I mentioned this awhile back and saw some people disagreeing with me so I wanted to try again to get a real discussion going. We can probably agree that the two parties are very similar, and many could argue convincingly that they are identical, but I think there are some minor differences. Feel free to correct me, this is why I'm putting this out here. I'm including various genders, races, and generations as well. There are subjective differences to pretty much everything here, but I'm saying that the majority of people in each category support this or that party.
IMO, the Democrats represent:
Wall Street
The Military Industrial Complex
The Prison Industrial Complex
Oil and natural gas
Imperialism and settler colonialism
Corporate media
Tech (most tech CEOs give most of their donations to the Democrats)
Big Pharma
Labor aristocrats in non-STEM fields (some exceptions among tech workers, but most unionized workers vote for Democrats)
Small business owners whose customers tend to be diverse (restaurant owners in touristy areas for instance)
Landlords (3/4 landlords I've known are Dems)
Hollywood
Women
BIPOC
Students
LGBTQ people
People under 40, especially those who haven't inherited property
Republicans represent:
Wall Street
The Military Industrial Complex
The Prison Industrial Complex
Oil and natural gas
Imperialism and settler colonialism
Corporate media
Tech (Elon's more obvious rightward drift has been pretty notable lately)
Big Pharma (not as much as the Democrats, recall Trump's differences with the party rank and file over vaccines)
Labor aristocrats in STEM fields
Small business owners in less diverse fields (cattle raising, fishing for instance)
Landlords, particularly those with many properties
White people, especially white men, but also plenty of white women
Cis people
People over 40, especially those who have inherited property.
The police (Democrats lick their boots, but we all know that the overwhelming majority of cops are die-hard Republicans)
Let me know if I missed anything or fucked up.
The Democrats cater mainly to international capital interests. They white wash imperialist policies under wonky globalization economic strategies and moralizing using domestic cultural hangups.
The Republicans are also heavily into international capital interests. They do it using security theater, xenophobia, fear, and military might. More recently, however, the party has been hijacked by domestic capital interests. The ones who don't like globalization and trade agreements and the moralizing using social issues. Because global capital has alienated even other wealthy people. They have wealth but they don't get the spoils of a global economy. In fact the global economy may drive them out of business.
The smaller wealthy people share cultural affectations with the even smaller wealthy and proles who are also alienated by capital in various ways. This is why some blue collar worker in the middle of the country will have similar politics to a suburban jet ski shop owner and both will be similar to some multimillionaire steel magnate.
It's the same way Democrats use affectations to build false solidarity with lesser wealthy and proles. They're just different affectations.
It's absolutely bizarre that there is a lumpen bourgeoisie in America, but it exists.
I agree with everything, but if I were to nitpick, I would say that Republicans are just as Big Pharma as Dems, due to their staunch defense of insurance companies and full privatization of healthcare.
Also the dems are for the LGBT, POC and woman in theory but don't seem to ever be prepared to do what it takes to, say, stop the GOP banning abortion.
I would say that Republicans are just as Big Pharma as Dems,
I'd also add in they're also big on the snake oil homeopathy industry so they can have fingers in different pies
Democrats : international or cosmopolitan bourgeoisie
Republicans : national or provincial bourgeoisie
I'm gonna make a joke:
Democrats: Maoist third-worldists
Republicans: Trotskyite World Revolutionists
This would be better analysis if you broke it out regionally to understand local economies. The Republican Party of California and Montana are very different. Same with Dems between NY and the deep south.
This also has to do with competing leaders of industry. Wealthy oil barons of Texas vs Wealthy bankers of NY. Both can be Republican. But they have different interests for the economy.
In a way, these are essentially secondary or tertiary contradictions to the national contradiction. One big one is the old financial establishment of NY vs fintech of CA. Both rely on one another to exist but they are at odds. We wouldn't have Silicon Valley if it weren't for investors in NY and we wouldn't have modern fictionalization without tech people "disrupting" from CA. But they both want to steer the economy (and therefore must seek political control) in different directions. One is to preserve and grow the old international financial banking system, international trade and investment. They want to be the ones facilitating all of it, centralized, regulated, inseparable from the state. The other wants to remove regulation of the state, decentralize (which just means take it from the old guys and give it to the new guys), and create a simulation of what the old system was.
A lot of the national drama and conspiracy stuff comes down to warring factions of bourgeois.
I mean look at an electoral map. They are obviously different in some way. rural vs urban is an ok-ish shorthand for it.
I read that chain restaurants, outback steakhouse/Chilis, are a better predictor of republican voting areas than many things you'd think are more relevant.
These things only go where land is cheap.
Back in the old days there'd be the Jeffersonians and then the other faction (I don't remember). I think democrats vs republicans has a lot to do with how much your net wealth depends on the cheapness of land, for a restaurant, for a subdivision, etc.
At most we have fluid capital and invested in nonfluid assets capital
I would argue that the ballot line most politicians take really does not matter to capital (at least big capital) which is owned by finance capitalists and can work fluidly through either party because their word is law. What distinguishes the parties is their regional petty bourgeois affiliations whose conflict with each other is more cultural than material competition. The cultural differences are produced by geographic and resource distribution. Thus Republicans are Big Oil's party not because they are particularly amenable to Big Oil, but because they are popular in Texas and the Gulf Coast. Landlords in Democratic states will be Democrats and landlords in Republican states will be Republican.
This alliance between the petty bourgeois and the big bourgeois is entrenched fascism btw.
How else are we to explain something like 1/6 except by concluding that occasionally there are actual differences between different sections of the ruling class? The same goes for the Republican hatred of trans people. Democrats are ineffectual on this front but they aren’t actively genocidal (passively maybe). Could this be due to the fact that small business owners are increasingly relying on younger workers who tend to have pretty radical ideas about race, gender, and sexual orientation (though not class)?
I’m not excusing the Democrats, I hate them more than anyone, I’ll never vote for them. I’m just saying that occasionally these two wings of the ruling class do actually have differences driven by material circumstances.
I think :matt-jokerfied: puts it best when he describes how the split that the Dems and Reps represent has to do with how close your industry is to the actual machine of exploitation. Dems more closely align with finance capital, which can afford to appear nicer because it is partially removed from the children who work in the mines - meanwhile the Republicans are more aligned with the mines themselves, where you have to whip the children to make them work faster or be replaced by someone who will. Capitalist culture pushes people towards the mindset that the exploitation is justified for a million different reasons, and the people who like the harsher justifications (those children need to work harder) will lean to the right while those who want a softer justification (those children need to work because their parents don't make enough money without them) will lean to the left without anyone in mainstream politics questioning the underlying assumption (that we cannot pay the parents more and send the children to school).
Read the economy and class structure of fascism, it gives you a better idea about what different factions in the democratic party and republican party represent
