What’s Wrong With Everything

I recently read this article in Mother Jones:

Plutocracy Now: What Wisconsin is Really About

It’s fairly long, but it explains a lot. Here are a couple excerpts:

• American politicians don’t care much about voters with moderate incomes. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels studied the voting behavior of US senators in the early ’90s and discovered that they respond far more to the desires of high-income groups than to anyone else. By itself, that’s not a surprise. He also found that Republicans don’t respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that’s not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don’t respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all.
• The Republican Party gets [money] from corporate sponsors and [organizational muscle] from highly organized church-based groups. The Democratic Party, conversely, relied heavily on organized labor for both in the postwar era. So as unions increasingly withered beginning in the ’70s, the Democratic Party turned to the only other source of money and influence available in large-enough quantities to replace big labor: the business community. The rise of neoliberalism in the ’80s, given concrete form by the Democratic Leadership Council, was fundamentally an effort to make the party more friendly to business. After all, what choice did Democrats have? Without substantial support from labor or business, no modern party can thrive.

So, essentially, due to the decline of organized labor, we have come to a state of government by the rich, for the rich. Which is certainly what it’s felt like for the past 30 years, but I always figured that was due to the Republicans gaming the system. Instead, it turns out that apart from a few stalwart individuals (Peter DeFazio comes to mind) there is just no one standing up for the interests of poor or middle-class people. This should be depressing, but I find that knowing the causes and the real situation relieves a lot of frustration.

And it brings me back to one of my many unrealistic ideas; we ought to abolish political parties. They don’t serve any purpose other than to funnel money into large organizations that, more and more, exist only to continue funneling more money. It doesn’t serve the electorate to classify candidates by party. The platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties are both incoherent in terms of right and left politics. Voters identify with one party or the other for personal and cultural reasons more than political ones. And politicians are inconsistent in how closely they stick to the platform.

We’d be much better off if every candidate for every office had to lay out his or her own positions and run on his or her own merits. Then we wouldn’t have two sides of an aisle in congress to become deadlocked. It would mean more work for everybody; voters trying to stay informed, candidates trying to get their messages out, elected officials trying to build consensus; but that’s not a bad thing. It would require different rules for campaigns and campaign finance to insure a level playing field, also not a bad thing.

I don’t know how to make it happen. There’s no way a majority in congress would agree to dismantle the engine that makes them rich. But we ought to do something, because the engines are making the rest of us poorer.

Why I Prefer Democrats

cartoon by Thomas Nast

I hesitate to call myself a Democrat. The party almost always disappoints. But if I learned one thing during the Bush years, it’s that the Republicans can make things worse than I could ever imagine.

I ran across this line in a Paul Krugman column, which articulates a crucial difference between the parties:

“More broadly, if Republicans regain power, they will surely do what they did during the Bush years: they won’t seriously try to address the economy’s troubles; they’ll just use those troubles as an excuse to push the usual agenda…”

Full column here

Appalled, Yes; Shocked, No

So the latest voyage of the right wing crazyboat is keeping children out of school to protect them from the big bad president’s message of socialist indoctrination, i.e. study hard, stay in school.
I knew this would happen, and you did too, just not what form it would take. It started the instant Obama set foot in the White House. Actually, no, it started the instant the Democratic nomination was solidified. Attacks. Rabid, nonsensical, ad-hoc character assassination. In years past, the MO has been to dig up scandal from the candidate’s past and harp it into the headlines by brute force. Obama has proved better than most at resisting this tactic. In at least one small case, the attack backfired; Obama’s decision to meet the Reverend Wright “scandal” with a brave and clear-eyed discussion of racism is what convinced me to support him.
Thus, the new MO: whip up frenzied opposition to his every move, large and small, and dress it up as populist revolt. This works better against Obama. It requires him to commit to specifics; he can’t move the discussion with big-picture principles. The principle of providing health care without danger of bankruptcy should be enough to motivate Congress, but clearly it isn’t.