In a previous diary I proposed a Democratic philosophy that lies behind Kos’s slogan "Democrats are the party for people who work for a living". I received a number of comments that I will address in this diary. One noted that economics is not philosophy. My use of philosophy referred to the common use of the word (e.g. a philosophy of life) and not philosophy as a field of intellectual endeavor. A better word might be a worldview or paradigm that to various extents is held by people who consider themselves Democrats.
I started with the concept of prosperity which I asserted was the goal for both parties. I defined prosperity as good economic outcomes for the majority of voters. There is not a single majority. A majority of voters which established Republican rule is quite different from the majority which establishes Democratic rule. Because the two parties represent largely different majorities what constitutes prosperity for them is different. These different notions of what is prosperity (based on whose interests they represent) underlie different economic beliefs held by each party.
My main point was that Democratic beliefs, when acted on, tend to promote workers over management, while Republican beliefs are the opposite. This is why the slogan "Democrats are the party for people who work for a living" is effective, it summarizes the key difference between the philosophies of the two parties.
My article described Democratic versus Republican philosophies as two sets of opposing beliefs. It is an idealized description, of course, and was criticized as being overly simplistic. I note that in today’s political world the two major parties are more obviously organized along the ideological lines I suggested than they have been for a very long time. Here I will go further and assert that sharp divisions on policy must be present when both "sides" are competitive. That is, there is no such thing as "bipartisanship".
Periods of apparent bipartisanship are actually times of one party dominance. From 1933 through 1980, the Democratic party controlled Congress 44 out of 48 years and the Presidency two-thirds of the time. During this period, US economy underwent "The Great Compression" (ca. 1940-1946), a leveling of income disparities between the rich and poor, creating a middle class society. The Great Compression was followed by three decades during which strong economic growth was shared equally by all income quintiles. That is, most of this 48 year period of Democratic dominance saw economic outcomes consistent with what I claim are Democratic notions of prosperity.
That the economy produced Democratic style prosperity when Democrats ruled is no coincidence. As Paul Krugman explains in his recent The Conscience of a Liberal, the Great Compression and its aftermath was the result of deliberate Democratic policy. What happened during the Great Compression was anything by prosperity when viewed from a Republican perspective. The rich lost a great deal during the Great Compression and for 35 years afterward made no headway in trying to recover from their losses.
The world changed in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan. Since then, the Republicans have controlled the Presidency 71% of the time and had majorities in Congress 57% of the time. Since then the rich have fully recovered from the Great Compression: income inequality has returned to 1920’s levels. In other words, the nearly three decades since 1980 have seen Republican-style prosperity. It should be obvious that economic policies during this time have benefited Republican majorities more than Democratic ones.
The point I am trying to make is what Republicans want (prosperity) did not change since after they lost power in 1932. For a long time they were powerless to act and so they influence they could wield was to play along with the Democrats. Hence the postwar period is remembered as a time of bipartisanship. Actually it was a time when Democratic definitions of what is prosperity were accepted because the Democrats, being dominant politically, made the rules.
Since 1980, the Republicans have been back in the game. And Republican definitions of what is prosperity now became more acceptable. In the post-1980 world, if Democrats want to play the game, they have acknowledge Republican strength and compete. When the word bipartisanship is used today, it’s really about Democratic capitulation to the Republican agenda. But bipartisanship has always meant capitulation. Republicans who wanted to restore the prosperity of the 1920’s were called "stupid" by president Eisenhower. Democrats (progressives) wanting to restore the prosperity of the 1960’s are similarly dismissed by DLC Democrats.
Principle of Opposition
That there must be stark ideological division between politically active groups comes from the political principle of opposition: somebody has the take the other side of every major policy. If both "sides" agree on an issue, say the need to confront terrorists after 911, the definition of what it means to confront will be changed by whichever side is politically dominant until such time as the other side disagrees. This is why the supposed "national unity" after 911 was so fleeting. It did not take long for the Republicans to define the response to 911 (War on Terror) to include a pointless and destructive war in Iraq with the result that the two "sides" now violently disagree about what to do in the aftermath of 911.
Another example is the fiscal policies of the Clinton administration. With the abandonment of fiscal rectitude by the Republicans, the Democrats were forced to become "Eisenhower Republicans" as Clinton himself noted. Why did Clinton feel so constrained? Because the government will be unable to function if both parties embrace deficits. Republican constituencies believe they don’t require government; the rich can provide for themselves the services normally provided by government. Conversely, Democrats need government. Clinton saw that in a game of "deficit chicken" the Republicans will always win and so Democrats had to become the party of fiscal responsibility.
After the 1948 election the Republicans saw the writing on the wall. They would have to embrace big government in some way or become permanent losers. The key to Democratic power was the welfare state, which had brought about good times for the large majority underlying Democratic electoral power. Republicans only hope was to constrain the growth of this state, by creating competing claims to government attention. They adopted the military-industrial complex (originally a Democratic initiative) as the competing claim, justifying it by the Cold War. Over the next 2-3 decades the GOP came to "own defense".
Democrats were eventually forced to become the anti-defense party by the principle of opposition. Since the welfare state benefited Democrats, the GOP could express a stronger preference for defense over welfare than could the Democrats. Because of their need to fund welfare (the base of Democratic strength) hawkish Democrats couldn’t compete with Republicans perfectly willing to prove their toughness by increasing Defense to 100% of the budget in order to meet the Red menace. Democrats could not win a game of defense "chicken" and so had to take the position that Defense was not always paramount, that it was one of several important things government do. By not agreeing that Defense is always #1, Democrats became weak on defense.
Many Democrats don't buy the opposition principle. They don’t see bipartisanship as what it really is: the weak capitulating to the strong. They believe that a "Third Way" best solution can be found somewhere in the middle of where the two parties stand.