Liberal Talk Radio

A tourist came in from Orbitville, parked in the air and said,

“The creatures of this Democratic party resemble nothing so much as the European style parliamentary coalitions I studied in my ‘Modern European History and Government Class’ back at that elite East Galaxy university my parentals paid way too much money to send me to.

“While the Republicans are a more or less solid block of Nationalists and socially conservative populists (with a fading few libertarians stubbornly clinging to the notion that the party that has put America in massive debt and passed laws to steadily erode civil liberties is somehow pro-sensible economics and pro-individual rights), the Democrats are a hodge-podge of competing groups. It’s a rickety coalition, with myriad constituencies having so little in common that even when united in opposition to the most important policy disaster of the day (Iraq) can barely muster collective victory.

“You’ve got the party’s progressive (socially liberal populist) core. This used to be a broad group of farmers, trade unionists, academics and professionals, but these days it’s really just a small but vocal group of policy activists. That yeller guy — what’s his name? oh, Howard Dean — is their leader. This group trends more and more to out and out socialism, or even to utopian socialism in its most extreme examples, like that strange little city in the far northwest of the contiguous 48 states … Seattle, I think it’s called. Let’s call this group the Social Dems.

“You’ve got the American equivalent of Christian Democrats — socially conservative trade unionists and other manufacturing workers. These folks have traditionally favored redistributive policies along class lines and tolerated their more progressive party breatheren, but lately as their economic circumstances have become more and more tenuous, their latent nationalist and reactionary beliefs have come out and they’ve been defecting in droves to the GOP.

“Then you’ve got the ‘liberal centrists,’ or what in Europe would be considered a right wing party of classical liberalism. Pro-trade, pro-business, pro-individualism, in America these folks tend to be regarded as elistist, as their politics tend to be those of the educated upper management and high-income professionals. Most of the party’s current putative ‘leaders’ belong to this group — Hillary Clinton being the most visible example.

“Finally, you’ve got a hodge-podge of special interest groups. Greens, ethno-centric groups, women’s rights voters, and others who have very specific policy preferences based neither on redistribution nor broad social policy. Generally, their interests are aligned with the progressive elements of the Democratic party, but their loyalties are weak and the party has to ’spend’ inordinately platform planks and lip-service to keep them happy.

“Since the Democrats have by necessity to be the ‘party of all policies, master of none’ — and when you consider the American electoral system, which rewards ‘first past the post,’ combined with the particularities of the geographic dispersal of voting groups — you’ve got a situation where any given Democrat voter has little likelihood of seeing their preferred policy mix adopted. So since the PMC of voting is higher than the PMB, the Dems stay home, and the party of the plurality — the Republicans — are likely to keep winning for a long, long time as soon as they drop their goober leader and the U.S. withdraws from Iraq.”

“The Dems — are they the guts or the brains of the United States?”

“They’re both, and more, and so they’re neither.”

And so our interstellar De Tocqueville departed.