Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Why I Admire the Democratic Party
I will stipulate that the policies of the Democrat Party are both fiscally irresponsible and socially destructive. I will stipulate that Democrats lie to advance their destructive and irresponsible policies. I will stipulate that Democrat politicians are by and large corrupt, irresponsible, and often display a disturbing hostility toward Constitutional rights.
Having said that, there are things one cannot help but admire, even envy, about the Democrat Party versus the Republican Party.
1. Democrat Leaders Don’t Attack Their Own Members.
In the Republican Party, merely wanting fiscal responsibility is enough to get you labeled a “whacko bird” or one of “the crazies” by the party’s own leadership. There is no Democrat equivalent to Congressman Peter King or Senators Lindsey McCain and John Graham, advancing themselves by constantly attacking parts of their own coalition. And it’s not as though the Democrat Party doesn’t have crazy people attached to it: Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee, Code Pink, Fortney “Pete” Stark, #BlackLivesMatter, and Baghdad Jim McDermott, to name a few. But when have you heard them attacked by other members of their party, much less the leadership? The Democrats follow the Republicans 11th Commandment better than Republicans do.
2. Once Elected, Democrats Deliver for the People Who Elected Them.
The Democrat Party has one basic value proposition: “Vote for us and we’ll take money away from other people and buy you things with it.” It’s what their voters want, and when elected, they deliver. What do Republicans promise their voters? “We’re going to cut spending and get the Government off your backs.” Yet, spending is never cut, and the bureaucracy continuously grows. In fact, there has not been a major piece of conservative legislation passed since the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. In fact, it often appears that the GOP leadership spends the bulk of its time in office trying to figure out how to sell out the people who elected them and make deals with the Democrats. And on that note…
3. Democrats Always Win “Bipartisan Compromises”
Hypothetically, liberal Democrats always want to increase spending, and conservative Republicans always want to cut it. So how is it that every “compromise” ends up increasing spending, just not as much as Democrats want? Instead of decreasing, just not by as much as conservatives would like? The much-hated sequester didn’t really cut spending, just the rate of growth. Baseline budgeting is suggested year after year, but never comes anywhere near being implemented.
And consider the grand “Bipartisan Compromise” of the Gang of Eight Immigration Bill. Democrats pretty much got everything they wanted; a path to citizenship for a constituency that votes 70-80 percent Democrat and higher levels of future immigration for that constituency. What did conservatives get? A bunch of border security promises and some fines for illegal immigrants, all subject to the waivers and whims of the Democrat president.
4. Democrats Never Give Up On Their Policies, Even When They’re Unpopular
When Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi took over the Congress in 2007, they didn’t just wring their hands and say, “Gee, we would really like to push the agenda our constituents elected us for, but we just don’t have the votes.” No, they went to work advancing the left’s agenda. Even if they didn’t get the payoff right away, they began laying the groundwork. Democrats pushed for state run health care for years before winning Obamacare. Democrats pushed gay marriage for years, even when it was unpopular. Even when they didn’t openly support it, they didn’t try and alienate those who did. Democrats still support partial birth abortion and gun control, even though they are massively unpopular. They aren’t easily cowed into abandoning their priorities by harsh word or a legislative setback.
5. Democrats Don’t Act Like They Are Embarrassed by Their Own Base.
One reason it’s so demoralizing to be part of the conservative base is that even when you win an election, you still feel like you’re losing the agenda. The Tea Party helped deliver the Congress to Republicans in 2010 and 2014, and what thanks do they get? The party leadership seems embarrassed by them and only too happy to deride them as “radical extremists” just as the Democrat Party and the media do. The Democrat coalition, on the other hand, includes environmental extremists, radical feminists, reconquistas, socialist revolutionaries, and a menagerie of fringe leftists. Whatever Democrats may think privately about their fringe, you never hear them trashing any constituency openly.
It is a shame that the Democrat Party, with policies so destructive, actually manages itself in a way that guarantees the advancement of those policies. The Republicans either have no grasp of how the game is played, or have no real interest in advancing a more conservative set of policies. Maybe both.
Published in Politics
Just to piggyback on some of Jamie’s comments:
All of the postulates in the original post can be explained by two phenomena:
1) Democratic voters/supporters are simply more ideologically in unison with each other than Republican voters/supporters
2) The overall zeitgeist of our society leans slightly left.
The apparent success of Democrat politicians in the public sphere is not due to any special traits possessed by Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barack Obama, etc., or behind-the-scenes whip cracking among their ranks. It is primarily due to the underlying sentiment of the public, both those who vote Democrat and otherwise.
No, but it is the perfect example that self-identified conservatives can be very fond of the dominant state once it comes to benefits they themselves receive from that state.
I thought those of us on the right did not support awarding participation trophies.
Nobody gives me a medal for doing my job. Not supporting cap and trade, working on the deficit, and preserving the 2nd Amendment is their job.
