I recently heard a conservative characterize the difference between the parties this way:
Democrats, he said, believe in and fight for "justice," republicans believe in and fight for "opportunity."
This is very clever posturing, because the apparent compliment ("liberty and justice for all") is actually code for what republicans want the public to believe: that democrats are fixated on protecting aggrieved groups such as blacks, women and gays.
By claiming "opportunity" as theirs, republicans invite ordinary Americans to identify with economic values that stress individualism.
It’s easy to ridicule republican hypocrisy. After all, what have conservative policies and practices done for people who work for a living?
But the more intriguing question for me is how the liberal agenda has failed the working class. The decline in private sector unionization, for example, has persisted under democratic congressional majorities and democratic administrations. And while establishment liberals were fighting for justice and rights - civil, gender, sexual preference - the rug was being pulled out from under the American worker.
How do we square the fact that noble and necessary national campaigns against employment discrimination were taking place at the same time millions of American jobs in factories and mills were disappearing? During this entire period of deindustrialization, the only piece of federal legislation on the issue required employers who were closing down to give workers 60-day notice before they throw them out the door.
While many democrats lamented these job losses, some liberal elites quietly approved of deindustrialization. What better way to discipline the surly, overpaid, unionized working class, put a lid on those nasty smokestacks and convert old mills to waterfront condos?
The decline in high-wage American manufacturing has many villains including, of course, corporate scoundrels eager to exploit cheap labor markets. But could business interests have succeeded in depleting blue collar employment without the complicity of so-called mainstream liberal democrats - preoccupied with causes - and indifferent to the working class and their unions?
The failure in the Senate this year of the Employee Free Choice Act, a moderate reform in federal labor law which would have imposed some reasonable restraints on union-busting in the private sector, demonstrates again the lack of imagination among democrats.
And I’ve not yet heard the plan by the Obama administration to close the ever-widening wage, income and wealth gap.
So as the economy "recovers," entry-level and semi-skilled jobs will reappear. But "market forces" will ensure that much of this work is low-pay.
People coming off the unemployment lines to eagerly join the ranks of the working poor.