Year 12s: what will be the first way you research your future options? >>

The self-satisfied Democrats are large part of problem says US commentator

Take a look at this article, it is excellent.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/04/democrats-acting-elitist-not-progressive-thomas-frank

Reply 1

sleepysnooze

I don't think anybody would disagree with this - if the US, kind of like the UK, is a 2 party system, then they are at least 1/2 of the problem. I don't even know if I'd call trump a member of the two party system though - he wasn't funded or supported by the republican establishment but won via popular support anyway - you might compare that to corbyn. hillary on the other hand is the biggest crony in recent political history in my honest opinion - she got booted out of high office but is getting back anyway because of 1) her husband, 2) her donors, 3) her gender that she has politicised

(edited 7 years ago)

Reply 2

anarchism101

Very good and insightful. While I don't know that much about Thomas Frank personally, the magazine he founded, The Baffler, is excellent and I thoroughly recommend it.

But yes, the Democrats have never really been the party of workers or progressives. As Thomas Ferguson's 'Investment Theory of Party Competition' pointed out years ago, they are primarily the party of capital intensive industries, which are generally multinational and either employ relatively few workers at all (relative to the size of the business), or primarily employ overseas labour. By contrast, the Republicans are primarily the party of labour-intensive industries - not small businesses as such, but generally mostly or wholly US-focused, and unable to simply outsource their work to workers in foreign countries. Hence the Democrats are generally more favourable to immigrants and organised labour because their business backers have no obvious conflict with these groups, while Republican backers do.

In recent years, though, the Democrats have increasingly become essentially a non-party. While the Republican Party has become more and more ideological since the 1980s, the Democrats have more and more become the bland, non-ideological party whose primary selling point is not being the GOP. It is less a party and more an electoral machine that exists to produce and elect generic politicians (the GOP also used to do this, but it seems the Tea Party finally succeeded in getting the lunatics to take over the asylum).