Employers will always be outnumbered by employees. And there will always be certain areas where their interests simply do not overlap. In the American system, where we really are stuck with two parties, it’s not healthy for one party to represent employers and one party to represent employees. And it actually doesn’t quite work that way. For the Republicans, they have to overcome the problem that employers are badly outnumbered. That is why they use religion and patriotism and xenophobia and race-resentment, and some regional resentment, and anti-elite rhetoric and entertainment to lure workers onto their side.
For the Democrats, there are two problems. The first is that employees have a lot less money than employers. They can try to make up the difference with small donations, but it’s a lot more work and it isn’t always enough. Second, and related, the Democrats are not trying to be a worker’s party. They aren’t anti-business. They aren’t anti-capitalism. They aren’t interested in simply taking the unions’ agenda as their own. It’s true that the Republicans make those claims, but they are not true. There are minor parties in this country that unapologetically pursue the workers’ interests, but the Democratic Party can be better understood as the party of the New Deal. And the New Deal was a compromise between workers and employers that served as a middle ground between communism and fascism. It won its political support from an unlikely coalition of immigrant city bosses, progressive-minded intellectuals, and Jim Crow-supporting Southern plantation owners and businessmen.
The system worked pretty well (if you didn’t happen to be black) because it didn’t pit workers against their bosses. It created a system of arbitration and conflict resolution that served both sides pretty well. And it allowed the country to move at a slow and steady pace toward progressive reforms for blacks and women and gays who had all suffered severe discrimination at the beginning of the process.
Things are breaking down now, though. It’s probably the result of 30 years of Reagan conservatism eating away at the project. When Mitt Romney starts telling employers to intimidate their workers and ask them to vote Republican, we’re back to the days before the New Deal when owners could use the police to break up worker strikes and fire anyone who expressed a political opinion they didn’t like. What is going to happen is that workers will become radicalized, too. That consensus that America is a hybrid country that is neither corporate/fascist nor communist/anti-business will break down and you’ll start to see workers embracing a hard-edged socialist attitude.
You can see the seeds of this in the growing income inequality in the country, and in the Occupy Movement. The problem is that our elites have been failing us, badly, and people are increasingly giving up on the consensus. On the right, they just don’t want to pay to sustain this country anymore. On the left, they can’t take much more erosion of the middle class.
You can say whatever you want about President Obama, but he’s running things how they were designed to be run. He hasn’t failed anyone who understood the hybrid system and wanted to see it propped back up and run by competent people. He’s the best hope for the kind of country we grew up in continuing on with slow improvements. The way Romney behaves with his 47% comments and setting bosses against their employees, he’d destabilize everything. Maybe you want that. I don’t.