Of Party and Principle

Over at the American Spectator, Cato’s Doug Bandow considers the implications of Senator Specter’s decision to become a Democrat. Without exactly welcoming the switch, he suggests that Specter’s departure  offers an opportunity to get back to principle: “Absolute purity will never be possible in politics.  But why bother to create a party if it stands for nothing?  If the goal is simply to seize power, then let’s strip away the pretense that the parties stand for anything.”

Apart from electoral considerations—I maintain that limited government is deeply unpopular, although anti-Washington rhetoric often sells—this strikes me as a misunderstanding of parties’ role in American political life. Only rarely have our great parties been “ideological”. More often, they’re represented coalitions of interests and regions, which have coalesced around particular policies at various times. The GOP, for example, has traditionally been the party of big business, among other constituents. Its conversion from protection to free trade had less to do with principle than American industry’s waning fear of foreign competition. 

One could give similar examples for the Democrats. But that doesn’t mean that they stand for nothing: historically, they’ve tried to satisfy the shifting demands of immigrants; Catholics; city-dwellers; in the old days, the South; and, more recently, the highly-educated. If you want to understand the rise and fall of party fortunes, ask WHAT they propose to do for WHOM. Principles, most of the time, are for pundits and convention speeches.

Looked at this way, Bandow’s opposition between advocates of larger and smaller government is a false antithesis. Virtually everyone thinks government should be bigger in some respects, and smaller in others. The question is which. It’s all very nice to criticize the stimulus package and the bailouts. But it’s hard to see that as an expression of old-style liberalism when it comes from a party whose spokesmen have argued that an increase in defense spending from $513 to $534 billion is just too not enough.