“Both of our political parties, at least the honest portion of them, agree conscientiously in the same object: the public good; but they differ essentially in what they deem the means of promoting that good. One side believes it best done by one composition of the governing powers, the other by a different one. One fears most the ignorance of the people; the other the selfishness of rulers independent of them. Which is right, time and experience will prove. We think that one side of this experiment has been long enough tried and proved not to promote the good of the many, and that the other has not been fairly and sufficiently tried. Our opponents think the reverse. With whichever opinion the body of the nation concurs, that must prevail.” –Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, 1804.
Erm, so are you relating the so-called “activists” to the “higher classes”? Because that’s just… bizarre. Jefferson was talking about people who were born to wealth and priveledge… we’re talking about people who care enough and/or have enough friends to make them come to the community center on a Saturday morning every 4 years. Anyone, in our system, can become an “activist”… no one, in theirs, can become a member of the old-school aristocracy.
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And Reilly people who just didn’t work hard enough to get the vote out can whine and moan all they please about the system (which I bet everyone would agree was in fine working order if Saturday had gone differently)… but that doesn’t change the fact that they obviously didn’t want it hard enough. If they had, they would have worked for it, and they would have won.
I think Jefferson, and by extension yourself, have a point. And were we discussing the two parties of thirty years ago, I would agree that both have the public good at heart.
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Obviously, that is no longer the case. What is eminently clear to me is that the Republicans have two goals: the entrenchment of power and the enrichment of the wealthiest class. Certainly, there has been no evidence to the contrary. Even now, this president wants to cut taxes to the richest members of society and cut education and medicare for the poorer ones.
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No, I think you and Jefferson are wrong – at least in these times. It is not about suspicion of the people vs. confidence in the same. It is about protecting the people from becoming little more than the serfs of the rich and famous, or doing the most to make them just that.
Where does that leave the majority of the country that voted for Bush in 2004? Deluded? Part of the rich minority — hard to understand how that would work since Bush apparently got a majority of the popular vote — trying to entrench themselves?
I don’t know what 2004 had to do with it. Jefferson did not say, “Whoever the people voted for are the Democrats and whoever the people didn’t vote for are the Aristocrats.” He talked about the party’s attitudes toward the distribution of power. I think that the run-up to the election is perhaps more instructive: Democrats worked to sign up new voters while Republicans worked to restrict the vote, concentrating not on new voters but their base.
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Bob, I think your point is well taken that the Democratic Party does not always live up to its democratic principles. And the Republicans certainly are more complicated than simply a party of the monied elite. The GOP is today a coalition party that brings together cultural conservatives, economic conservatives, pro-business factions, libertarians and others and has proved, recently to be remarkably good at holding that coalition together. But the Republicans do not derive their political success from advocating for a system of government that expands the franchise and a broader distribution of political power to “the people.”