The Iowa primary and two parties vs four

Much has been written about the Iowa caucuses, the results, the horse race. I’m not sure i have much to add from half a world away.

One thing i did thing was interesting was Huckabee. From the perspective of urban, professional class, coastal america, he comes across as being a religious zealot. A crazy preacher. But looking a little further i saw that he’s a social conservative and economic liberal, other republicans even say socialist.

“Mike Huckabee is a Christian socialist. He is a good man, but with a Big Government heart. He is the most liberal of all the Republican presidential candidates on economic issues.”— said Ricard Viguerie a conservative strategist.

The conception of a socialist republican, right wing social values and progressive economic values kind of makes sense. It’s a republicanism which would attract a majority of Latino, currently %14 of the US population. Pro-church, Pro-Family, and Pro-Worker. Anti-gay, anti-urban, anti-abortion, anti-corporate power.

It’s not the republican party which is in power today, nor the one of Reagan. But it is exactly the social movements which Zack is describing in Revolution in Jesusland. It’s an evangelical version of Liberation Theology.

In a system which allowed fair elections, proportional representation, and more than two parties, the Republican party would divide in to two separate parties. Social conservatives, like Huckabee, and economic conservatives like the neo-con’s including Giuliani, McCain, Reagan, etc… Right now the two groups don’t really see eye to eye, but they are in the same party. The Republicans also have libertarians, who are far-right economic conservatives who are social liberals.

On the Democratic party side there is a similar divide. Clinton represents the DLC, conservative democrats, or centrists as they call themselves. They advocate a conservative economic agenda over all, free trade, lower taxes, smaller government. The same agenda as the economic conservatives on the republican side! On social issues they support the agenda and values of urban professional costal NPR listening america. Don’t rock the boat, but slowly support civil unions, keeping abortion accessible to people who live in ‘blue states’, fund the arts, fund universities, increase fuel economy standards and slowly address global warming.

Then there are the economic progressives, the democrats who work with Unions and Black America. In general working class democrats are concerned about economics, jobs, minimum wage, anti-free trade, etc.. John Edwards is the democratic candidate who most represents the economic progressive branch of the democratic party. You can see this by the endorsement of Michael Moore who correctly sees Edwards as truly caring about the poor and working class. Edwards is the union candidate. The social issues which are valued by this branch of the democratic party are ignored by the party as a whole. Church going and married, the issues which drive the social agenda of working class democrats are ignored by liberal urban professionals who bankroll the party. The unions keep supporting the democrats because the republican economic conservatives want to abolish them, but the Democrats never DO anything for the unions at all.

Obama is an interesting case. I don’t think he winning based on his politics. He’s winning because he’s amazingly charismatic. He’s a great speaker, and a great campaigner. People like his story, the multiethnic boy raised by white Christians from Kansas. It goes without saying that clearly Obama is super smart. All of this lets the democrats vote for him because they like the person. He’s seen as a bridge who can reach out to different parts of the democratic party, and to independents.

Interestingly, i assumed Obama’s politics were like the Clintons. Centrist democrats. And if you look, he did run against a former black radical for the Illinois state senate. But looking at his voting record, he’s actually pretty damned progressive. I was surprised. Who knows if he’d be a progressive president or not. But if he gets elected president, Americans will get a much more progressive administration than they were expecting.

What the elections in Iowa, and presidential primaries, say to me is that the structure of the party system is broken in the US. We’ve got social conservatives with progressive economic policies, and we’ve got economic conservatives with liberal cultural values (secular, pro-gay, pro-abortion).* Those two groups are split evenly within the two parties, who are supposed to hate each other. This crazy setup is a large part of why US elections are so non-competitive. Less than %2 of members of congress lose a seat if they run for reelection!

A sane system, given these political and social values would be to the evangelicals with their party, the economic conservatives (centrists) with their party, and the economic progressives with their party. It’s not as simple as i laid out, but the two party system means that the economic centrists from both parties dominate fundraising and the power structures of BOTH parties. That’s a large part of why there is no political debate in the US. The leaders in power of both parties agree MOST of the time.

• There are also the libertarians on the right and greens on the left, who don’t fit so cleanly in to this spectrum. Not to mention crazy anarchists like myself.