Mark Phillips: The American Question

Both parties are capitalist parties.

The Republican Party has closer ties with finance capital and the sunbelt defense industries than the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has closer ties with Great Lakes epoch manufacturing. They about tie in high tech.

The two parties differ primarily in their approach to the working class.

The Republican Party elite favor pre-Rooseveltian smash-and-stomp class struggle. Break that union! Fill those prisons! Call in the National Guard! Above all, keep the white folks and the black folks and the brown folks apart.

The Democratic Party elite favor corporatism as practiced from the Roosevelt era until about 1978. Gramsci called it "Fordism", liberals call it the Welfare State. Inequities and injustices of the class structure are to be managed via top-down interventions packaged as "programs". Under no circumstances is self-emancipation to be practiced from below.

The capitalist class as a whole oscillates between the two strategies depending on the global economic climate and the state of the class struggle. Democratic Party corporatism was ascendant in the period from WWII to Vietnam as the high rate of profit provided the "space" for the reforms demanded by the civil rights mobilization. Republican Party class struggle became dominant after 1978 as the declining rate of profit and the demobilization of the civil rights and anti war movements combined to close the "space".

Neither party can achieve power or govern without achieving aliances with other classes capable of providing mass bases. Historically, Republicans sought out various petty-bourgeois layers and relied on low voter turnout. During the corporatist period, Democrats combined mass working class voting bases in the cities with the "solid south" segregationists in Dixie. Nixon broke the Democratic Party hold on the south just as the onset of the long "crisis" of profitability was becoming apparent. Today the Republican mass base is in petty-bourgeois layers, anti-integration southern whites, evangelicals, and others who identify with "conservative" cultural totems. The Democratic mass base is in communities of color, petty-bourgeois layers, the women's movement, the remnant of organized labor, and those with ideological commitments to caring for the poor. The Democratic Elite, particularly the DLC, orient toward the right, that is, emphasize the alliance with petty-bourgeois layers at the expense of other constituencies. Conventional wisdom, that is, the dominant strategists of both parties, seem to agree that the only open space for struggle between them is over one or another petty-bourgeois layer.

Neither party any longer claims to represent the poor or the unemployed.

These mass bases and alliances differ profoundly from region to region, so that attempts at analysis on a national scale are inevitably overly abstract.

This is profoundly over my head. I don't have the specialized knowledge to do this analysis properly. Just some methodological pointers based primarily on Althusser and also the TI tradition.

IMO, no movement for "socialism", "democracy", "self-emancipation" or any other good thing from below can succeed without first concretizing and completing this sketch, or replacing it with something better.