor market.
That’s different than the abortion question which is actually, unlike all the issues one side or another tries to turn into moral issues…basically a moral issue. Of course people’s view of practicalities affects their view of morality, the two are never 100% separate. But govt mandating wages is largely a practical question about a particular means, abortion is largely a moral question.
Anyway again I think the main problem with ‘pro-life Democrat’ is itself a practical political one. The party is so dominated by activists in favor of zero abortion restrictions that the concept, again especially for somebody off to join Nancy Pelosi’s caucus in the House, just doesn’t pass the laugh test. Note I’m not saying either side’s position is laughable or that the issue isn’t serious. It’s just a joke to claim one is a Democratic candidate for the House off to Washington to battle for more abortion restrictions, an insult to voters’ intelligence.
It’s hard IMO to see how the Democrats get from where they are to a credibly mixed party on abortion. But I’m not saying it’s impossible for them to gain a majority if they don’t. As long as there are two major parties the faults and excesses of one, exacerbated by ‘victory disease’ when they have a temporary advantage, always seems to put the other one back in the game.
Exactly. A party should have tent poles, but unless you find yourself outside of a majority of the tent poles, you should be allowed in. Sure some parts of you may get wet, but if you can stay mostly dry, that’s a Democrat for me. And yes, one of those tent poles is reproductive rights and one of them is the minimum wage, etc.
There were Pro-Life Democrats in 2009. The issue is if we actually push the idea that you can’t be a Democrat and Pro-Life. Get rid of the Pro-Life Democrats, and you only reduce our power.
If those Pro-Life Democrats in the House were not there, they would have been Pro-Life Republicans, who wouldn’t budge on the ACA at all.
That is fundamentally contradictory. The money given in tax credits has to be made up somewhere, and that somewhere will be from companies or individuals paying more taxes than they would if the social program didn’t exist.
That’s the problem with Republicans in general. They say they support social programs, but then reject the need to have the taxes to actually provide them. Because, for them, the issue of having to pay money is more important than the issue of other people.
The only difference in the extremists is that they see the problem with the taxes issue and thus don’t support the social programs.
The real answer is that, if you want something, you have to pay for it. There is no way to have social programs that do not also affect the market. Taxes always affect the market. You just need to build them into your calculations.
And this is a good thing, as the laissez faire capitalism definitely didn’t work except for a handful of people. We need a government using taxes to regulate the market.
This is ridiculous. No, you absolutely cannot tie yourself to any one issue. Because that inherently means that, if people vote against you on that one issue, you cannot get the rest of what you want. Flexibility is absolutely essential.
Yes, there may ultimately not be a big difference in both parties. That is not a bad thing. There ultimately shouldn’t be a huge difference. They both should be striving to be what the Democracy wants them to be.
Having two diametrically opposed parties is the problem. It’s why legislation cannot be passed. If you don’t agree on anything, then you can’t do anything unless you win all the parts. Which is the exception, not the rule.
We don’t have a parliamentary democracy where there is a clear majority. That’s not how our government was put together. We need compromise, and compromise can only happen if both sides are close enough to one another to deal with it.
If a party creates a litmus test, they are just ceding ground to the other side.
I’m a firmly pro-choice woman of childbearing-age and I don’t want the line of with-us-or-against-us to be abortion. If I am voting in a primary between two otherwise comparable candidates, I’ll most likely go with the more pro-choice one, but that’s the only litmus test I feel comfortable with.
We need to keep together to win back the House, make gains/maybe win the Senate and governorships. Fighting over being in lockstep on everything is going to tear us apart. I’d rather vote for an anti-choice Democrat than a pro-choice deep red Republican… if there are any anymore. I might be furious at every anti-choice vote that Democrat makes, but maybe s/he would do OTHER things that I think are very important.
Bernie is very pro-guns. Do we make that the next line no Dem can cross?
I spent a lot of today thinking of the Democratic party as a Venn diagram. Most of us fall within the main circle with similar views and agendas, but there are plenty of people that fall MOSTLY within that main circle. That little sliver might overlap with the Republican Venn diagram, but we are going to throw them out for not being fully within our circle all the time? Someone who has too many slivers outside the D Venn diagram probably does fall into DINO territory, but who is the perfect Democrat who has all the “correct” views and who decides what is “correct”? I love me some Warren, but she voted Carson out of committee, for example.
