ONE POLITICAL PARTY OR TWO? by Frank Forman Everyone is at least somewhat myopic, and it is primarily those close to the political center that can see big differences between the Democrats and the Republicans. Those away from the center, the "extremists," see no essential differences between the two major parties. Far leftists claim that capitalism and fascism are the "same." Far rightists, likewise, see only one party, the Demicans/Republicrats. Maybe we should not expect much of a difference between the two parties in a two-party democracy. If the Democrats moved away from the center to the left, the Republicans capture all the votes to the right of center, plus half the votes from the center to the Democrats. In the next election, the losing Democrats are sure to move their platform back to the center. We see exactly the same things with two competing hot dog stands on a beach. Suppose the beach were a mile long and the bathers placed evenly throughout. From the point of view of the customers, the best place for the two stands would be at one-third and two- thirds of a mile along the beach. This would minimize the distance the average customer would have to walk to get a hot dog. But if the second hot dog proprietor moved his stand to the center, he would still get all the customers he got before and add many customers who have been patronizing the first hot dog stand. Eventually, the two stands would wind up next to each other in the middle. This is not an ideal solution, and the proprietors have a real incentive to make an antitrust agreement to split up the market and put their stands at one-third and two-thirds of a mile. In politics, however, this would result in radical swings of policy whenever one set of bums was thrown out and another set put in. It would take a real "extremist," one who was not even on the beach, to see no differences between the two parties. These swings have taken place in other countries, where politics is much more ideological than here, where politicians dispense with more than just handouts to various constituencies. Except for the Civil War, politics has been pretty non-ideological in this country, despite all the rhetoric, and it is quite possible to argue that the corresponding stability is a good thing. Thus the case that there is only "one" political part in the United State and that this is not something to really complain about. If there were only one hot dog stand, it should indeed be placed half a mile along the beach. The complaints about our country's political system should not be directed at two-party democracy, which leaves the fewest dissatisfied voters, but with the voters themselves. They want, and get, far too much government, and government of the wrong sort. One the other hand, a case can be made that there are really *two* parties, as the great John C. Calhoun foresaw in his _Disquisition on Government_, that of the taxpayers and that of the taxeaters (not his term). The Republicans are the non-unionized wage earners and most of the businessmen; the Democrats are the welfare and Social Security recipients and government employees. There have been more net taxeaters than net taxpayers in this country for over twenty years, and so the Democrats have maintained healthy majorities at all levels except for the Presidency itself throughout most of this period. Here are the two views and their corresponding dualities (discussion welcome!): ONE PARTY TWO PARTIES Elitist Pluralist Ruling Class Masses Domination Common Advantages Positive Power Veto Power Conspiracy Spontaneous Order Hidden Hand Invisible Hand Ideology Self-Interest Taxeaters Pressure Groups Coercion Consensus Conflict Model Integrationist Model Exploitative Cooperative Karl Marx Max Weber BUT NEITHER: Left-Wing Right-Wing NOR: Right-Wing Left-Wing But however much the natural constituency of the part of the taxeaters differs from that of the part of the taxpayers, the political *platforms* have come to resemble each other. One calls for $1.7 trillion in federal spending per year; the other calls for only $1.6 Terradollars. One calls for extending civil rights protection to homosexuals; the other calls for holding the line. Only irresponsible right-wing "extremists" call for repeal of civil rights legislation or reducing the role of the federal government to what it was under Jimmy Carter. There is a paradox here. There really are such things as taxpayers and taxeaters, whence the analogy with the hot dog stands along the beach breaks down, but you wouldn't know it from listening to politicians or looking at their voting records. Maybe we are so relentlessly non-ideological that we cannot make the simple distinction between taxpayers and taxeaters. Maybe we have been so bamboozled by the ideology of egalitarianism and what Ayn Rand called altruism that we do not see that the taxeaters have no authentic right to the earnings of the taxpayers. This takes us back to the beach: the hot dog stand to the left caters to those who want more for the taxeaters, while the stand to the right caters to those who want less. The stands themselves are located next to each other, in the middle and thus just where the voters want them. The extremist who is not on the beach at all and sees