US Elections 2020

[filghy2]

Although I agree with much of what you say, I think my main interest is in the way that in the US Conservatives have failed to prevent their most basic ideas being corrupted by political practice and expediency, that they have attempted to re-define it but ended up in effect turning it into a meaningless concept, and that the Democrats have failed to exploit this confusion by failing to re-define what it is that they believe in.

I'm not sure that philosophical coherence is essential or even possible these days. In order to achieve that parties would need to have a support base whose interests are well-aligned and large enough to form an electoral majority.

In the old days the major parties could have coherent philosophies because politics was based essentially on economic class. The party of the left represented the working class (manual workers), while the party of the right represented the middle and upper classes (business people, professionals and land-owners). Cultural issues were less important because both sides accepted the predominance of Christianity, patriarchy, heterosexuality and whiteness. This seems no longer tenable because of economic and social changes.

The Republican party started playing the race card around 50 years ago because it realised that it could no longer rely on traditional free market conservatism to win electoral majorities, as the middle class became more educated and more liberal. In order to appeal to white working class voters it emphasised 'culture war' issues to distract attention from its primary agenda of advancing the interests of the well-off. This started well before Trump; he has just taken it further.

The obvious tension is that if the working class continue to struggle when Republicans are in power they might realise that their economic interests are not being served. So far they have been able to offset this by further ramping up the culture wars and appealing to blue collar workers through protectionism, anti-immigrant policies and opposing environment policies affecting their industries.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have seen their traditional support base eroded though shifts in the economy away from highly-unionised blue collar jobs in manufacturing etc. They have attempted to compensate by broadening their appeal to minorities and socially-progressive educated urban voters. This has created tensions that have contributed to white working class voters drifting toward the Republicans.

The centre-left policy agenda over the past 30 years has been to accept a largely deregulated globalised economy, while supporting relatively moderate policy interventions to ameliorate its excesses. Regardless of the result in November I tend to agree that playing safe and hoping to benefit from the other side's excesses and mistakes will not suffice going forward. The right time for a policy rethink would have been after the 2016 election loss. Unfortunately, the US system, where the opposition party does not even have a leader until the election year, does not seem to lend itself to this.

[Stavros]

I agree with your post, but rather than resolve the contradiction in American politics, which also exists in the UK but in a different form, the intellectual basis of my argument matters, for this reason-

It may be true that in the US now, the Liberal and the Conservative do not correspond to the terms as they were understood in 1776, indeed, that today the claim appears to be that the Liberal American is more or less a socialist who seeks to change the Constitutional intentions of the USA, where it is the Conservatives who seek to refurbish its original intentions.

But this is manifest rubbish, for the one thing that the American Revolutionaries were not and never could have been is Conservative, because the whole purpose of the Revolution was to argue against Burke and his uncritical subservience to the Crown, and embrace a Liberal concept of the State which had no King and where power was distributed in common with an emphasis on individual and community as the sources of power. In this sense, Liberalism is 'the American ideology' and one must assume every American who believes the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution are the foundations of the US, is by definition, a Liberal.

Wolfe disagrees but Ryan argues Libertarian ideas cannot be separated from Liberal ideas, which means that on one level, the Liberatarians in the US are closer to the Founding Fathers than Conservatives and Liberals so-called today ie Democrats and Socialists, but confuse their own agenda, because of their Libertarian commitments, presenting an extreme version of the Revolution that was not there at the time and has never found its way into any law, because there must be a Federal State and the Federal Government that the Libertarians find obnoxious, even as they seek to capture power locally in their State in order to enact their own version of or 'restoration' of the Revolution -the Liberal Revolution of 1776 never envisaged the absence of Government, and this is what utimately makes the Libertarian movement in the US today a contradiction in terms.

