GROWING DISTINCTIONS

 

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When one looks at American political parties and their role in promoting or handling polarized politics, one sees that the Republican Party has experienced meaningful changes in the last decade or so.  Until recently, that party has engaged in rhetoric that utilized coded language to promote policies that favored Anglo identity people – the white majority – at the expense of minority groups. 

It was not necessarily motivated by racist or otherwise bigoted motives.  It instead, to win elections, had to find a way to garner votes when its basic policy positions were formulated to represent a relatively small number of voters.  Until recently, its positioning reflected the economic interests of a minority, businesspeople. 

That minority – especially in the form of larger corporate personnel who shy away from forming alliances with others – hold political aims that run counter to the interest of the larger populated block of potential voters, the working classes.  Whereas there are many more working-class voters then there are businesspeople, those business entities had to conger up issues and accompanying messaging that would cut into those working groups’ support and shift their political allegiance to the Republican Party. 

Identity politics fits that bill.  This process, in effect, was an incubating problem in that under this facade many working class issues went unaddressed by Republican led legislative efforts.  But given the recent developments, those “hidden” messages and their accompanying policies have erupted into the open.

Certain events have served to “out” them, not to lead workers to see the duplicity of Republican policy, but to unmask the racist and xenophobic character of their positioning.  Putting immigrant children in cages, the death of African Americans at the hands of police, and the growing frustrations at the loss of jobs to foreign countries – usually inhabited by people of another race – as well as other developments have brought matters to a boil.  And then there was Trump.  He used the politics of identity to form his base.  And, in turn, he, unintentionally, has also developed his counter base.

In doing so, Trump has gained effective control, at least at the national level, of the Republican Party.  The Democratic Party has evolved into that counter base.  The level of animosity between the two camps has reached dangerous levels.  Where this might end, at the time of this writing, is unknown.  One hears of outrageous possibilities, recently even the possibility of Martial Law was thrown out in the public arena as a way to undo the 2020 presidential election.  January 20^th cannot get here fast enough.

And this leads one to take a close look at how the major parties are constituted in terms of their respective constituencies.  In general, the Republican Party has a far more unified set of supporters while the Democrats can boast a far-ranging array of groups that make up its supporters.  For each, its situations, while different, does have its own set of challenges standing in the way of each party coalescing its voters so as to win elections.

Republicans do attempt to attract followers among businesspeople and the more fundamentalist religious groups.  Both these constituent groups tend to be populated by whites and support conservative policy choices.  That is there is a good deal of overlap between these two groups and, therefore, allows the party to design a fairly unified ideological message.  And, as a result, can go “deep” within its rhetoric to describe and explain what it proposes in a given campaign.

This is not the case with the Democratic Party.  Its supporters range from urban, liberal voters to fairly conservative minority people who have strong religious beliefs.  Prominent in this religious block of supporters are blacks and Latinos/as.  These latter groups cringe at Democratic positions on social issues – e.g., their pro-choice position – but can’t abide by Republican’s anti civil rights proposals.  Consequently, while Republicans tend to be ideological, Democrats tend to be practical in both their policies and rhetoric.

This leads to various differences in the respective strategies each party employs.  For example, in terms of governing, Republicans are less likely to compromise; Democrats are more open to compromise.  This just reflects how much compromising goes on within their respective ranks – Republicans a little bit, Democrats a lot – and tends to set a different mindset in the way politics is viewed within each party.  But of late, Republicans, on this score, have experienced a bit of a shift in their perspective and strategizing.

The instigator of this shift has been Trump and his presidency.  In his more blatant identity messaging, he has promoted higher government deficits – to sustain lower taxes rates – and a larger government, traditionally un-Republican policies.  His base reacts to such policies with “who cares,” and voice their tolerance of such divergence with the satisfaction Trump offers them through his identity politics and rhetoric. 

The main concern has now become preventing illegal immigration and support of current policing policies as they pertain to minority populations.  More generally, the Trump Administration supports policies that advance natural rights’ biases, for example in how that administration has conducted its coronavirus policies.