This post was inspired by something that was said in comments. If you think that the Democratic Party is the party of big government and the Republican Party is anti-government or that the Democratic Party is anti-business while the Republican Party is pro-business, please show your evidence. There’s a sure way to disabuse you of your misconceptions: stop reading the press releases and start watching the movie.
Both parties just love big government. And big businesses. They’re not entirely in agreement on which parts of government or which big businesses they like but they have no opposition to big government or big businesses per se.
How about Sarbanes-Oxley (I hear somebody ask)? Doesn’t that prove that Democrats hate business? Sarbanes-Oxley was passed in the House with majorities of both parties and all but two Republicans voting “Aye”, unanimously in the Senate, and signed into law by a Republican president.
Well, what about sequestration? Doesn’t that prove that Republicans hate government? Between 2012 and 2013 federal spending decreased by less than 2.5% from $3.538 trillion to $3.45 trillion and that was with sequestration. If that’s hatred, it’s pretty flabby.
That isn’t to say that there’s no difference between the two parties. For some inexplicable reason Republicans like tax cuts. It’s the universal cure. If that were matched by antipathy towards borrowing, it might have some coherence but it isn’t. Democrats love unions and who can blame them? Nearly all political donations by unions go to Democrats.
I’ll believe that Republicans hate the federal government and the Democrats hate Big Business when the Republicans do something that shrinks the size and reach of the federal government and the Democrats do something that hurts Big Business. Until then not so much.
Ideologies between republicans and democrats differ — words and aspirations which then attract their bases and swaths of indies to one side or the other in elections. However, “good” policies do not always translate into “good” politics. And, as we have discovered in our ever-increasing polarized DC environment, politics will win out every time. Consequently, big government grows while the populace becomes more disengaged, indifferent, as more of the same weighs down the entire system.
I think the rhetoric is different but I think the actual ideologies of Congressional Republicans and Democrats are a lot less different than you think they are, jan.