What I Like About Democrats

The Democratic Party (Democratic Republicans as they were called back in 1791) as the party of “the little guy”. And, typically, it started out with a very big, rich guy (Thomas Jefferson) leading the party for the benefit of all the little guys. Same pattern today—note Averell Harriman, the Kennedys, G. Menon Williams, etc. All for the little guy.
Under Andrew Jackson, it became very much the party of the once little guy on the make. Get those horrid Whig/Republican institutions like banks off our backs so we can speculate to our heart’s content. Many Nineteenth Century Democrats sounded a lot like late Twentieth Century Republicans.
It also continued as the chosen Party of the pro-slavery South. Even Northern Democrats like Stephen Douglas made sure that his moves benefitted the southern slave holders—note, especially, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Again, it sounds like this era’s Republican Party.
But the heart of the Democratic Party—and here it parts company with all ages of the Republican Party—lay in the ethnic ghettoes of our northern cities. In the Dickensian slums of New York and Boston, Democrats forged an ethos that remains with them today.
It began as practical politics. There was no social security, no welfare, no unemployment, no workman’s comp, no safety net at all. Factory workers made a dollar a day for decades on end. Women made as much as $1.75 a week; kids under ten rarely made a whole dollar in a week.
Needless to say there was no reserve for layoffs, injury and death. The spectre of instant economic disaster hung over every working family. Suddenly there might be no food, no heat, no medicine and an eviction notice on the door.
Democratic Party bosses who faced moneyed Republican opposition found there was one way they could guarantee themselves hundreds and thousands of votes for a relatively small investment. The disaster stricken immigrant worker had only one thing to sell—his vote.
For a bag of coal, some bread, a doctor’s visit, a job for the paterfamilias at city hall—you not only saved lives, but you bought a whole family’s gratitude for generations. Sure the bosses were corrupt—but they kept people alive; that was their power.
Republicans never understood this simple fact—either in dealing with the Democratic big city bosses or with the subsequent New Deal. The issue wasn’t “big government” or “tax and spend”; the issue was food on the table.
(To vote Republican you had to get a good enough and secure enough job to buy a house in the suburbs and never have to worry about where tonight’s meal was coming from. Republicans could afford to buy a week’s worth of provisions on the weekend. They could buy cars instead of trolley fare—it was often very much a simple matter of economics. In the 1950s, we saw millions of Democratic urban ethnics moving to the suburbs and switching party affiliation.)
You bet the urban bosses were corrupt. Moralizing Republicans who harped constantly on the corruption factor had plenty of valid ammunition. But the city voter was in the position of the man I knew who got robbed. He went to the police; they couldn’t help him.
He went to the bookie who fronted for the Mafia. They got his stuff back for him. “So,” he asked me, “who do you think I vote for? The cops? Or the Mafia?” (Safest streets in any big city were for many years those of the local Mafia headquarters. No muggers welcome.)
So, for whom did the urban ghetto dweller vote—the Republican who preached fiscal restraint and moral probity in political office or the Democrat who gave him coal and later food stamps? What would any responsible parent do?
All too often the Republican response to both fecklessness and calamity was that of a once good friend of mine. (His uncle, incidentally, was a Republican Senator.) He was as moral as any man I’ve ever known and, all in all, a decent fellow. But he insisted that if you got ill and lacked insurance, it was your duty to die. Quote, end quote.
Democrats for all their moments of wrong headedness and corruption have never forgotten that they are the party of the “little guy”. No matter how well you pad your own expense account, it remains a duty to make sure that he at least eats.
A lot of the rhetoric coming out of the Democratically dominated Washington of today is based on that fundamental notion. The little guy needs help with medical care, with job security, with protection against calamity; the little guy even needs protection against the biases of society that keep him from jobs and housing. (Whether he be an Irishman in 1850 or an Hispanic today.)
That’s by no means an ignoble motive. It goes to the heart of much of what Christianity purports to be about. For this core, gut principle, I have always liked and admired the Democratic Party. Many times I have wished I could join them.
Tomorrow I shall talk about what I do not like about the Democratic Party—and why I cannot and will not join them.