Again, I am very pro-choice. I don’t give being anti-choice a pass as a philosophical difference as a general rule. But I’ve known people who otherwise have opinions and actions of value who disagree with me on this and I don’t want to drive them away. I don’t want my rights and humanity stripped away, but this isn’t the only issue and I don’t want to walk away a winner on abortion and a loser on every. other. thing.
That point is obvious and does not make wage subsidies (via tax credits) ‘contradictory’. You’re arguing against a point no informed person would make and I definitely didn’t make, that a subsidy via a tax credit is some free lunch for all. Of course it’s not. Somebody has to pay more in tax if somebody else pays less (or receives a refundable credit), on a first order basis, obviously.
The difference between wage subsidy and a wage mandate isn’t that one is ‘free’ and the other not. It’s what economists call the ‘dead weight loss’ in the mandate case, from less efficient use of the labor of people whose work isn’t worth the mandated level in the market, who become unemployed and don’t earn anything. That dead weight loss isn’t suffered in the subsidy case.
And in the practical world of politics the misconception is if anything in the other direction. Unfunded mandates are often described as if somehow a fee lunch, ‘oh that’s just businesses who has to pay for that, it doesn’t affect you the voter’, which is complete BS. Not only does the cost of the mandate flow through to the general public just like a tax subsidy would, but in addition there’s a negative effect from distorting the point at which the market clears between the supply and demand for labor.
In fact the argument for mandate by any economically literate proponent would be ‘I know this is a worse policy that simply subsidizing low wage people via credits or grants, but we can’t politically sell the idea of credits or grants, so we’re just going to go with a wage mandate, some lower wage people will get screwed by the distortion of the labor market and lose employment altogether, but that’s just the way it goes’.
Anyway back to the actual point, this is all about understanding or recognition of practical characteristics of the labor market v practical political limitations. It’s not a genuine moral issue, but rather one of those issues sometimes dressed up as a moral issue as a cheap debating tactic. Abortion OTOH is a genuine moral issue.
There is a reason for this. The idea that illegal abortions would be inherently less safe did not arise until the 1980s. In the years before Roe, most abortions, even though illegal, were performed in legit medical facilities, typically doctors offices, and in fact, in the 1960s, while those opposed to abortion argued that it should be kept illegal because it was an inherently dangerous procedure – which it was, in say the 1800s – and those in favor of abortion were insisting that modern medicine had already made it quite safe (for the mother). Planned Parenthood and others published data on how safe abortions already were Pre-Roe.
After a decade of legalization, the arguments changed into what we have now, with those opposed dropping medical concerns, and those in favor switching from “already safe and therefore should be legal” to “only safe because it is legal.”
If by “acceptable”, you mean that a person that holds that position should not, on those grounds alone, be excluded from the party? Then yes, absolutely, it must be so, because we live in a two-party system. If, between the two parties, you have a total of more than one litmus-test issue, then you will have people who fail litmus tests for both parties. What do we expect such a person to do? And if both parties between them do have only one litmus-test issue, then that makes all other issues completely irrelevant, and you’ve got an even bigger set of people who are now disenfranchised, everyone who cares more about other issues than that one.
A strict litmus test can work just fine for British-style parliamentary democracies, where you have a plenitude of parties each defined around a few relatively narrow issues. If you have a party that’s the nation’s Pro-Life Party, then you can absolutely make opposition to abortion a sine qua non for membership in that party. And that party can still get things done, because they can form coalitions with other parties, whose members may or may not be pro-life, but who have their own purity tests for their own pet issues. But here, we have only two parties, and so everyone is going to end up in one or the other, and it’s folly to not recognize that.
We can’t let the perfect stand in the way of the good. Sure, it would be perfect if every Democrat was pro-choice and for more gun control, but realistically some areas of the country aren’t going to elect someone with those views. So do we just want to surrender those seats to the Republicans or do we want to have someone in there who agrees with us on most things and will vote for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker and help us gain control of all the committees? Personally, I think it’s more important to get control of a chamber of Congress to keep the evildoers at bay than it is to have ideological purity.
A pro-choice white supremacist would have to be without a party, I guess.
Life is just rough sometimes. 
That would explain why Bernie Sanders is independent, definitely.
The Clintons are far more of a “white supremacist” then Sanders ever was.