So what? you might ask. But the Federalist Society which has played so major a role in the 'selection' of hundreds of Judges in the US (see link at end of this paragraph), appears at times to favour what it claims is a 'Conservative' agenda, when in reality it is not Conservative, because it seeks to change rather than to conserve so much of US Law that has been passed in since the 1960s, but it is not Liberal either, because it can only pay lip service to much if not most of the Constitutional arrangments that were laid down between 1776 and 1789 which in realty they object to. Two other factors are also at work here: Christian Fundamentalism, and Race, two factors that Libertarians ought to object to.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...ca-republicans

Thus, my suggestion is that somewhere in this fog of definitions, something is happening that many Americans may object to, because
a) the idea that the Government ought not to intervene in the economy sounds fair, but is not met in the conditions of contemporary Capitalism, whether the President is the 'radical left' Democrat Obama or whatever label you want to pin on his successor -both have inherited an economy dependent on Federal and State Government contracts, and neither did, or intend to make any structural changes to replace Government with free markets -it is worth noting that Obama's successor has claimed he does not believe in 'free markets' but 'fair markets' which I guess is how he defines the US taxpayer bailing out his failed businesses.

b) the Liberal idea that social and individual choices shoud keep the Government out of the Library and the Bedroom was not exactly met in the 19th century because 'peer pressure' in society allowed the imposition of rules on behaviour, at a time when most Americans lived in small religious communities where a 'higher' authority established those rules. So what is interesting is how it may not be the Libertarian elements in the Judiciary and the State that are seeking change to intervene in the Library and the Bedroom but the 'Evangelical Christians', and though they may share social prejudices that were common in 1800, today the agenda goes beyond the prohibitions of Abortion, Divorce and Homosexualty, to embrace mystical ideas the 'End Times' and the 'Tribulations' sounding at times more like a death cult than a practical religion.

d) thus there is not only a contradiction in the so-called Conservatives as to what they believe in, they make common cause with the Evangelical Christians with whom they must disagree on most things but only to secure positions of power and authority, so that the real Americans who have no interest in either, face the prospect of their freedoms and their rights being mashed between the jaws of Libertarians and Evangelical Christians who in numerical terms represent a minority of the population, with the added confusion that Race, which ought to mean nothing to both, is the anvil on which to re-shape their America, Black Americans its permanent victims.

If there is one last thought on this attempt to unite the obscure with the real present, it is that one cannot escape the argument that the Founding Fathers of the American Revoution were slave-owners who were motivated to remove the Crown from American life so that they could benefit from the economic opporunities that America gave them. I think it was Charles Beard who first argued that the American Revolution was a classic -and class-based- Revolution of the property-owning bourgeoisie against an absentee landlord who never worked a day for a dollar. History has shown how the poorest immigrant to America could 'make it', where 'make it' was an American dream of freedom and prosperity, but just as money and wealth was at the basis of the Revolution, where wealth could be valued in terms of land and 'human chattel', the cynic might argue that what underpins the Republican project today is to capture Federal and State Government, because whatever policies they prefer -it is where the money is.

Follow the Money may now tell us more about American governance than the Bill of Rights or the Gettysburg Address.

[filghy2]

It may be true that in the US now, the Liberal and the Conservative do not correspond to the terms as they were understood in 1776, indeed, that today the claim appears to be that the Liberal American is more or less a socialist who seeks to change the Constitutional intentions of the USA, where it is the Conservatives who seek to refurbish its original intentions.

The founding fathers were essentially believers in limited government and universal individual rights. As you say, this would have put them in the liberal rather than the conservative camp in those days. Where they would stand in today's politics is a moot point because I think they viewed their work as providing a framework to govern how decisions are made and political power exercised, rather than setting out what governments should be doing 250 years ahead. They would certainly have been appalled by the current administration's claims of unlimited executive privilege, which are against everything they stood for.

The problem I have with thinking in terms of liberal vs conservative (or left vs right) is that it assumes that political views can be characterised along a two-dimensional spectrum. There are probably three main spectra affecting political views these days:
(i) smaller government vs larger government
(ii) socially conservative/unicultural vs socially liberal/multicultural
(iii) nationalist vs internationalist

The Republican Party at present is smaller government, socially conservative and nationalist, while the Democrats could be characterised as larger government, socially liberal and internationalist. There are 6 other combinations which are also conceivable, which makes it hard to think in left vs right terms.