If Boehner and his leadership team want credit for doing something brave or heroic then do something brave or heroic. No debt ceiling raise, no funding for EPA enforcement, no funding for Obamacare.
Only rubber-stamping the majority of Obama’s agenda instead of all of isn’t reason for high praise.
Consider the popularity of Donald Trump. Nobody – not even his supporters – pretend Trump is very conservative. He is a slightly conservative-leaning populist.
But at its core, populism goes hand-in-glove with progressivism. Indeed, the Progressive movement was nothing if not an attempt to get more for the masses – more power, more stature, more money. Yet the tradition form of American conservatism dating back to our founding is in many ways anti-populist.
So the Republican party is – and always has been – an uneasy balance between two sentiment which are inherently opposed. Meanwhile, the Democrat party is progressivism all the way down. It shouldn’t surprise us that they can speak sotto voce much more frequently than we can.
No doubt, but there are a plethora of other welfare programs that we could address.
But likely without any success. Our legislative system requires many disparate parties to agree in order for anything to occur. When Republicans ask for a liberal program to be cut, the first response will always be: what are you willing to give up in return?
If conservatives are not willing to cut their own benefits, they will never convince anyone else to cut theirs. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the only major spending cuts in the past decade were the sequester, which was blindly across-the-board.
Which I think supports the OP.
Nobody in hindsight is going to think of GW Bush as conservative outside of stem cell research.
Ted Kennedy got NCLB, Karl Rove got Medicare Part D, until Obama’s inauguration Bush held the record for largest addition to the national debt.
Even when legislation they generally support is being passed they are still screaming like pigs under a gate for more.
Good points and well reasoned. We still have the power of the purse and if we wanted to curtail or not fund just one program we could do it.
At one point near the end of GW’s second term, he got upset at the ridiculously expensive budget the new Democratic House had passed. He said, “They can authorize it, but I don’t have to spend it.”
The height of 8 years of spending irony.
Ted Cruz has said he admires Obama for being a true believer. That term reminds me of Eric Hoffer’s book “The True Believer.” And when I think of it, that is what I see. The progressive is a believer in collectivism (it takes a village) and according to Hoffer, those who are spoiled and feel worthless like causes to identify with to feel better about themselves. The “make a difference and give back people” seems to be a social justice meme that I identify with the left. There are very few independent thinkers on the Democrat side, especially with the average voter. Churchill said something to the effect that you can see the problem with a democracy by talking for 5 minutes with the average voter.
Of course there is much truth in this and we’ve all said similar things from time to time but less comprehensively and less cogently. The democratic party is a giant distributive coalition the goal to capture key positions of power wherever possible using whatever works. To do so they must reward loyalty and punish disloyalty. Having no principles only the will to power, they don’t have to argue over truth, values, principles, unintended consequences or the damage they do because only power matters. It’s hard to fight against this using their tactics because if we do, i.e. big government conservativism, we lose. The default position for government is to grow, that is what it does. Any authority created can be captured. Conservatives are busy doing real things ( as are of course normal Democrat voters) that aren’t politics and our political junkies are awash in ideas and history values and other unprovable abstractions that can’t be nailed down and coordinated like sound bites. The way tight distributive coalitions are broken down is through change, as radical as possible. The Republicans are afraid of this change as well because it breaks up their comfortable coalitions as well. So, well, there we are.
There’s certainly an argument that unhinged hippies might make here, but for the most part, the “anti-war” left was just the anti-American left, and it hasn’t complained much since the departure from the public eye of W. There’s a hard core in there, but it’s very thin. For most of these people (and very likely most people in general, depending upon the topic), the desired results feed back into the ranking of values. Hate Bush? Need to maintain your conceit of moral and intellectual superiority despite an animal rage against a decent man? Easy! Become morally and intellectually invested against things he does. “Anti-war” it is, then, let’s go sing protest songs with college girls!
Besides which, the lefties who are bothered by the unfolding middle east disaster (this is just the beginning, folks) still blame America for trying, but not for hauling out.
Where’s that half-like button?
Agreed. All so discouragingly true.
[don’t mind Me, but this is bugging Me]
I need a ruling from an editor Here.
Shouldn’t the title read:
Why I Admire the Democrat Party [?]
Actually, according to the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition, it’s the Democratic Party.
Washington is not broken. It works wonderfully, for the Democrats.
For whatever it’s worth, the DNC website says “Official Website of the Democratic Party.” Actually it says “OFFICIAL WEBSITE OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY” but I’m a polite and restrained person.
It is neither defeatism nor unmoored from reality. It is, in fact, the current condition. Dems Win Everything. They are turning us into the emasculated socialist weenie state that they have long admired. During the 27 years that Mr Soto alludes to, the Dems have accomplished every aspect of their agenda that you can think to name, primarily by playing the long long long game–this despite the fall of the Eastern Bloc, which showed the fundamental madness of leftism.
