Anti-Climacus

ARE THE DEMOCRATS A PERMANENT MINORITY PARTY*?

*(For the next 20-30 years, anyway)

My inclination is to say yes. If you accept a realist theory of democracy (and who doesn't? Well, Democrats don't, but I'll get to that in a second), you believe that voters are organized by elites based on paticular interests they have. And what's important about these interests, as opposed to voters' preferences, is that it is through them that people get paid off by political parties. That is, businessmen get paid off through the Republican Party when laws or regulations take effect that are generally good for business, the same happens with teachers' unions when Democrats are in power.

The real problem that Democrats have is that the economic interests of people have shifted away from positions that would naturally benefit Democrats. To put this somewhat bluntly: I'll be going to grad school, and getting a professorship somewhere, and will presumably meet and marry a woman who will be a similarly career-minded professional. So we'll not be rich, exactly, but we'll be upper-middle-class or so. So why is a tax cut a bad thing for me? If we accept game theory as at least a reasonably accurate model of how people make political decisions, don't most Democratic proposals ask me to put off an obvious current benefit for me in favor of a potential future benefit, only a very small portion of which will accrue to me?

Of course, you may well rejoinder, was this not how American politics was lined up for the period 1932-1968, give or take? People readily gave up current benefits for themselves in favor of general goods delivered at a later time, sometimes not at all (the tax money that went into rural electrification, for example, probably never benefitted most of the people who had paid for it). I think at least part of the answer has to do with the shift econimically within America from an industrial to a service economy, which reduces the impetus for certain types of social-good legislation (no office, no matter how bad, will compare to a early 1900s factory in terms of safety), as well as the general increase in education, which makes job skills more portable from job to job. Internationally, I think it's pretty much a fact that the world economy is remarkably stronger than it was even 50 years ago.

What does this mean? People, generally speaking, can do better for themselves economically on their own, and therefore, the tradeoffs between me-now and everyone-later look less appealing. Why is this a problem for the Democrats? Because they fail to realize this. Most Democrats will say something like, "people would be for program x if only they understood what was best for them." But politics doesn't work that way--it's not what people's preferences are (Democrats aren't even arguing this--they're talking about what people's preferences should be), it's where their interests are. People vote, in most instances, where their payoffs come from, and in most instances, those payoffs come from Republicans.

Democrats are in trouble, electorally, until they figure out how to stop trying to tell people what they should want done as public policy, and start doing things people actually do want. The problem here is that payoffs can only happen on a sufficiently large level when your party is in power. The Republicans have a lock on the House, Senate and White House at the moment, which means something else is going to have to dislodge them from power (of sufficiently large import to override people's calculations of their interests). But no such issue or issues seem to be on the horizon. Thus, I think it's gonna be a long, cold winter for Democrats.

Disagree? E-mail me, and I'll post any comments, with rejoinders.