[Stavros]

The problem I have with thinking in terms of liberal vs conservative (or left vs right) is that it assumes that political views can be characterised along a two-dimensional spectrum. There are probably three main spectra affecting political views these days:
(i) smaller government vs larger government
(ii) socially conservative/unicultural vs socially liberal/multicultural
(iii) nationalist vs internationalist

The Republican Party at present is smaller government, socially conservative and nationalist, while the Democrats could be characterised as larger government, socially liberal and internationalist. There are 6 other combinations which are also conceivable, which makes it hard to think in left vs right terms.

As a description of what Liberals and Conservatives think today, your post sums it up. But in doing so, it begs the question -have Liberals and Conservatives been faiithful to ther ambitions?

The Republican Party might claim to want smaller government, but has not only not achieved this, it has literally increased the size of American Government through the GW Bush Administration's creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which in some areas does the same work as the FBI. Indeed, one wonders why the 45th President of the USA, having insulted the former leadership of the FBI as 'human scum' has not gone one stage further and shut the FBI down on the basis the DHS can do that job. At least here in the UK ,having created the Department for Exiting the European Union (cost: £100 million a year), the Government has now shut it down.
One could also argue that if the debt is the indicator, Republicans since Reagan have opted for Colossal rather than Little Government. By now a tired comparison, but to compare Eisenhower's economics to Reagan's is like comparing a slice of toast to an ALL YOU CAN EAT Buffet, probably in Texas.

There is also the view that if American Conservatives once defined their aim as 'to conserve stability', the currrent 'Conservatives' are addicted to disruption and instability.

There are plenty of other contradictions with both parties, but perhaps the most intriguing is the extent to which, influenced it seems by 'Evangelical Christians', it is the politics of the bedroom, which Republicans have adopted, as if it were a fetish...but I shall stop here as I am in any case grateful to anyone who reads my usually very long posts.

[broncofan]

The centre-left policy agenda over the past 30 years has been to accept a largely deregulated globalised economy, while supporting relatively moderate policy interventions to ameliorate its excesses. Regardless of the result in November I tend to agree that playing safe and hoping to benefit from the other side's excesses and mistakes will not suffice going forward. The right time for a policy rethink would have been after the 2016 election loss.

I agree with your description of our political climate but I am not sure what kind of strategy change would be effective. Does a post-mortem of the 2016 election indicate that we lost because of mistakes in broad policy objectives or because Hillary was a candidate who had been effectively maligned over a long career and made some errors while campaigning.

Your knowledge of our long term political trends far exceeds mine but I am not sure that significant changes in what we present to the public wouldn't have the effect of taking a small loss and making it larger. Obviously the point Stavros has made, which is that you have to have some sense of what you win if you win matters. You have also previously made the point if I recall correctly that one cannot automatically assume that the most moderate platform pulls the most voters. Voter turnout matters and so does the excitement of the public about your platform.

Why don't I keep my query short since I'm enjoying the quality of the discussion. What kind of platform could the Democratic Party run that would achieve their objectives of more fairness in the marketplace and better programs but would also give them a better chance of winning? Regardless of the actual outcome of the primaries, who most embodied that?

[trish]

Regarding point (i): I don’t believe the divide centers on the size of government, but rather on the functions government should serve. Very few liberals want a needlessly large government and very few conservatives (with a few exceptions) want absolutely no government. We all want a government just large and authoritative enough to serve our needs and protect our rights, but not so powerful and authoritative as to threaten our freedoms. However, we disagree on what our needs, our rights and our freedoms are. Thus issue (i) slides into issue (ii): are our needs, rights and freedoms to be determined by a single culture or are do they allow for a plurality of cultures. At least on the issue of religious cultures the Constitution already favors a plurality (in that it determinedly places no one religious way life above another).

Personally, I love Jesus, pick-up trucks, country music, cheap beer and AR-15’s. Everything else is un-american.

