Is the Democratic Party no more than just a collection of special interests?

Great Debates
1

Mr. Moto makes this claim here, and rather than hijack that thread, I started this one:

Sorry, Mr. Moto, but I don’t see how you have any ground to stand on.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, the evidence would have been on your side. But that was then.

Nowadays, what “special interest” stances have the Dems been taking in appreciable numbers?

Dems want a higher minimum wage. Over 80% of the American people want that.
Dems want us out of Iraq. A substantial majority of the American people want that too.
Dems want to investigate Bush Administration malfeasance. Ditto.
Dems want to use the bargaining power of the Federal government to bring down prescription drug costs for Medicare Part D. 80% of Americans favor that too.
Many Dems would like to bring about universal health care. Most Americans want that.
Many Dems would like to address global warming. Most Americans want that.

I’m sure there are some minor ways in which the Dems are helping some group in a parochial fashion that the American people at large don’t want or don’t benefit from. But the broad thrust of what the Dems are about, right now, has nothing to do with special interests. They are trying to do what the bulk of Americans want our government to do.

2

Perhaps so. We will see. I will fully admit that my view of the Democrats is colored strongly by my experiences and my opinions.

What I’m curious about is whether the Democrats are benefiting right now from a temporary swing in public opinion, or whether they have genuinely swung the debate over to their side.

Elections go one way or the other, but long term trends are harder to discern. If the Republicans can fix certain of their major problems right now, it could stop this current Democratic rebound right in its tracks.

And don’t forget, the Republican Party bounced back from Watergate. Less than a decade after that the Democratic presidential machine was totally broken. So let’s see how this all plays out in the end.

3

Public opinion always swing back and forth. What would be genuine? There’s no question the public see’s the Iraq situation as an no win situation. That’s major problem number one and the only credible thing they could do as Republicans would be to repudiate Bush and bring it an end. That would impress me.

4

The Dems advocate racial preferences and a *de facto * racial quota system, which most Americans oppose.

Most Americans don’t want marriage radically redefined to include same sex couples, but the Dems are obviously pushing for this (and it hurt them badly in the last presidential election).

Most Americans want illegal immigration brought under control, but the Dems are sitting on their hands and doing nothing for both political and ideological reasons. (They hope to build a political power base among the new immigrants, and they have a neurotic obsession with not seeming racist and with bashing whites.)

Most Americans don’t trust the Dems very much when it comes to fighting terrorism, and with good reason. Dems seem to be more concerned with moral purity than with actually controlling terrorism.

The Dems are out of tune with the American people in a great many ways. (So are the Pubs, but that calls for a different thread.)

5

Democrats weren’t pushing for it in the last election so much as Republicans were pushing against it. Most of the major Democratic candidates advocated (and still advocate) the compromise of civil unions.

I think polling has shifted quite a bit on this. Certainly, if you include the war in Iraq as part of the “fight against terrorism”, people are strongly favoring the Dems on it at the moment.

6

The Dems and the more radical Left have not done a good job handling quotas, affirmative action, and the larger underlying issue of categorical oppression — the notion that “there are categories of people who have historically been oppressed, are still currently unfairly treated partly because of unequal starting points due to the historical oppression and partly due to continued unequal treatment, AND we are fully aware of all of the relevant categories AND if you are in one such category you are a victim and need the help of progressive political action AND if you are not you are an oppressor of those who are AND, most centrally, it DOES make sense to address this problem on a categorical level: to consider each individual as a local incarnation of the relevant category or categories to which he or she belongs”.

The aggregate-categorical way of thinking does not easily lend itself to an assessment of their own progress or success: they need to have, but do not tend to have, a public stance of using affirmative action & other ameliorative interventions as tactics of temporary duration. Instead, the state of adversariality and the designation of which categories as “up” and which as “down” are all treated as permanent conditions.

Despite the fact that over time they do introduce new categories of “The Oppressed” to the list, they tend to behave at any given time as if there is no possibility that individuals not part of any currently recognized category are not necessarily best conceptualized as “The Oppressors” and might be oppressed due to a mechanism of oppression that they haven’t recognized yet.

Despite the insights of feminist theory of the 80s and early 90s, they still have a very 1890s Karl-Marxist zero-sum approach to understanding issues of oppression and power and inequality.

And, finally, a great portion of it all is done in a very condescendingly avuncular paternalistic fashion. The Democratic party leadership is not so greatly composed of The Disenfranchised (or the Until-Yesterday Disenfranchised).

There are some politicians within the Dem party who have tried to step away from those attitudes and bring a fresh consideration: Bill Clinton did, Hillary Clinton seems to have done so a bit, and Barack Obama has done so to a considerable extent.

At any rate, they are by far the lesser evil for the moment. There is nothing the Democratic party stands for that outweighs the need for the US to hand the Republican party its collective hat and show it the door until it can come back and behave itself.

7

I would say that the Democratic Party is indeed merely a collection of special interests, though not quite in the manner that is being discussed in this thread.
Instead, I argue that the Dems are a collection of special interests simply because it has no overarching philosophy, theology, or theory of government. It is a coalition of coalitions, often with competing or even diametrically opposed policies, that have joined together in an effort to obtain political power.

The GOP is the same; the primary reason the GOP has done better in recent decades is that the coalitions making up the GOP are much better at intra-coalition politics. The internal GOP coalitions have been more willing to compromise internally in order to obtain and maintain electoral power than the Democrats have been.

Sua

8

I couldn’t agree more. That is why I have “wasted” many of my voting opportunities casting votes for 3rd party candidates, primarily Libertarians.

9

Which is fine, so long as you use them as a means of making sense of facts, rather than using them as a substitute for them.

