4.7 - Ideologies of Political Parties

Defining Political Ideology

Conservative

• Approach to change: change shouldn't happen until the reasoning behind the current setup is fully understood, illustrated by Chesterton's Fence: don't tear down a fence if you don't know why it was put there in the first place.

• Party alignment: mostly Republicans.

• Populist wing: a nationalist populist wing within the GOP favors stronger government power around anti-immigration and anti-trade policy, sometimes clashing with more traditional conservatives.

Liberal (Progressive)

• Role of government: favors a bigger, stronger government to legislate the equality they want.

• Worldview: sees government as a tool for widening opportunity and protecting groups that have faced discrimination. Liberal ideologies generally favor more government regulation of the marketplace and more national government involvement in social issues like education and public health (Topics 4.9 and 4.10).

• Openness to experimentation: more comfortable trying new policies to fix current problems, even if the outcome is uncertain.

• Party alignment: mostly Democrats.

• Populist wing: a Democratic socialist wing pushes for much higher taxes, more regulation, more government control of the economy, and expanded government programs.

Libertarian

• Role of government: favors a very weak federal government focused mainly on protecting individual freedom.

• Limits on freedom: the only acceptable reason to limit someone's freedom is to stop them from infringing on someone else's.

• Suspicion of power: shares the Founders' wariness of concentrated government power, while acknowledging some government is necessary.

• Core government tasks: defense, protecting property rights, maybe roads and sewage, everything else left to the people.

• Distrust of coercion: deeply skeptical of government's power to force compliance, and big fans of the Bill of Rights.

• Party alignment: doesn't fit neatly into either major party. The Libertarian Party is the largest third party, though many libertarians end up voting for the "lesser of two evils" or skip voting altogether.

How Party Ideologies Shape Policy Debates

• Health care: Democrats generally want the national government to expand access to health insurance, like the Affordable Care Act (2010), which passed Congress without a single Republican vote. Republicans generally prefer market-based approaches with less federal control, and they tried several times to repeal the ACA.

• Taxes and spending: Democrats tend to favor higher taxes on high earners and corporations to pay for social programs. Republicans tend to favor tax cuts and less spending, like the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (2017), which passed without a single Democratic vote.

• Immigration: Republicans stress border security and enforcing immigration laws. Democrats stress a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants, like those brought to the U.S. as children.

• Guns: Republican platforms strongly defend Second Amendment rights and oppose most new gun laws. Democratic platforms support stricter laws, like universal background checks.
• Case connection, McDonald v. Chicago (2010): the Court ruled 5-4 that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for self-defense applies to state and local governments through the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause (selective incorporation), striking down Chicago's handgun ban. The ruling was a win for the conservative position, and since then the party debate has been over which gun regulations are allowed, not whether a city can ban handguns outright.

• Polarization: today's parties are more ideologically sorted than they were in the mid-1900s, when there were many conservative Democrats (especially in the South) and liberal Republicans (especially in the Northeast). With fewer moderates in either party, compromise is harder, gridlock is more common, and big laws like the ACA and the 2017 tax cuts often pass on party-line votes.

• Federalist No. 10 connection: Madison would call parties factions, groups united by a shared interest or passion that can work against the rights of others or the public good. He expected conflict between them to be a normal part of government: "The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government." His fix was a large republic with so many competing interests that no single faction could take over. Two big parties competing, plus many interest groups, is one way that plays out today.