the two parties as "one" party is, then, someone who sees (probably without realizing it) an ideological racket at work. He would, if he could, come in and sell hamburgers. This is, I submit, what the Middle American Radicals (MARs) are all about. Their wishes, to be left alone, not to be harassed with taxes and regulations, have been forgotten. It will take the kind of political entrepreneur called a populist to make their voices heard. But he cannot be too loud about it. The MARs have assimilated too much egalitarianism, altruism, and globaloney to be comfortable with a populist who emphatically rejects them all. Populists in fact cast their rhetoric in egalitarian terms, whatever they really believe, just as closet atheists in the Middle Ages cast their arguments in terms of Christianity. Ross Perot's political positions, whenever he stated any, were generally between those of the Demicans and the Republicrats. As the Middle American Radicals see it, then, there are indeed the taxpayers vs. the taxeaters. It's just that the Demicans and Republicrats are *jointly* the taxeaters, while they, the MARs, are the taxpayers. So there is "one" party, with the taxpayers not represented at all. How is it, then, that the Republi*cans* are taxeaters? They are made up, after all, largely of non-unionized workers and businessmen. Don't businessmen object to all the taxes they pay? Well, they would rather not pay them, but they may very well think they are able to pass all the taxes on to the consumers, those Forgotten Americans, William Graham Sumner's term for those whose function in life is to pay. This *appearance* of an ability to pass on taxes is bolstered by another astonishing ability of men, even businessmen, to internalize whatever morality racket rules the day. This is especially true of big business and big banksters. They prattle endlessly about global responsibility and North-South dialogue. They are *liberal* Republicans. A Middle American Radical cannot but suspect that they are also on the take. Are they? They manage to get tariffs and "voluntary" import quotas. Worse, the banksters are convinced that the taxpayers will bail them out when their foolish loans to Third World dictators fail to be repaid. And a good many businessmen are protected from competition by regulatory commissions. The airlines are no longer, so it seems, but when they fail in open competitions they hide under ridiculously lenient bankruptcy laws and continue to operate. It seems, at least to MARs, that we have socialism for the big boys and free enterprise for small businesses. However, if one tries to total up the rakeoff big business manages to get for itself, especially in comparison with the Human Betterment Industry (health, education, and welfare--the latter two almost entirely subsidized by taxes), it is not plausible to think big businesses are net taxeaters. Why their leaders go along with, and often publicly affirm, egalitarianism, altruism, and globaloney, can be explained by the fact that they pretty much have to. In the old days, businesses were run by engineers. Later the accountants took over (or rather accountants became the CEOs), not necessarily such a bad thing, since engineers do not keep profits uppermost in mind. Profits are small in relation to total sales (they run about four percent), and if a few product lines look splendid to the engineers who designed them, but cost too much to make or fail to sell for more than they cost, then the company will be bested in competition. Now government regulations and arcane provisions in the tax code have come to make up an often very significant fraction of this four percent. This has meant that big businesses are more and more being run by lawyers with political connections than by accountants or engineers. Any lawyer that came across like Ayn Rand's Hank Rearden (basically an engineer) in front of Congressional staff would be thrown out. It's the smoothies who get those little changes made in regulations and the tax codes that make a tremendous difference in the bottom line. It is not the least unlikely that many lawyer- businessmen will come to believe their own talk about egalitarianism, altruism, and globaloney. In fact, they came to believe their own compromised posturings a good many decades ago and are now far from allies of the Middle American Radicals. They have come to think, in their more cynical moods, that they are ahead of the game and rip off others more than they are ripped off themselves. So it looks there is "one" political party after all. Then again, just maybe businessmen could see themselves as taxpayers and wrest control of their businesses from the lawyers. And then yet again.... I stop, to give the readers a change to render their own opinion on how many political parties there are in the United States, and to suggest what can be done. But PLEASE don't just give a quickie response: I'm not taking a poll and want some really hard thinking here. Write at least 400 words (2000 Bytes), read this piece over again, and then revise it. Please also let us know where you are reading this from. And try to refrain from suggesting that the MARs become an organized and hence a new group of taxeaters. *Someone* has to do the work!