“I’m not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”
This Will Rogers quote came to mind as I read President Biden’s comments after his meeting with respective House and Senate Republican leaders Mike McCarthy and Mitch McConnell on raising the debt ceiling. I was struck how Biden’s remarks were so accommodating to their unreasonable demands.
The American governance structure is not revealed wisdom, it was the best deal some serious late 18th century politicians, trying to start a country, could do at the time.
If you are Black in America, or a member of some other threatened marginalized group, which obviously now includes school children and anyone who happens to be shopping at a random mall, which political party is more dangerous to your well-being? Is it the MAGA-controlled Republican Party or the establishment of the Democratic Party? I would suggest the answer isn’t as obvious as it may seem.
MAGA Republicans, which is the entire Republican Party at this point, are an avowed enemy of anyone who isn’t a white supremacist Christian nationalist heterosexual. So, classifying them is easy, just like lions never have to give any thought to the danger hyenas pose, it’s instinctive.
You should just understand and accept they are a real physical threat. What about the establishment of the Democratic Party? That answer requires more thought and analysis to make a judgement.
When you’re faced with only two viable political options like the aforementioned, you’re like the sheep discussing the lunch menu with two wolves. In the real world what we choose is a function of the options available at the time we choose. When forced to decide, and confronted with unacceptable choices, choosing the lesser of the two evils is both a rational and logical course of action. Here’s what you must always be mindful of though, you didn’t make a good choice, you made the less bad choice.
This is what it means politically to be Black or marginalized in America. You support Democrats because it would be immoral and irrational to support Republicans. In the current American political system, becoming a Democrat is the only sensible and viable political option. However, if you’re Black or marginalized, the Democratic Party option regularly leaves you politically a day late and a dollar short.
America may have two political parties (debatable), but you don’t have two political options. The Republican and Democratic Parties are both center-to-right status quo parties which represent the same vested Neoliberal economic interests. It’s the political maintenance of these vested economic interests that is the driver of the American political system. The lack of viable political options is a feature, not a bug, of the American political system. What do I mean?
If you where in Western Europe the current Democratic Party would be considered a moderate conservative center right party, not committed to any major changes in the way the political economy of the country is structured or operates. The Republicans would be considered a radical far right party, with authoritarian, fascist and racist tendencies. It would be like one party for unhinged white people and another for socially moderate white people. But it would ok if you didn’t fit in either category because there would be other viable serious political options.
The democracies of Western Europe are all different, but the majority have one thing in common, they’re all multiparty parliamentary systems, and your party affiliation is a function of ideology. If your major political organizing principle is the environment, there’s an environmental party, if it’s social justice there would be a political party with that as its major priority, if you’re economic preferences tended toward Socialism rather than Neoliberal capitalism, you’d have political representation. Western Europeans have real political options, Americans don’t.
The political success of the current MAGA Republican Party, despite it’s shrinking demographic base and generally unpopular policy proposals, is because it understands how to take advantage of the deficiencies of the American federal political structure, and they’re organized to function like a European political party. I mean they have organized themselves as a national political party with a specific set of ideological operating parameters, whether they’re running for President or the local school board.
There’s a contradiction in Democratic Party politics in America. The white Democratic establishment will make every effort to accommodate Republicans, basically white Americans it doesn’t politically support. Yet, it will do the bare minimum politically to accommodate Black voters. If Black voters were to vote for Democrats in the same ratios as white voters, or even Asian and Hispanic voters, Democrats could not function as a national political party.
We continue to complain and protest about political outcomes, but we never critique or criticize the system that produces the outcomes we find so unacceptable. In our obsessive focus on American pathologies like racism, sexism and xenophobia we regularly overlook a more compelling structural problem, the American political structure makes the United States ungovernable.
The American governance structure is not revealed wisdom, it was the best deal some serious late 18th century politicians, trying to start a country, could do at the time. The American political system is a relic of history that was designed to politically accommodate a set of elite economic interest, specifically those of the Southern slave holding plantation class. Ultimately it will change, for better or worse and sooner than later, because it’s collapsing.
You can’t govern a country of more than 330 million people using a structure that was created before electricity and indoor plumbing. This is governance of the absurd.
