Our Political Parties - II

The Grand Old Party

Alas, the storm is come again! My best way is to creep under his gaberdine; there is no other shelter hereabout: misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. I will here shroud till the dregs of the storm be past. –William Shakespeare, 1564-1616

The Democratic Party is the party of Labor, and the Republican Party is the party of Capital. That statement is true, but woefully incomplete.

First of all, it should be obvious that there are a lot more laborers than there are capitalists. As a matter of fact, the percentage of the wealthy in this country has been shrinking considerably in the past four decades, even as the percentage of wealth they control has risen. How in the world can the capitalist party gain the support of so many laborers?

The history of the Republican Party is indeed a saga of strange bedfellowship. It actually started as a vehicle to express moral outrage at the institution of slavery, and moral outrage has been one of its recurring themes since that time.

Republican leaders would probably rather their party be called conservative than capitalist, and there is a lot of common ground between the two terms. Those who have wealth did not get it, and cannot keep it, by being liberal. Such people who are cautious in their financial dealings are likely to be cautious in social matters as well. They tend to dress like each other and look askance at those whose attire is less conventional. They tend to favor keeping the various institutions of society just the way they have been.

Social conservatives tend to resist the endless, unstoppable change that has characterized the history of humankind. I am sure that there were such people who decried the construction of the Pyramids of Egypt as profligate and unnecessary; more recently their counterparts have decried and bemoaned everything from the shocking display of ankles by women, to the pernicious influence of the nickelodeon, to the degenerate fads of pointillism and cubism, to the decreasing amount of fabric devoted to articles of swimming wear, to the debauchery of the music produced by such impertinent dastards as Beethoven, Joplin, Gershwin, Sinatra, Pressley, and Dylan, to the imposition of the designated hitter rule, and on and on.

And that’s not a bad thing. Society needs a certain amount of inertia. As far as I know the construction of the Pyramids was indeed profligate and unnecessary, unless they had a purpose we have yet to discover. Most of us would agree that change is not necessarily for the better. We may decry the loss of civility, the proliferation of filthy talk, the degradation of women, the “dumbing down” of our educational system. We are all conservative to some extent.

What really worries me about the Republican Party are the “values” it currently espouses. Most of these, in my mind, are xenophobic hatred and bigotry: fear or loathing of Blacks, Jews, Muslims, homosexuals, artists, “eggheads,” Catholics, Mormons, poor people, immigrants, Hispanics, and I’m tired of thinking of more because it’s too easy to do.

But many of the people who hold these “values” actually think of them as moral. Many of these people are aligned with the GOP although, thank God, not all Republicans share their prejudices. Nonetheless, it’s pretty hard not to at least pay lip service to these “values,” especially when Rush Limbaugh and Faux News are ready to expose you as heretical if you do not.

To my mind there are a number of different constituencies of the GOP:

1. The very rich and those who wield corporate power.
2. Fiscal conservatives.
3. The well-to-do who have the attitude of “I made mine; let them make theirs.”
4. Those who aspire to be wealthy and think becoming Republicans will help them do so. (It’s amazing how many there are. In my opinion, they are deluded and their party affiliation goes against their own self-interest.)
5. Those who feel threatened by change (including xenophobes).
6. Those who are against abortion.

Probably the largest group is #5, while the smallest is certainly #1. But all the prizes are through door number one, and it is the rich and the corporate power brokers who really exercise the power in the party. As incontrovertible evidence of this, witness the fact that during the recent lame duck session of Congress, every single Republican senator signed a letter to the majority leader saying that absolutely nothing would be passed until all the Bush tax cuts were continued. Barak Obama campaigned to let these expire for everyone with incomes over $250,000, and he was elected by a big majority. During the Senate debate, New York Democratic Senator Chuck Shumer offered to raise that limit to $1 million. There wasn’t a single taker on the GOP side.

That was a display of the real power in the Republican Party.

The cohesion of the several constituencies I’ve mentioned is quite fragile, and I believe it portends the doom of the Republican Party as we know it. Fiscal conservatives, especially, have had a difficult time sticking with the party in recent years while those few powerful people behind door number one have engaged in the biggest hog slop in history.

The 2010 election was a real victory for group #5, but its influence is waning, nonetheless. Today’s young people are far less likely to be bigots than their parents and, especially, their grandparents. African Americans and homosexuals and immigrants and all those other bugbears cause little consternation to the younger generation. As the bigots die off, the GOP will suffer unless it changes its focus. Today’s young people do not listen to Limbaugh or watch Faux News. They listen to music and watch Jon Stewart.

Thank God for that!