Mr Soto, what aspect of the conservative agenda is stronger than it was in 2000? In 1990? In 1980?
Failing to admit the superiority of the leftist approach does doom us. We cannot defeat what we do not acknowledge. We need our own Reids and Obamas, men and women willing to push our agenda come hell or high water, not McConnells and Bushes. A little spine, please, gentlemen.
Conservatives have won the argument on taxes, gun rights and free trade to name just a few. Unions are the least powerful they have been in 60 years. Abortion is trending in the conservative direction.
It hasn’t been all one way.
There are different Democratic camps. The biggest are the unions, feminists, and race baiters.
The Democrats (unions) really want a strong labor movement. At activist’s meetings, the Employee Free Choice Act (Card Check) was Obama’s big specific and consistent promise throughout the 2008 election. Instead, the legal changes have gone the other way. They haven’t just failed to enact their priority, they’ve seen union numbers grind down still further.
The Fiscal leftists also wanted to spend more of our money, and instead the government is spending a smaller portion of our money.
The Democrats (feminists) really want deregulated abortions. The Freedom of Choice Act was another key part of their push for Obama; before the “War on Women” slogan was used, abortion was their key female empowerment mantra. They didn’t just fail to get it passed, but abortion law has become dramatically more restrictive.
The Democrats (race baiters) really want gun control. Instead, we have a strong Second Amendment for the first time in history and ever more widespread open and conceal carry.
Like you said, teacher’s unions and protectionists are key factions in the party, and they’ve a few genuinely terrible decades.
Bush’s early years get dominated by financial hits of 9/11, the recession, and the war, and his last year looks terrible because of TARP (although a lot of that “spending” was composed of genuine loans that got paid back), but the Bob Portman era of Bush budgets saw some pretty effective efforts to patch things up.
This is utterly wrong.
We are winning at every turn on the questions of unions and gun rights. Abortions remain legal, but state level victories are occurring all over.
The US budget is lower this year than the previous year. We managed to cut spending under a democrat president.
Every republican congress since 1980 is more conservative than the one that came before it. If we can get our heads out of the talk radio gutter and recognize this fact, we can do tremendous things when we win back the presidency. Entitlement reform is finally a real possibility, and we seem hellbent on pissing away the opportunity by screwing around with Donald Trump.
These are true, but it remains the case that the 2006 election saw the majority of Democrats campaigning with their first and foremost promise being to pull out of Iraq.
When those Democrats were elected, they increased the numbers of troops being sent out there. If that was on our side, it would never be forgiven, and would be constantly (and justly!) used as an example of perfidy. Instead of “holding their feet to the fire” or sitting the election out, or prioritizing attacks on Reid and Pelosi, they worked to get Democrats elected anyway, and that worked out incredibly well for them. It was only bad luck for them that Kennedy died and they weren’t able to remake more sectors of America with party line votes.
I can almost agree with you. It would seem to be a matter of time…
Taxes –
Let’s call this a “believe it when you see it”problem. That is to say- If we’ve won the argument; I’m not sure that we’ve already borne witness to the policy spoils of that victory. We still have the death tax – the AMT is still gathering up a larger segment of payers – we still have taxation of profits made overseas, again, etc.
Gun Rights –
This one is also yet to be seen. e.g.: DC v Heller(wherein the Supreme Court holds that the right to CCW(implicitly Shall Issue CCW) for purposes of self defense is Identified as belonging to the individual) hasn’t produced Shall Issue CCW permits as being the law of the land yet, has it? Isn’t it, though?
Abortion –
It is trending in the conservative direction, right up until you get to the part about the money that is paid to Planned Parenthood (With Verbal Irony: which of course has no effect on their ability to perform abortions…) . Still waiting on that one(the policy victory-that is).
Thank you.
Not to mention the mess Clinton left behind with his military reductions.
I think conservatives tend to overlook a key fact: the Democratic party is bigger.
For instance if you look at this chart you’ll see that in the very best GOP years (1995, 2002-2003) they managed to tie — but not pull ahead of — Democrat party identification numbers. As of 2014 they trailed 32% to 23%, with 39% of Americans self-identifying as “Independent.”
When you have more voters in your party, you tend to win more elections.
Look at the chart from my last comment. If you’re a career politician reading the polls and trying to figure out how to win elections, who would you rather appeal to: the 39% of voters who call themselves “independent” or the mere 23% of voters who self-identify with the GOP?
Yes, but we no longer have 70% marginal tax rates and most American’s balk at a rate north of 30ish percent. That’s a significant victory.
Again you’re focusing on the edges instead of recognizing that that every time the Democrats come for our guns the vast majority of the public says no way. The democratic dream of banning handguns, or even worse adopting a regulation scheme like Australia, is impossible.