HONG KONG - Amid the
balloons, confetti and name-calling, the US
political conventions highlighted a substantive
divergence between the Republicans and Democrats
on a crucial issue.
Throughout the
Republican convention, speakers talked about
business and "job creators" as the engines of
economic growth. The Democrats, on the other hand,
focused on the middle class as the driver of the
American economy, suggesting that expanding the
middle class is the key to growth.
Both
arguments are half right. A healthy economy needs
investment in business, and it needs consumers who
can afford to buy what those expanding businesses
produce. But elections
aren't about being
right, they're about getting the most votes.
Both parties have been championing their
respective sides for generations. At the close of
the 19th century, Democrats were the party of
debtors, demanding weak currency and high
inflation, while the Republicans represented
bankers favoring strong money to preserve the
value of their assets. As the country
industrialized, the Republicans became the party
of tycoons and the Democrats the party of workers.
Tale of two
Roosevelts Republican Theodore Roosevelt
had a progressive, internationalist agenda, but he
became president by accident; he was the vice
president and ascended after William McKinley was
assassinated. Calvin Coolidge better portrayed the
Republican's core values when he famously declared
"the chief business of the American people is
business" during the 1920s boom. After the economy
crashed in 1929 and conventional Republican
policies failed to turn it around, the US elected
Franklin D Roosevelt, Theodore's cousin and the
godfather of progressive Democrats.
Roosevelt was re-elected three times,
underscoring a basic problem for the Republicans.
As the party of the rich, they were bound to be
outnumbered by the Democrats, representing the
unrich. That's a major handicap in a democracy. So
the Republicans and their wealthy backers have
labored over the decades to attract more voters
without deviating from their main agenda.
Of course, the Republican Party always had
other issues aside from protecting the plutocrats.
During the late 19th century, the Republicans were
the party that won the Civil War and freed the
slaves. In the early 20th century, the Republicans
represented a return to the international
isolationism that America's founding father,
George Washington, espoused. After
internationalism and progressivism triumphed under
FDR, the Republicans had to find new ways to win
votes.
In 1952, they found an amiable
candidate in the World War II commander, retired
general Dwight Eisenhower. People liked Ike, but
he was no ideologue. Eisenhower ended the war in
Korea but tolerated a Republican-led
anti-communist witch-hunt at home. He supported
big business but denounced the
"military-industrial complex" that he cautioned
could undermine democracy.
Silent
majority speaks Eisenhower's vice
president, Richard Nixon, lacked the former
general's charm and had built a reputation as a
staunch anti-communist. But Nixon, when he ran
successfully in 1968 after losing in 1960,
targeted working class white voters alienated by
the rapid social changes of the 1960s. These
voters - Nixon called them the "silent majority"
of Americans - felt that the baby-boomer youth
culture, the civil rights movement, the stalemate
in Vietnam and the anti-war movement it triggered
were changing the character of America from the
country they knew.
Ronald Reagan
capitalized on this feeling of alienation - and a
lousy economy - to win the presidency. His
campaign gathered support from the emergent
Christian right and working-class voters who
crossed party lines and became known as Reagan
Democrats. Reagan's muscular approach to foreign
policy issues and defense held great appeal in the
wake of Vietnam, the humbling seizure of the US
embassy in Tehran and the failure of a commando
mission to rescue the hostages under president
Jimmy Carter.
Despite the lip service to
social issues such as abortion and greater states
rights, the signature domestic policy of the
Reagan administration was tax cuts, particularly
at upper-income levels. Reagan also attacked labor
unions, breaking the air traffic controllers union
when it struck. Plutocrats got a taste of how good
things could be and they wanted more.
In
the nearly three decades since Reagan was elected,
the landscape has changed dramatically. The
collapse of the Soviet Union eliminated America's
one rival that threatened the country with
immediate, mass devastation; without that threat,
both parties had more leeway to disagree more
vehemently.
