Collective Conscious

Cer­tainly Repub­li­cans do. At this point, 100% of their activ­ity is devoted to increas­ing the share of the prof­its that the rich enjoy — that is, increas­ing inequal­ity in order to strengthen the electoral-​​financial power of their coali­tion, and the new Con­gress looks to be no excep­tion:

Think about it. Ronald Rea­gan and George W. Bush talked inces­santly about fis­cal respon­si­bil­ity and lost no oppor­tu­nity to denounce deficit spend­ing, but these prin­ci­ples flew out the win­dow when it came time to cut taxes on the rich. The new bunch are even worse. Incom­ing House Ways and Means Com­mit­tee chair Dave Camp recently told George Will that one of the biggest prob­lems with our tax sys­tem is that too few poor peo­ple pay income tax.

Repub­li­cans against Democ­rats demon­strates a fun­da­men­tal fight in our soci­ety between two under­ly­ing ele­ments — labor and cap­i­tal. It’s clear that Repub­li­cans, above all, are the coali­tion of cap­i­tal:

Tea Party Nation Pres­i­dent Jud­son Phillips said deny­ing the right to vote to those who do not own prop­erty “makes a lot of sense” dur­ing a weekly radio program.

“The Found­ing Fathers orig­i­nally said, they put cer­tain restric­tions on who gets the right to vote,” Phillips said. “It wasn’t you were just a cit­i­zen and you got to vote.”

Mak­ing the rich richer is a cen­tral tenet of this ide­o­log­i­cal group; after all, they are by and large already rich, and so it ben­e­fits them enor­mously to con­tinue accu­mu­lat­ing wealth in their own hands; with each elec­toral cycle the accu­mu­lated wealth can be put to use to accu­mu­late more wealth, etc. The idea of exclu­siv­ity is key, because the ben­e­fits of that sort of accu­mu­la­tion can’t be shared widely, or they pro­duce no real ben­e­fits after all. Hence the enor­mous fight against social insur­ance and other redis­trib­u­tive programs.

In the past, Democ­rats have been much more clearly on the side of labor in the great dis­trib­u­tive fight. Their pil­lar pro­grams — Medicare, Social Secu­rity — are at their heart designed to redis­trib­ute income down­ward, to insure work­ers against the per­ils of old age and dis­abil­ity. Union ties pro­vided the ammu­ni­tion for the leg­isla­tive push, as raw vot­ing power over­came the influ­ence of money through­out the mid-​​twentieth cen­tury. Now, though, the con­stantly per­ceived weak­ness of the Demo­c­ra­tic party per­haps comes at the risk of aban­don­ing the core labor con­stituency that empow­ered them through­out the New Deal and Great Society.

Now Democ­rats embrace financiers and other own­ers of cap­i­tal because labor is stay­ing home from the polls. Here’s a chart that demon­strates the clear decline in par­tic­i­pa­tion (source):

Note the spikes in Democratic-​​presidential-​​victory years (namely, 1992 and nearly in 2004). Democ­rats rep­re­sent labor inter­ests, so they win when peo­ple vote. Sim­i­larly, when peo­ple vote, Democ­rats respond to their needs in turn by sup­port­ing labor through redis­trib­u­tive poli­cies. But since the late 60’s, peo­ple have been stay­ing home. Money, how­ever, always goes to the polls — and hence the con­ser­v­a­tive shift in both the Demo­c­ra­tic Party and the nation’s gov­er­nance in gen­eral. If peo­ple aren’t respon­si­ble for Demo­c­ra­tic vic­to­ries like they used to be, why should we expect that Democ­rats will shower the spoils of vic­tory on peo­ple instead of on the more con­cen­trated spe­cial inter­ests that have dri­ven pol­i­tics since the early 70’s?