The 2014 Democrat Crack-Up

The trouncing Democrats took in November’s elections has opened fissures between their liberal wing, represented by New York Senator Charles Schumer, and their progressive wing, led by President Barack Obama.

Standing uneasily with a foot in each camp is Hillary Clinton. The tiff concerns Obamacare, and 20 years ago, she authored its forerunner, Hillarycare. Having lost both houses of Congress, the party of government (and Hillary) in 2016 may also lose the Presidency if it lacks a compelling message.

The dust-up presents a “teachable moment”, not only about these sects of left-wing statism but also about their inherent flaws and the superiority of limited-government conservatism as offered by some Republicans.
In a major recent speech, Schumer cast the decline of middle-class incomes as the key political issue for this decade. So, he held, Democrats should have focused their strategies on that problem. Instead, they “blew the opportunity the American people gave them. We took their mandate and put all our focus on the wrong problem: health care reform.”

Schumer adheres to the mid-20th-Century liberal notion that politics and policy are about coalitions and mediation by politicians among interest groups. Liberals do not need a principled theory of the role and limits of government. In fact, not being bound by such restraints is better because it leaves politicians free to take many positions and to wheel and deal. For them, the public interest is only a term they deploy promiscuously, not anything real that would ever constrain their politicking.

Instead, for modern liberals, politics and policy are about naming a set of problems and then, via political horse trading, organizing interest groups defined by those problems into coalitions that command a majority of votes in an election or legislature. Naked majoritarianism. A politics of compromise and even bipartisanship for which principle is not only unnecessary but also inconvenient.

Progressives, however, believe that elite bureaucrats, politicos, planners, experts and academics – that is, they, themselves – will do better at running the world than will individual sovereignty, liberty, the rule of law, free markets and the democratic choices of the people. So, all you little people just leave it to your enlightened betters.

From Schumer’s liberal perspective, the progressives’ over-reach in jamming Obamacare through in 2010 without a single Republican vote is not wrong in principle, but merely a failure to recognize that it actually has only a fairly small real political clientele. In Obama’s progressive view, it was a holy cause, despite its many apparent failures and unpopularity. Today’s progressives are so arrogantly certain history will judge them right on everything that they dismiss apparent failures and unpopularity as reflecting only the ignorance and crassness of people who disagree with them.

Some Republicans moderates and RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) are hardly distinguishable from liberal Democrats. They live on coalition politics and mediation by pols among interest groups, mostly unconstrained by limits on government or by the public interest. Wheeling and dealing – being “players” – are what it’s about, so compromise and bipartisanship are their highest values.

Limited-government conservatives, however, understand their duty to the voters, taxpayers and broad public interest -- a duty to maximize economic growth and promote the real fairness of liberty, of property, contract and individual rights, and the rule of law. They know that redistribution and group rights and responsibilities are perversions of the public interest.

The failures of all Democrat sects were so glaring that voters gave Republicans big victories as an opportunity to do better. If the limited-government conservatives prevail over the moderates, the Republicans may pull us out of the mess we’re in and deserve and win more in the future.