Paul Wilczynski's Observations

Gary Hart: Political Parties are Disintegrating

Former senator Gary Hart says The parties are over.

Out of power, the watchword among Democrats, and many independents, is: “I don’t know what the Democrats stands for.” That’s because the Party’s old coalition—traditional liberals, labor, minorities, women, environmentalists, and internationalists—is in the process of disappearing and a new one has yet to be formed. Millions of people wait to hear what the twenty-first century Democratic Party stands for, and Democratic Party “leaders” are not saying until they see what the new coalition is going to look like. They are afraid of taking principled stands for fear of alienating some group they think they need. So there is a kind of stand-off. Voters afloat want to hear what the Party has to say, and the Party is trying to find out what they want to hear.

But many traditional Republicans don’t know what their Party stands for either. It used to stand for balanced budgets, resistance to foreign entanglement, laissez faire economics, smaller government, and individual freedom. Not any more. That old coalition has disappeared as well. The new Republican Party stands for big government, huge deficits, pre-emptive warfare, massive nation-building, neo-imperialism in the Middle East, intrusion on your privacy, and a semi-official state religion dictated by fundamentalist ministers.

This new Republican Party is merely a temporary diversion because its new political base is too far out of step with mainstream America, an America which includes the traditional Republican base. Democrats used to be the Nanny Party in the secular realm; the neo-Republicans have become the Nanny Party in the religious realm.

posted by Paul Wilczynski @ 7:36 AM