Republican Tories & Democratic Whigs (posted December 11, 2002)

[arendt]

Republican Tories & Democratic Whigs
by arendt (December 11, 2002)

The debate about the future direction of the Democratic
Party (move left or move right) refuses to recognize a
very large and disturbing fact. Over the last twenty years,
big money has totally reconstructed our two political
parties. Today, only money talks; not the voters.

There are only two sources of big and ideologically
acceptable money in America today: big business
money and hard right ideological money. In the
past, people hoped that the fight between social
reactionaries and economic reactionaries would
allow the old Democratic Party to withstand the
old Republican Party. That didn't happen.

What is emerging is an echo of the old British
governmental coalitions: Tories and Whigs. The
Tories were royalists and aristocrats. They preached
the "divine right" of kings and the innate superiority
of the aristocracy. They argued for the rule of a
man, a man who was also the head of The Church.
The aristocrats felt they deserved to be paid a
cut of everyone else's labor and to be appointed to
all the prime positions regardless of talent.

The Whigs were businessmen and Parliamentarians.
They fought for the Parliamentary power of the purse to
discipline the excesses of the king and to safeguard the
rights of moneyed non-aristocrats from seizure (bills of attainder),
imprisonment without cause (habeus corpus, due process),
and trial other than by jury of peers (Star Chamber). The
Whigs argued for a rule of law overseen by propertied men.
(Of course, there were no propertied women, just women
as property.)

The one thing Tories and Whigs agreed upon was
to keep the peasants and workers on a tight leash
and out of government. Universal manhood suffrage
was considered a radical event, even fifty years after
the Napoleonic era.

In today's America, the Republicans have become
Tories for Bush, and Democrats have taken on the
features of Whigs.

The Republican Tories work to preserve the legalized plutocratic
bribery of effectively unregulated campaign finance, to eliminate
taxes on the super-rich, to disenfranchise black voters, and to pack
the government with cronies, criminals, and ideologues instead
of honest, qualified public servants. Instead of principled and outspoken
resistance, the Democratic Whigs join in by approving massive corporate
tax cuts and by silence or tepid support of suffrage and meritocracy
issues that could soon eliminate not only the franchise, but also, the
mere presence of the non-rich in government.

The Democrats became Whigs when the conservative,
corporate-funded Democratic Leadership Council (DLC),
headed by Bill Clinton took over the party machinery.
Look where the big Democratic money comes from:
lawyers, Wall Street, some Silicon Valley money, and
a residue of union money that is heavily advertised
but largely overruled in policy matters (e.g., GATT, NAFTA).

The Republicans have always been Tory wannabees,
but only when the Bush Crime Family managed to
bribe, cheat, and steal its way into two major state
governorships and two presidencies was there a
rallying point for these Tories, a pretender to an American
dynastic throne. The GOP today feels like a royal court
with no criticism of the ruler allowed, with rich courtiers
bribing and currying royal patents and subsidies for
themselves and royal offices for their offspring.

These are the true natures of the two political parties today.
Of course, the media pretends it is still the two old small-d
democratic parties. We DUers make our mistake when we try to
understand both the debate and the political position of the parties
in those out-of-date terms. All of us at DU have experienced
how distorted the corporate media is, but I think it is a mistake
to say that there is no genuine disagreement allowed in the
media. Genuine debate is allowed between the Whig and
Tory positions.

There was just such a "ruling classes" debate during the
Viet Nam War. Business interests began to be troubled by
the social and financial dislocations caused by the guns-and-
butter economy, the trashing of revered institutions, and
the endless escalation without victory. Those interests
allowed the media to publish their doubts. Because those
doubts were aired in an "approved" forum, the public
took notice and joined the debate. It is our misfortune in
2002 that that debate splintered and discredited both political
parties, taking down both Johnson and Nixon. The resulting
power vacuum was filled by the well-funded extremist
radical right and their shadowy compatriots in the Bush
CIA. Their looting began in 1980 and is on the verge of
total victory over the middle class.

With this lengthy introduction, the move left/move right debate
in today's Democratic Party can be decoded.

Since 911, the Bush Tories and their shamelessly partisan
puppets in the media have been able to play the "national
security" card to trump Whig uneasiness over economic
meltdown, the trashing of the Constitution, the setting up
of a police state, and the open belligerence towards the
rest of the world. Whig resistance is largely invisible to
the disenfranchised middle class. Whig resistance takes
place in private meetings of the ruling class, in genteel
policy forums, in foot-dragging in Congress.

The Whigs recognize that the end goal of the Republican
Tory program is the establishment of an American Empire
over a world whose demographics will more closely resemble
Haiti than Boston. The Whig anguish is in deciding if this
Empire would be good or bad for business, and good or
bad for the Whig wing of the plutocracy. How a businessman
makes this decision depends on his line of business.

There are Tory businessmen, but they are mostly in low-tech
Tory businesses that rely on coerced sweatshop labor, sleazy
salesmanship fraud, and government-protected raw materials
extraction from public lands. To them, the Bush Regency is
a gold-mine, both literally and figuratively. Its business as
usual for them to rely on bribery, chicanery, and violence.

