Yesterday, March 24, was a rather rich day for a snide political commentator who blasts both sides. What do you think went wrong in DC? I remember in school learning about the early Twentieth Century comedian and commentator Will Rogers. He is famous for making the political joke, “I don’t belong to any organized political party, I’m a Democrat.” Here we are more than eighty years later and the shoe is literally on the other foot. The only organized political party in power is the Democrats, who can almost always count on their members to stick it to the Republicans. But when the republicans run both houses of Congress and the White House. They can’t agree with each other on a single health care bill.
The roots of this go back to the cultural divide in the United States that formed between the revolution and the Civil War. In one region of the country an idea of rugged individualism grew up. At the same time in another area the more traditional philosophy of nobless oblige was the driving force on society. In politics the Democratic Party was strong in the region of nobless oblige and the Whigs were losing influence to the upstart Grand Old Party, the Republicans. The GOP embraced rugged individualism and promised the slogan Government of the People, for the People and by the People. This brought the common people to the ranks of Republican membership and gave the party a uniting concept to drive their politics.
The secession of the Southern states from the United States caused a rift in the Democrats that lasted almost seventy years. The democrats would argue with each other more than their political rivals. Meanwhile, the Republican Party was taken over by the big money of the robber barons of the industrial age. It became the party of big business, where at one time it had been the party of the common man. The last great Republican leader who embraced the founding concepts of the party was Theodore Roosevelt, who was as bitterly opposed by his fellow Republican politicians as he was loved by Republican voters.
The Great Depression was the wake up call for the Democrats, as well as the moment of their philosophical shift from old money privilege to an uniquely American form of socialism. The victories of the New Deal in raising the hopes and the the prospects of American poor became the cement that bound the party. The privileged money part of the party joined with the capitalist robber barons in the Republican Party over the next thirty years, and by 1965 the Democratic Party was very good at organization. Still lacking in big money donors, they attracted unions and working poor to their banner on the promise of government assistance for their financial difficulties caused by the capitalists’ unfair business practices.
The 2009 exercise of the mandate gained by the Democrats from the previous fall’s election was the crowning moment in Democratic unity. The Republicans had shot themselves in the foot by eight years of W’s presidency with near feudal government that served the interest of Bush and no one else. Now the Democrats shoved through their pseudo-socialist Affordable Care Act without regard for the objections of the newly marginalized Republicans. They did reach out to invite Republicans to join them in voting for the bill. But at no time did they consider amending the bill to assuage these objections. The resentment over the strong-arm tactics that passed the bill cemented opposition to the Democrats, but nothing more.
Meanwhile, the republicans were being overrun by the Tea Party Movement. This created a large group of sitting Republicans who were professional opposition forces, but not amenable to consensus. When the Republicans won the whole enchilada, they were not a united party, but in reality four parties under one name. The capitalist minded old guard was in the minority, the Tea Party opposition was in the ascension, the Bull Moose style original Republican moderates were a small minority, and a growing wave of populist Trumpians showed up to confuse things even more. We now have five parties in the Congress, four of which think they’re working together.
We would be better off if we rid ourselves of this “two-party system” sherade and adopted a system of multiple parties. Then the opposers would have practice in working together instead of assuming unity that doesn’t exist.
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