The collapse of US
manufacturing, a source of the middle-class
insecurity that Reagan exploited, led to
stagnating incomes across the board. That blanket
statistic masks growth at the top that has widened
the gap between the rich and the rest. The US now
has its largest GINI coefficient, a measure of
income inequality, in a century, and its lowest
rate of economic mobility in decades.
That
should add up to bad news electorally for
Republicans, but the plutocrats have used their
growing wealth to amass political power and
influence. Led by the oil tycoons Charles and
David Koch, the right wing has successfully
established think tanks that provide appealing
popular and intellectual arguments for ideological
positions, cloaked in the garb of non-partisan
research.
Moreover, victories don't mean
that these advocacy groups fold up their tents.
They just set new goals, staking out more extreme
positions. Having won reductions in marginal tax
rates for the wealthy, they don't just ask for low
rates, they mount a multi-faceted challenge to the
entire notion of progressive taxation that
includes labeling people who earn too little to
pay taxes as "lucky ducks".
That's an
effective distraction from how surpluses at the
end of the Bill Clinton administration turned into
record deficits following the tax cuts under
George W Bush. Republicans decry the deficit but
prescribe tax cuts as a solution, citing partisan
studies rather than actual experience under Reagan
and George W.
At the same time, right-wing
influence has helped to undermine barriers to
further influence as well as greater wealth. The
dilution of media ownership restrictions enabled
Rupert Murdoch to expand his empire in the US and
to create the Fox News to spread rightwing views.
The dilution of campaign finance restrictions has
made it easier for the wealthy - and since 2010
even corporations - to fund political causes.
Finally, relaxed restrictions on campaign
financing have allowed the wealthy to have greater
influence over elections. Casino magnate Sheldon
Adelson has pledged US$100 million to support Mitt
Romney in this election. He and his wife also gave
$10 million to Newt Gingrich in the primary
campaign. The Koch brothers have pledged at least
$60 million to defeat Obama.
These
magnates have different agendas. The Koch brothers
are adamant opponents of environmental regulation
as part of their extreme libertarian agenda. The
Adelsons are staunchly pro-Israel and heavily
invested in China's semi-autonomous region of
Macau, as well as in Singapore. Christian right
donors want to outlaw abortion and influence
education policy. These agendas often clash; tax
cuts are the one area where all wealthy
benefactors can agree, so that has become the
focus of the GOP agenda.
Without those
other issues to pull in voters, the Republicans
face the numbers challenge more starkly. The Kochs
successfully provided the funding and expertise
that nurtured the Tea Party, tycoons providing the
funding for a movement that favored their agenda
while portraying itself as a grassroots
alternative to corporate lobbyists. Whatever the
merits of the case, the Tea Party and similar
groups have successfully moved the debate in the
US sharply to the right. Even with persistent high
unemployment, the right wing has politicians
talking about cutting the deficit and taxes.
The Republicans have also repeatedly
pledged to lie during the campaign. Operatives say
that fact-checkers won't dictate what they say and
do. The Republican's most effective current
television advertisement says Obama has abolished
work requirements for welfare recipients. Even
though independent groups have shown the charge is
untrue, supporters of the Mitt Romney keep running
the ad. When confronted with non-partisan research
that key planks of his Republican convention
speech were untrue, vice presidential candidate
Paul Ryan repeated them. It was the first
Republican president, Abraham Lincoln who's
credited with saying, "You can fool all the people
some of the time and some of the people all of the
time."
Plutocrats just need to fool enough
of the people in few key states to their way and
defy the arithmetic of democracy.
ATol
2008 Campaign Outsider Muhammad Cohen told
America's story to the world as a US diplomat and
is author of Hong
Kong On Air, a novel set during the 1997
handover about television news, love, betrayal,
financial crisis, and cheap lingerie. Find his
blog, online archive and more at www.MuhammadCohen.com,
and follow him on Facebook
and Twitter @MuhammadCohen..
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, a novel set during the 1997
handover about television news, love, betrayal,
financial crisis, and cheap lingerie. Find his
blog, online archive and more at 