Gotta say, running Biden is not putting our best foot forward. (Has anyone been watching Cuomo give his daily briefings? They’re genius.) But it’s probably too late to change. The question is, “What can Biden do to excite the base and draw others in?” Obviously the platforms of both parties are going to promise to revive the economy while keeping us safe. The winner is the one that’ll sound the most convincing to the largest number of idiots. In this race, I’m hoping the well-meaning idiots outnumber the rest.

[blackchubby38]

I agree with your description of our political climate but I am not sure what kind of strategy change would be effective. Does a post-mortem of the 2016 election indicate that we lost because of mistakes in broad policy objectives or because Hillary was a candidate who had been effectively maligned over a long career and made some errors while campaigning.

Your knowledge of our long term political trends far exceeds mine but I am not sure that significant changes in what we present to the public wouldn't have the effect of taking a small loss and making it larger. Obviously the point Stavros has made, which is that you have to have some sense of what you win if you win matters. You have also previously made the point if I recall correctly that one cannot automatically assume that the most moderate platform pulls the most voters. Voter turnout matters and so does the excitement of the public about your platform.

Why don't I keep my query short since I'm enjoying the quality of the discussion. What kind of platform could the Democratic Party run that would achieve their objectives of more fairness in the marketplace and better programs but would also give them a better chance of winning? Regardless of the actual outcome of the primaries, who most embodied that?

Hillary lost because she was the wrong candidate at the wrong time and because she made too many mistakes to overcome it.

Instead of the Democrats realizing that and trying to figure out why they lost and what could give them the best chance to win in 2020, they spent the past 3.5 years picking battles with Trump that that they eventually went on to lose. Now they're stuck with a candidate that by all rights should be able to win in November. But at the same time, has to deal with issues like his son's position with a foreign company. As well as possibly being guilty of sexual assault.

As for what platform the Democratic Party should run on, its simple as this. 4 more years of Trump means he gets to pick another Supreme Court nominee.

[filghy2]

The Republican Party might claim to want smaller government, but has not only not achieved this, it has literally increased the size of American Government through the GW Bush Administration's creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which in some areas does the same work as the FBI.

Regarding point (i): I don’t believe the divide centers on the size of government, but rather on the functions government should serve. Very few liberals want a needlessly large government and very few conservatives (with a few exceptions) want absolutely no government.

I think Republicans do believe in small government, except when it comes to their preferences for social conservatism and America First nationalism. They don't believe in government action to promote social equity or to regulate market failures (such as environmental externalities, public safety, monopoly power, financial instability). So I guess (i) is really about a subset of government functions, although in most countries it would cover most of what government does.

[filghy2]

I agree with your description of our political climate but I am not sure what kind of strategy change would be effective. Does a post-mortem of the 2016 election indicate that we lost because of mistakes in broad policy objectives or because Hillary was a candidate who had been effectively maligned over a long career and made some errors while campaigning.

The Democrats should have been strong favourites to win in 2016 because the economy was good, the outgoing president was popular, and the opposition candidate was flawed and unpopular. It might be that Trump's victory was somewhat accidental, but the real question is why was he close enough that a combination of accidents got him across the line. I think that was because voters in previously Democrat-leaning 'rust-belt' states were sufficiently dissatisfied with the status quo to overlook Trump's flaws and vote for someone who promised to shake things up. As I've argued before, I can't see that trying to restore the pre-Trump status quo can be the answer.

In terms of policy directions I think part of the answer will involve a more questioning attitude toward globalisation, as economists like Dani Rodrik and Joe Stiglitz have been arguing - not crude protectionism but something more strategic. There also needs to be more active policies to promote economic development in the rust-belt states, like Roosevelt did in the New Deal. Higher-education reform should also be a priority to increase economic opportunity - the current US system seems almost designed to impede upward mobility. There should also be a better safety net, but I think the main organising principle needs to be to give the left-behinds a hand up to improve their lot through their own efforts.

[filghy2]

But at the same time, has to deal with issues like his son's position with a foreign company. As well as possibly being guilty of sexual assault.

I'm curious as to why these should be big problems for Biden when the same issues apply to Trump in spades.