By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, February 14, 2020
For most of my life, the rule of thumb was that the GOP
was the ideological party and the Democratic Party was the coalitional party.
This always was an overgeneralization. Democrats had an
ideological perspective, and Republicans had coalitional interests. But from
the New Deal to around the end of the Bush years, it was generally true. I used
to think it had to do with the superiority of conservative ideas, but I’m
coming around to the view that it has more to do with the way political power
works.
There was obviously an ideological component to the New
Deal and the Great Society. Stated plainly, the people at the helm of those
projects believed in the power of the state or “big government” to steer the
whole of the country in a positive direction. But if you look at the members of
the FDR coalition, you’ll find a lot of diversity. There were intellectuals and
populists, capitalists and socialists, racists and civil-rights leaders,
isolationists and interventionists, corrupt party bosses and the reformers who
hated them, poor farmers, urban union leaders, Southern conservatives, blacks,
whites, Jews and immigrants, all swirling about, often battling to win the
president’s favor. That’s what you get with majority parties — a diverse
coalition of interests, all trying to get their place at the trough.
As the saying goes in Washington, if you’re not at the
table, you’re on the menu.
The GOP was a minority party for most of that time, and
even when that started to change, it still usually thought like a minority
party. By that I mean minority parties emphasize ideological cohesion and
partisan unity. Always at a disadvantage, they tend to understand that if they
don’t stick together, sharing each other’s priorities and leveraging what
strength they have, they’ll get steamrolled by the majority.
It might seem paradoxical, but being in the minority
makes arguments over principle more important. When you have little or nothing
to trade, you argue about ideas. When you have stuff to trade — taxpayer money,
jobs, seats on commissions and committees — ideological differences are easily
papered over. Moreover, because majority parties in a democracy are by
definition governing parties, there’s less reason to get bogged down in
debating questions about ideological nuances.
The least ideological politicians in American life have
always been the heads of political machines, such as Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall
or the mayors of cities such as Chicago. In such places, high-minded complaints
about principles are easily assuaged with a construction contract or a monopoly
on hot-dog concessions at the ballpark.
The GOP hasn’t exactly figured out how to govern like a
majority party, but under President Trump it’s behaving a lot more like an
urban political machine, doling out goodies to members of its coalition with
little concern for a coherent philosophic rationale. The role of ideological
principles has been decidedly downgraded, as religious and economic
conservatives get the stuff they want in terms of policies and jobs.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are behaving more and more like
a minority party, putting ideological commitments ahead of coalitional
interests. Bernie Sanders is the most obvious and important illustration of
this. The de facto front-runner in the Democratic primaries, Sanders is like a
left-wing Barry Goldwater — the ideological icon who spearheaded the
conservative takeover of the GOP in 1964, in part by losing to Lyndon B.
Johnson in a landslide.
Sanders is a pure ideologue who sees no reason to
compromise his brand of socialism for the sake of coalitional interests. He
wants no help from the rich if the rich expect anything in return. He insists
that pro-lifers have no place in his party, and he doesn’t seem to care if
things like fracking bans will cost the country jobs and his party votes.
My theory isn’t neat and tidy because politics are never
neat and tidy. Sanders thinks he has the majority on his side. He doesn’t.
More broadly, Democrats don’t see themselves as a
minority party — minority parties are often the last to realize they aren’t as
popular as they think they are. Also, the desire to defeat Trump has a tendency
to crowd out ideological arguments. Which is why Bernie, like every other
Democrat, leads with the promise that he is the best candidate to defeat Trump.
And that’s a shame, because I’d love to see the
billionaire-hating socialist and progressive billionaire capitalist Michael
Bloomberg have an actual debate on their ideas. That debate may just have to
wait until after Sanders fulfills his role as the woke Goldwater, truly making
the Democrats a minority party by losing in 2020.
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