This Way And That

I was listening to a podcast yesterday, and Elon Musk was a guest panelist. During his talk, he noted that both the Democratic and Republican Parties have different forces that push them to be unresponsive to the needs of the public at large (or, "the people," as Mr. Musk put it). On the Democratic side of the house he called out labor unions and the trial lawyers (who are something of an old bugbear when people speak of "special interests"). On the Republican side, Mr. Musk called out "corporate evil" and religious zealotry.

It was a nice, succinct encapsulation of the of the activist class of both of the United States major political parties. But I wasn't sure that it was an accurate one, mainly on the Democratic side. I'm not sure that trial lawyers, as much as they're commonly blamed for making the United States into the overly litigious place that it's often seen as being, are that partisan of a problem.

Thinking about it a bit more, it seemed that if one was going to come up with two groups on either side of the partisan divide, it might be possible to place them into categories of proactive and reactive; that is one partisan interest group actively pushes for policies and the like that worry the other side, and the other interest group that is mainly responding to said pushing from opposing partisans.

And, using that overly simplistic model, perhaps one could structure the interest groups this way:

Proactive Interests:

• Republican - Rapacious Capitalists: The problem with capitalism, it could be said, is the capitalists. There are a fair number of people in the United States who view the goal of capitalism to be one of running up the score on everyone else, and to that end, using the vulnerability of others as an asset. They prod the Republican party to ignore the degree to which the current American practice of capitalism not only creates rampant inequality, but comes across as deliberately designed to not work well, if at all, for the majority of Americans.
• Democratic - Social Engineers: There is no problem that can't be solved by using whatever crisis may be at hand to attempt to reshape the United States into something that more closely resembles the social democracies of Western Europe. Never mind that the United States is much larger than Europe, less densely populated than Europe and significantly less homogeneous than most European nations. If that pesky individualism and religiosity can be stamped out and the right technocrats placed into offices, the United States can actually become a legitimate First (or Second, depending on where one starts counting) World nation.

Reactive Interests:

• Republican - Culture Warriors: A mix of nationalistic would-be theocrats and racial-superiority supporters, this is a group that seems to want nothing more than another bite at the apple that was the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When women were meant to be seen but not heard, the only value of minorities was cheap (or even simply stolen) labor, and freedom of religion really meant the right to be the proper sort of Christian. This movement strikes me as mainly acting in response to their caricatures (and sometimes the reality) of the Social Engineers, perceiving them as Godless heathens who don't realize that "all men are created equal" wasn't actually intended to apply to humanity as a whole.
• Democratic - Counter-Capitalists: Encompasses organized labor, sure, but also brings in a wide variety of people who have no use for labor unions, but still see American style capitalism as a crass, and deliberate, means of victimizing people. Generally unable to distinguish Capitalism from Corporatocracy, this is a group that tends towards dreams of a utopian future in which the only reason for wealth to exist is to free the population at large to pursue their dreams.

Three out of the four groups that Mr. Musk identified are still present; only the trial lawyers have been swapped out and replaced with the Social Engineers. The other groups are more or less the same. On the whole, I suspect that it's a bit too neat, and I've left out some important details. It is worth noting that both the Culture Warriors and the Counter-Capitalists have strong economic identities; both are acutely aware of their own feelings of poverty, and have convenient villains to blame for it, corporate managers and billionaires on the left and socialists and globalists on the right.

And there is a fifth group that should likely bear some of the blame; the passive voters (and non-voters) who may care enough to complain, but not enough to search out people who may change things for the better. While they may not actively seek to enact policies that advantage themselves to the detriment of others, their general lack of engagement reduces the penalties for politicians who chase particular interest groups to the exclusion of all else. To drive politics one way or another, one's vote has to be seen as being in play; the voter who can be relied upon to find an extremist of their own party to always be a better bet than a moderate from the other, or the person who simply never shows up to the polls, narrows the number of people that office seekers have to appeal to. This is what drives the hollowing out of the political center.

I don't know what remedy there might be for all of this. One is likely needed at some point; democracy is not meant to be the means by which mutually-antagonistic groups decide which off them will be run over by the other, nor is it a means of deciding between competing visions of right and wrong. Something needs to take the place of the broad sets of warring interest groups outlined above. And maybe it will. Whether it happens anytime soon is anyone's guess.