It’s an interesting question, but it’s not the question at hand. Just as, in the previous thread, the electoral failure of Jimmy Carter in 1980 didn’t indicate that the Democratic Party itself was damaged beyond repair - just that it was sufficiently off course that the public wasn’t buying what it was selling. As you say, “Elections go one way or the other.”

Well, sure. If the GOP could be freed from the influence of those who are only interested in government as a means of funneling money to favored businesses, and enshrining right-wing religious opinions as policy, then indeed it could. But right now, that’s asking for the GOP to have a full-fledged identity transplant.

Like I said, I’m not talking about electoral success or failure. But the difference there was that Watergate didn’t involve the GOP as a whole, just the Nixon Administration. And when it counted, enough Republicans stood up against the Nixon Administration - being fired rather than fire Archibald Cox, voting for the articles of impeachment in the House Judiciary Committee, and so forth.

During the past few years, how much independence from this Administration have we seen from the GOP in Congress? Practically zero.

That’s why the GOP was reparable then, but not now. In this decade, it has proudly displayed its fundamental corruption. It stands for nothing but power and self-perpetuation. Now that it’s no longer very good at that, what’s it going to be for?

Fact is, it’s the GOP, rather than the Democratic Party, that now exists just to provide “automatic opposition to any [Democratic] initiative, worthy or not.” Minimum wage? They’re against it, unless they can get a bunch of tax breaks for businesses that already got plenty of tax breaks during the previous three Congresses. Using the bargaining power of the Federal government to bring down prescription drug costs for Medicare Part D? They’re against it. And that’s not exactly partisan stuff, unless the GOP is going to fight for the 15% of Americans who are against these things.

10

You might find the answer here.

11

Another reason is that the GOP coalition includes the special interests that have the most money.

12

Actually, most Republicans I know oppose the minimum wage because they believe it leads to job losses among the poor. At least, that is why I oppose it, certainly not out of any desire to harm poor people, one of which I happened to be once.

Democrats like to point to McDonalds jobs paying far more than the minimum wage as evidence that the wage should be raised, while I see that as evidence of a market in action, labor that is in demand, and a minimum wage that is not needed.

Now, Republicans are willing to compromise on this to achieve other goals and actually move legislation forward because it is so much more a priority for Democrats than Republicans, true. But do not confuse this philosophical difference of opinion with malice.

13

It doesn’t.

14

I’m honestly surprised that this would be contentious or debatable. I’ve always thought of the Dems as a collection of special interests. And it’s not just me. One of my more liberal friends when I lived in Albuquerque, a Dem Party worker, was always decrying that that was why they could never get ahead (this was long before Clinton’s term), that their being made up of so many special interests, each with its own agenda, was why they could never come together and that the Republicans were so good at winning elections because they were largely a party of white millionaire wannabes with unity of purpose.

15

Or here.

(Note, I cut a little bit out there, the original quote in all its glory can be seen in the OP here.)

It’s funny; this is exactly what I think about the Republican Party. Republicans to me consist of a collection of the right wing religious who want to legislate their morality, a collection of wealthy business men who want to maximize their profits be minimizing their taxation and regulation, and a collection of gun enthusiasts that want to keep their guns. The Republicans I completely agree with, those civil libertarians who believe in small government, fiscal accountability, low taxes, etc…, either left the party or do not have power anymore.

16

Me either.

I can understand why you may have thought that fifteen years ago, but why would you think it now?

I think the key phrase in there is the parenthetical.

Cite?

The Dems have a lot of pressing matters on their plate right now - wars, corruption, global warming. Immigration, while important, doesn’t have the same urgency; it can wait until next year if need be. There’s a big difference between sitting on one’s hands, and not being able to do everything at once.

17

How could either of the two big parties be anything but a collection of special interest groups? You can’t get 10s of millions of people to agree on an overarching political philosophy much less how to translate that philosophy into policy. Hell, even the Libertarians could be characterized that way, and they’re less than 1/10 the size of the Big Boys.

The Republicans can easily be seen as a collection of anti-abortionists, gun-rights folks, pro-business people, and a smattering of libertarians.

The Democrats can be seen as a collection of labor union types, pro-choice folks, minority rights people, and a weird smattering of both pro- and anti-business folks.

I’m sure I missed a few in that quickie analysis, and I’m also sure there are many different ways of slicing and dicing the parties. Not to mention that one man’s “special interest group” is another man’s “principled policy advocates”.

18

Agreed. Completely.

19

I think you can, as long as you’re not demanding too complex a political philosophy. The Democratic domestic political philosophy is that many, and quite possibly most, societal problems are amenable to effective solutions through governmental action. The Dem philosophy of America in the world is that war is a last resort; most but not all international problems can be solved through conciliation and negotiation.

Or you can see the Democrats as recognizing that most of us work for a living, and the rest of us depend on those that do; half of all people are women, and the other half of the population aren’t exactly unaffected by what happens to the women in our lives, and they’re able to make certain decisions for themselves; that we are all human beings who should have the same rights under the law, and the same access to opportunities to better our circumstances, regardless of conditions unrelated to our abilities; and so forth.

I didn’t touch on the “pro- and anti-business folks” because few Democrats are anti-business in any meaningful way, any more than it’s anti-car to regulate fuel efficiency or enforce traffic laws.

20

I think it’s easy to find Democrats who don’t agree with that, or who don’t act is if they do.

Well, of course your “special interest groups” are “principled policy advocates”. :wink:

Which is why I used to the term “smattering”. I probably shouldn’t have used that term for the pro-business wing, because there are (IMO) quite a few Dems who fall in that category.