Divided We Stand

Two political parties; 240 million eligible voters.

We are a diverse society, with many opportunities for compromise, with many interests in common and many interests in conflict. We seek to maintain a governing system that works, while encouraging innovation and meeting the needs of people like ourselves. 

The choice for us, as for many nations today, is authoritarian control or the complex and always frustrating “muddling through” of democratic institutions.  Both provide a process for shared living—and claim to largely avoid street fighting, even run the trains on time. 

Perhaps because I was introduced quite early in my life to a belief in popular, democratic government, I remain a strong supporter of democracy and therefore a defender of the importance of competitive political parties. 

But what parties?

In past blogs, I presented four views of partisanship—four ways to think about two-party democracy in America. I left unanswered, though, which represents the best way to view the present and future state of American partisanship. Here is what I see (through a glass darkly).

The first, a conservative vs. a progressive party division, seems to fit the local level.  Local government very often involves policies of “stay” or “move. You will find on City Councils both the cautious and the bold (boat rockers)—those who want to improve overall quality of life, but are not willing to take risks to achieve these goals, and those that seek more and better funded public services and focus on future growth and change at greater immediate costs to the taxpayer and risks to the traditional culture and stability of the community.

This is also an important distinguishing characteristic of parties at the national level.  Here the tendency is for one party to attract elites whose interests are largely satisfied by present law and its administration, while the other party is “befriended” by elites who seek changes to better their own position and opportunities. 

A government like that of the United States, dividing sovereignty between various government branches, is more hospitable to the status quo, as it is structured to provide greater opportunity to block rather than enact change.  The “conservative” party is thus, even when not in control of all three branches, able to ensure a governing approach that is resistant to change, or largely conservative.   It risks, though, in times of crisis losing an election to the party of change, or losing the benefits of change.

As for “big” government and “small,” (My 2nd Blog), I think this is a generally incoherent description of reality.  It is a “talking point” of electioneering, where one party takes advantage of popular, but unsupported ideas about the greater competence of one of two similar bureaucracies (government vs. private). 

The serious question should be whether the public goods and services that only government can accomplish are desirable enough to compel government action and whether we are willing to provide the resources necessary for their success.  You want a small army to face the enemy’s larger army, because small is good.  Really? 

The 3rd blog saw parties as continuing “the good fight,” the 19th and 20th century battles between clearly defined economic forces reflecting the social/economic battles of the industrial revolution in Western Europe and the United States (and some other places, of course).  Workers against the Bosses.  Private ownership vs. public. 

On the whole, the battle ended by the second half of the 20th Century in a “peace” of sorts, a balance accepted, if grudgingly, by both sides. It endures as a serious disagreement over how to reform Capitalism (to preserve what is seen as a necessary private sphere of economic activity that creates dynamic allocative solutions for millions of producers adjusting to a similar numbers of consumers).    

Some are recasting it as “Oligarchs against the People,” but this may be another story. 

In any event, I don’t see this as the future of political parties in the U.S.--unless you feel today’s conflicts over limiting the excesses (and systemic damage to the economy of unconstrained monopoly interests and rent seeking financial institutions) are the modern version of the traditional “class conflict.”    

That leaves us with the 4th Blog, which looked at parties as teams of career office holders supporting one group of social forces (often referred to as “special interests) in a continuing negotiation with another party whose supporters (also special interests) seek alternative allocations of resources and forms of regulation.   

Don’t scoff too readily at this description. It serves real people and real interests.  Social and economic forces in society are affected by government policy and thus need their agents in place to protect their interests from mismanagement, unintended consequences of policy or lost opportunity.  Economic causes, or social!  Cultural issues and/or religious!  Policy advocates send their “soldiers” to the front.  There’s a war going on.  Politics is hard ball.  And the wealthy and well-organized interests within both parties contest elections by funding and working to get their kind of political leader, their warriors (politician) elected.   

While this is a good description of 20th century American politics, and remains an important thread that runs through governments from local to national, it may be less relevant to the politics of the next generation. It is challenged by the emergence of new political forces responding to an extraordinary dynamic of underlying economic, social and technological changes in American society and throughout an interconnected world.

Today we face a politics of crisis, requiring international cooperation and domestic unity over the widespread intrusion of global issues in national affairs. It encourages a politics of identity (supposed winners and losers), as economic forces disrupt stable communities and affect the fortunes of millions of citizens, at the same time as it requires strong government action backed by a national consensus. We are in a fight for democracy itself as well as the wellbeing of the planet.

And how then, do we describe and forecast the politics of the United States in the 21st century. That it is unclear or unsettled, should not be unexpected.  

American political parties have historically reacted to times like ours by “realigning,” reinventing themselves as defenders of new issues, adapting to a rapidly changing circumstances.  These changes have been the result of the dynamic nature of American life, the underlying tectonic shifts of economic and social reality across a vast continent--changes that are neither anticipated nor recognized in this largely non-ideological society, not, that is, until the resulting unresolved conflicts begins to produce blood on the streets. Now we face such changes at a global level and to a degree and at a pace that is unprecedented in our history.

From this, I believe, that new Republican and Democratic Parties will emerge—as post-industrial political forces in a fragile national and global society.

As they form and reform and the dust settles, we will each have choices to make. To actively participate in the difficult and critical times that will face the nation, we will have to choose sides. We will have to evaluate anew which party represents the interests of people like ourselves, and which party has the ideas and strength of purpose to meet the challenges of the middle years of this century.

Divided still, because we choose democracy as our system of government, we must also choose to stand with each other in the battle for a better life and a better world.