The Whigs are used to running things by the rules. Many of their
businesses are complex and technological. They have delicate
just-in-time inventory systems, perishable goods, and product
reputations that could be destroyed by incompetent or non-existent
regulation of infrastructure, markets, and product quality by the
government. They have work forces that would be impacted by
the intrusion of a creeping establishment of religion. If corporations
hate union organizers, just wait until they have a religious commisar
looking over their shoulder, like in Iran.

The Whigs actually make the things that the Tories rip off. The
Whigs are much more face-to-face with uncooperative natural
and social systems than the Tories who live in a fantasyland
constructed to insulate them from "the rabble". At bottom, the
Democratic Party today represents a Whig business constituency -
and a high-tech one at that.

Tech level is the key to the Whig decision. High-tech products
require a highly educated workforce to produce them; and,
often, a highly-paid population to afford them. The Tory program
is essentially anti-middle class. The Tories perceive the middle
class as the source of their opposition: soccer moms, college
professors, environmentalists, gun-controllers, family planners,
do-gooders, bleeding hearts, and so on.

The Tories would be perfectly happy to reduce America to a bunch
of uneducated morons living in trailer parks, obeying the dictates
of intrusive fundamentalist ministers, and buying cheap junk at
WalMart with the pittance they take home from their chump change
service jobs. In short, they would like America to look like a Mexican
shantytown, or lately, a Mainland Chinese shantytown. The Tories
are all for the globalization "race to the bottom" because they collect
the winnings. The Tories already live high by cheating and extorting
the growing segment of America reduced to this abject intellectual and
social poverty.

As the Bush Tories knock down their opposition and become free to
show their true program, large numbers of High-tech Whigs will start to
move from the Republican label to the Democratic label. Since the
Democratic label is really a Whig label, they should be able to pick
up the Libertarian crowd. The Libertarians are pro-business and
pro-meritocracy. They are anti-royalist and anti-religious coercion.

Push will come to shove if Bush can overcome the passive resistance
and start his "lovely little war" with Iraq. The resultant international
outcry and domestic chill will hurt a lot of businesses. Draconian
regulation of Internet communications could push that industry
into opposition to Bush. Loss of foreign sales due to boycotts, and
loss of sales due to oil price shocks could also generate Viet Nam-
style pragmatic opposition.

The problem is that our Whigs have already given our Tories
Star Chamber powers to imprison anyone it chooses in the
Bloody Tower. So, the Tories don't have the legal protections
that the British Tories had in their confrontation with the King.
Watch who joins the ACLU and who yells about the disgusting
court rulings of the Bush-vetted Federal courts to see if the
Whigs have got a clue here.

----

So, what is the bottom line of this analysis for DUers? First of all,
there is no way the Whigs will move left. They will run a Whig
candidate on a Whig platform. I already
pointed out in a previous thread that John Kerry is a perfect
Democratic Whig. The more I examine it, the more right it feels.

He comes from money. He is patriotic and was willing in the past to
investigate the outright illegalities of the Bush Tory Iran-Contra drug
running. But, he is part of this behind-the-scenes, drawing room drama
of passive resistance and wink-and-nod coded positions; and he won't
let the middle-class in on it. Since he has never been a businessman,
much less a high-tech businessman, my feeling is that he will not
resonate strongly with those key players, who are needed to halt the
coronation of King/Emperor/Pope George the Anti-Christ.

Decoding Kerry as a Whig, I can even get past the "betrayal" issue that
genuine liberals have with Kerry. Kerry is loyal to his Whig class, but
confused liberals think he is an old-fashioned liberal Democrat. At
least with the Whig/Tory analysis, I don't have to think of Kerry as
devious; just secretive and having a different agenda.

Al Gore is harder to figure. He was in the DLC from the beginning.
But, he is very smart and aware, and tends to let his intelligence
lead him to populist positions that make the Whigs nervous and
the Tories apoplectic. His understanding of high-tech can be used
to recruit the high-tech Whigs that the party needs for successful
resistance to Tory absolutism. The Whigs will continue to let him
"walk point" and take bullets; but, in the end, they will try to dump
him as a "loser". Notice how Bill Clinton stays very far away from
Al.

In a Tory/Whig world, there are no outsiders. So, you can
forget about fringe candidates. That kind of populist democracy
is history, unless it is used as an elaborate media ploy to confuse
the electorate. You know, like Ralph Nader.

So, if you buy this analysis - that our only choices will be Whigs
and Tories, Al Gore is the best deal for us in the only party
that even pretends to care about the middle class. Al can attract
high-tech Whigs, keep the black vote, and if he plays his cards
right, the Libertarians (although Tipper's record censorship gig
will hurt him there). My objection to Kerry is now more based on
his inability to engage swing Whig high-tech voters than on any
perceived betrayal or waffling.

OTOH, if DUers can't stomach being represented by any kind of
Whig, in the same way that labor union men would not want to be
represented by factory owners, it is going to be very lean times for us.
You better get out and organize a Labor Party for America. Make
sure to keep out Socialists, Greens, and any other easily demonized
group. Michael Lind had an excellent analysis of such a missing
conservative/nationalist left/labor party in his book "The Next American
Republic".

Thats my analysis. Any comments?