What would be worse? If the Democratic or Republican Party had total control?

Great Debates
#1

If the US were to become a single party state, which is of course almost impossible (I couldn’t see a way in which this happened), not in that one party would win elections so often that it became a single party state de facto, but a literal single party state like the Communist Party in China or the Soviet Union where political parties other than the Communist one were illegal, and people organizing in another political organization would be imprisoned or in some other way subject to prosecution under criminal law, which of the two major political parties, Democratic or Republican, would you think would make the US less worse off, and thus would prefer to have control of the government at every level, federal, state, and local?

Assume that either side in the scenario would get everything that the extremists within the party want they wanted domestically, and that a situation like genocide or a third world war won’t happen (please, no Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Kim Jong Il comparisons unless you really, really believe things would get that bad…)

I would prefer Republican, because things in the past that the Republicans wanted really, really badly are: abolition of slavery and preservation of the nation, which were somewhat extreme, and ended up being not that bad at all.

#2

You do realize that the things the Republicans want have changed in the last 150 years, don’t you? What you seem to be saying is that you’d want the Republicans to be in charge in 1860. Except that it’s now 2012.

But do you really think that this isn’t just going to be a poll of who supports the Democrats and who supports the Republicans? No one is going to give an inch.

#3

The Democrats wanted an expanded franchise (hence the name), and later single-payer health care.

So maybe that’s as good as ending slavery?

#4

The last time I checked the Republicans didn’t want to reinstate slavery. :rolleyes:

#5

Considering that moderate Democrats resemble the Republicans of 20 years ago, I’d say that granting total control to the Democrats would result in a schism between the moderate and more left-leaning Democrats, resulting in a political landscape that looked more like it did in the 70’s and 80’s which would be fine with me. I shudder to think what would happen with the current Republican party, though, which seems intent on purging moderates and in which the extreme wing seems to have inordinate power as of late.

Even leaving aside any specific policy questions, I’d say the Republicans would be a lot more likely to effectively maintain one-party rule, whereas I really couldn’t see the Democrats NOT splintering into factions.

#6

They’d prefer to call it a ‘guest worker program’

#7

I thought the exact same thing, but if we get more analyses like GreasyJack’s, it could actually turn into something halfway interesting.

#8

FDR ran for four terms…and Democrats weren’t against that.

#9

Yeah, because I obviously meant that Republicans now support slavery. :rolleyes:

#10

No, they’d like to EXPAND slavery by completely gutting the middle class, and have everyone making either $1 a day, or $1 million a day. No in-between. It would be slavery in all but the name.

Yes, people, Republican economic ideals are destructive to the middle class, by way of increasing the income inequality.

And if you think ANY society works without a middle class…I definitely would like to sell you a bridge, plus some oceanfront property.

Not that pure Communism works any better. You need open debate for a healthy society, and the extremists of both political philosophies seem to forget that fact.

#11

hey its a states rights issue :smiley:

#12

And FDR had Democratic majorities in the Senate and Congress for all four, but still couldn’t get large portions of his policies passed. He had a lot more trouble from conservative southern Democrats than he ever did from Republicans.

#13

Would you prefer a perfect free market that radical libertarians support (whether such a system even exists is a separate point, but assume that what the libertarians say is a free market is actually a “free market”), or communism-lite American style that the most radical socialists in the Democratic Party support?

#14

Well, since the Communism-lite is closer to a middle-of-the-road approach, probably that.

But there’s all degrees of “communism-lite”. There are some real true diehard Communists, even now, even in the US. Obviously they are foolish.

If you’re calling people like Obama “Communist-lite”, then, just for clarity’s sake, yes, I do prefer that to pure Capitalism. Do I even have to say that? Since this is the US, probably so, but still…

But I’d rather have perfectly-enlightened leaders, and I could care less about what system we’re using, if I can have that.

Since I can’t…I’ll take the closest thing to exactly halfway between Communism and Capitalism that I can get.

#15

And also since you bring up FDR, I think there actually was a possibility of the Republican Party going extinct during the 30’s and 40’s. The old guard laissez-faire (mostly northeastern) Republicans had virtually no constituency left after the Great Depression and it wasn’t really until the 60’s that they recovered by courting away the socially conservative wing of the Democratic Party.

