First of, I'm more of an independent than a liberal or conservative. Keep that in mind as you read. Also, this is my first diary of any real length, so please be kind.
As with most flashes of insight, this one came to me in the bathroom. There may something Zen about the sudden burst of clarity that comes when you're purging bodily waste, but this is probably not the time for that discussion. But what occurred to me was that the Democrats and Republicans are, basically, Coke and Pepsi. Or maybe that's Pepsi and Coke. Just as there is little fundamental difference between the two soft drinks, there's not a whole lot of difference between the two parties. They're both after power, and all else is secondary.
Years ago, Coke and Pepsi had real identities. Coke had a hard edge to it, and did funky things to your teeth. Pepsi was Joan Crawford putting in a Pepsi machine on the set party because she had married the Pepsi CEO, party just to piss off Bette Davis. Coke was Mean Joe Greene tossing a sweaty, smelly jersey to a kid who gave him a Coke. No doubt it not only refreshed him but it also enabled him to go and bury some hapless QB into the cold, cold ground. (There are probably finer distinctions I could draw, but I grew up in the South, which means that in my lexicon, "Coke" was a generic term for any soft drink. But you get my point.) Coke was Coke, Pepsi was Pepsi, and never the twain shall meet.
Years ago, you also knew that the Republicans were conservative. 30 years ago, that actually meant something. Conservative meant resistance to change--not because change was evil, but because conservatives were being prudent. Big change generally results in big chaos, and the bottom line for the conservative movement was the preservation of the status quo. It's not that they thought that the world was perfect--they just thought that government was not well-suited to effect societal change.
Republicans eschewed Big Government (or should it be "Big Guhvn'mint", muttered cynically by a heavy-jowled Broderick Crawford?), and they wanted lower taxes, lower government checks, and had as their goal the creation of an Adam Smith-envisioned Paradise. America would prosper as its businesses prospered.
The Democrats, on the other hand were liberal. Mind you, this was back in the day before Ronald Reagan turned "liberal" into a four-letter word. They were all for change, because they fervently believed that government could be an agency for good, helping individuals and society to realize a better standard of living for all. Yes, there were some socialist principles at work in the liberal philosophy. There are also some socialist principles at work in the Bible, unless I missed the part where Jesus and the Apostles charged a dinar a head for that meal of loaves and fish.
But over the last few years, those distinctions have blurred. There's not a lot of difference between Coke and Pepsi anymore. After Coke (or it may have been Pepsi, which kind of proves my point) built an ad campaign out of taste tests, independent taste tests showed that most people couldn't tell the difference between the two. And on the political front, a Democratic president enacted Welfare Reform that encouraged people to get off the dole, and somehow managed a balanced budget.
A Republican president pushed for expansion of health care benefits. Oddly enough, the Democrats do not embrace him for the attempt to provide health care to the elderly, but chide him because he doesn't have the money to pay for it. And all of a sudden, you can't tell who's on what team without a scorecard.
With soft drinks, the answer lies with money. Sweetened corn syrup is cheap, so both Coke and Pepsi switched to it, bringing the two closer. They both want the same markets, so there ads even start to blur together, culminating in the soft drink showdown between Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Or was it Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears? Sad to say, at my age, jailbait is jailbait.
With the politicos, though, the answer lies with power. Politics is no longer a matter of working for the public good, its working for power. Politics in the United States has been made no in the image of Adam Smith or Karl Marx, but of Machiavelli. You get power, and then you use that power to maintain that power.
Both parties bob and weave around the issue of immigration in the country, because they're courting the votes of other immigrants. Both parties bob and weave around healthcare for the elderly not because they feel any moral obligation, but because not only do those elderly people vote, but because they're living longer, they're voting in more elections.
And, of course, you have the lobbyists, who fling truly obscene amounts of money at both parties, muddying the water up still further (I guess in my extended metaphor, lobbyists are the high-fructose corn syrup of politics. A market was created for them and they expanded beyond the boundaries of that market, taking over like kudzu in a fertilizer factory.)
So, what with market saturation becoming an issue for both politics and soft drinks, what's a strategist to do? Improve the product? Hell, no, that'd be hard work! We'll go for the niches. And thus we get Coca-Cola with Family Values, Vanilla Republicans, Pepsi with Reproductive Rights, and Cherry Democrats. And because now specific groups are targeted, whether is the pro-limers or the pro-lifers, those targeted groups themselves start to develop their own power base, in some cases so much so that they start to dominate the proceedings. I mean, really, have you ever tried to talk to someone who drinks Diet Coke with Lemon? Ann Coulter is more conciliatory.
So here's where we stand. Both parties have, in effect, lost their core, but instead rely on special interests to push their agenda. Faint vestiges of the core values remain, but by themselves they don't always make sense. Cutting taxes sure sounds good, but if you can't cut taxes, it's stupid. Regulating business sure sounds good, but unless those regulations are leavened by the realities of economics, the economy, and by extension, the citizens, are going to suffer. In such a climate, is it any wonder that the discourse has become so antagonistic?
I do not know if Howard Dean will succeed in brining back the Democratic Party. But I do know this: He has a core. I've heard him speak on several occasions, on several different topics, and he clearly has a set of fundamental, classically liberal values. And that's not a bad thing. In fact, it can be a good thing, because it might help him right the Democratic Party. I'm not sure who can that for the Republicans, but I certainly hope they can find the right captain.
I had hoped that a third party would emerge, Dr. Pepper-like, which would chart a new course. But Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper pretty much blew that idea out of the water. The third parties all seem to embrace a handful of fringe groups, without ever finding a clear, unifying philosophical core. Libertarians, come close, but they're kind of like Mountain Dew to the Constitution Party's Mello Yello. They may be philosophical twins, but they'll disembowel each other before they admit it.
So, barring a total meltdown by both parties, we're stuck with the two parties. Here's hoping that at least one of them gets their shit together.
Where's a nice glass of Fresca when you really need it?