I actually don’t think the current political landscape would be all that different had the Republicans gone the way of the Whigs, though. The tension between the two wings of the old Democratic Party were bound to come to a head sooner or later, and either one group would split off or the major political battles simply would have occurred within the party. Most of the current Republican Party’s constituency are the remnants of the old conservative wing of the Democratic Party, and so other than the small remnants of the northeastern Republicans, a Conservative-Democratic faction or spin-off party probably wouldn’t look all that different.

The moral of the story is that in American history, party does not always perfectly correlate with ideology.

#16

The Democrats would be better, given how psychotic the Republicans have become in recent years.

They push for as close to slavery they can get without using the word.

What “radical socialists”? Heck, what moderate socialists? The Democrats are moderate-to-right conservatives, not socialists. If you want radicals or even moderate leftists, you’ll have to go to a third party.

#17

The democrats are diverse and fractured enough and have enough dissent that signficant factions could develop within the democratic party and keep any particular agenda from steamrolling everything else, more likely to result in less extreme policies. The democrats are really centrists at their most left. The idea that we’d turn into a communist state under democratic rule is pretty ridiculous. At most we’d be looking at turning into Canada or the nicer parts of Europe, and that doesn’t sound quite so dystopian.

On the other hand, Republicans try to appeal to seperate factions, but they’re really rigidly controlled by plutocrats. They carry far more party discipline - eveyone adheres to the one true agenda or they’re attacked by their own. Dissent and debate are not tolerate and they wouldn’t attempt to compromise and serve the interest of the various factions. It would be pretty much be be a return to robber barrens and the gilded age, or whatever the modern equivelant would be.

The democrats would be well meaning and fuck up. We’d end up with some things better, some worse. I would have to imagine that with the way Republicans have run their party in my lifetime, we could only end up worse across the board under them.

#18

The Republicans are diverse and fractured, too, in their own way. Aren’t they a coalition of fiscal conservative, anti-tax, social conservative, anti-regulation, big-military, interventionist, anti-immigrant, etc.? They’re held together now by their mutual hatred of Democrats, but if they didn’t have to stay together to ensure they stayed in power (as the OP suggests), would their coalition hold together any better than the Democrats would?

The thing is, they’ve spent so long united behind the goal of beating Democrats that they’ve learned to conveniently ignore the incompatibilities among the factions. If they held power but still tried to follow all their current policies, they’d cut taxes and spend a fortune on the military, border patrol, law enforcement (anti-abortion, anti-drug, anti-gay, etc.). Eventually, I think those contradictions would reveal themselves. Either they’d cut some faction loose from the coalition, spend us into the poorhouse, or conditions would deteriorate so much (environment, health care, working conditions, social mobility, etc.) that we’d remember why we asked government to fix those things in the first place.

#19

I didn’t really answer the OP’s question, did I?

If there has to be one-party rule, I prefer it be under the Democrats. I just don’t see those same have-our-cake-and-eat-it-too contradictions in their platform. For all the accusations that Democrats cackle with glee over the prospect of raising taxes, I just don’t see it. I do see an acceptance that if you want roads, and bridges, and all the rest, we all have to bite the bullet and pay for them. We’re adults, we know medicine tastes lousy, and we also know we have to take it sometimes.

I’m very unlikely to ever have an abortion or marry another man. I don’t agree with the Republican view on those things (as I’m sure many people don’t), but I don’t see them as a threat to the stability of the country. I do think their desire to satisfy every part of their coalition would blow up in their faces, eventually. I’d rather they not be the only party in government when that happens. In a sense, it’s their very lack of fractiousness that would be the problem.

#20

Democrats want to make us more like Sweeden, Republicans want to make us more like Iran.

Seriously, think about the Repubican USA: Abortion is illegal. Birth Control is much harder to get. There is no minimum wage. There are no environmental laws. No gay rights. No protection for women’s wages. Wars, as far as the eye can see. An electric border fence. Evolution taught as a scientific guess, co-equal with creationism. Privatized Social Security, Medicare and Schools. No thought of deficits. Global warming ignored. A highly-regressive flat tax. Christianity elevated to an all-but state religion. More people in prison.

And the Democrat USA: Strong unions. Intelligent global warming policy. Universal healthcare. Higher taxes for the very wealthy. Gun control. Strong financial regulations. The Dream Act and Immigration Reform. Legalized pot.

Obviously, the above refers to *recent *Republican thinking. They used to be sane, but right now, the intellectual center of Republicanism is a mouth-breathing yokel in a trailer that smells like farts.