Why democrats and republicans are the same

When I say that Republicans and Democrats are the same, what I mean is that their political philosophies do not differ fundamentally. That is not to say that their opinions on political issues are not different; it only means that the implications of their solutions to social issues indicate that their views on the function of government fall under the same classification: they are both statists.

They both view government as a tool to serve their own self interest and enforce their view of morality. The difference between the two is not in how they understand the role of government, but solely in their standards of value.

Republicans tend to value religion, nationalism, and individualism whereas Democrats often prefer secularism, globalism, and community. This is why their rhetoric is often the same in style but different in content, and it is why they claim to fight for the same things but are always fighting each other.

Republicans fight for freedom — as long as that means freedom to carry guns, not to marry the same sex. Conservatives hate government hand-outs to the poor but love farming subsidies both a form of welfare , while Progressives endorse single-payer health-care systems while simultaneously calling for cuts to the oil industry again, both a form of government welfare. Democrats are enthusiastic about regulating the drug industry, yet hate it when the Republicans regulate the trade of cannabis.

Both the left and the right want the government to guarantee security; the one by collecting intelligence on its own citizens and impromptly declaring war on anything resembling an enemy, the other by ensuring insurance and protecting the environment. The reason both political parties are hypocritical in how they deal with virtually every issue is because politics has moved away from its root in philosophy.

The Founding Fathers were academics, lawyers and philosophers. Politicians now days are…well, politicians. Luckily, pollsters have more or less solved this problem. The Ideological Right vs. The Interest Group Left. Since at least , the Pew Research Center has asked Democrats and Republicans whether they prefer politicians who stick to their principles or politicians who compromise.

This is a clever way of testing voters' interest in passing policy, as the American political system famously requires compromise to get anything done. The chart above shows the results: Democrats consistently prefer politicians who compromise and Republicans consistently prefer politicians who stick to their principles. What's remarkable is that held true even when Republicans controlled the White House. That is Even when a Republican president was facing a Democratic Congress, Republicans did not choose the answer that would have helped their president get more done.

And even when a Republican president was facing a Democratic Congress, Democrats did not choose the answer that would have stiffened their party's spine against passing Bush's bills.

I would have bet money against surveys showing this kind of stability between Democratic and Republican administrations. This is a difference between the two parties that runs deep. Policymaking in Red and Blue. Another difference between the Democratic and Republican parties is that Democrats answer to more interest groups than Republicans. Grossmann and Hopkins assemble studies showing that Democratic delegates at both national and state conventions report more organization memberships than Republican delegates, suggesting that Democratic conventions are the site of more organized interest group activity than Republican conventions.

They also note a study showing that more interest groups make endorsements in Democratic primaries than in Republican primaries. The graphic above is perhaps the most persuasive evidence of the density of the Democratic interest-group ecosystem: it connects interest groups that endorsed more than one of the same candidate or bill in the Congress and the midterm election. The more shared endorsements between two groups, the thicker the line connecting them; the more total connections any individual group has to other groups, the larger the circle they get.

You can see the results. The ecosystem of interest groups making endorsements on the Democratic side is both larger and more interconnected than on the Republican side; there are more organized groups asking Democrats for policy than asking Republicans for policy.

But Democratic interest groups aren't just more numerous; they're also more persistent. The diverse groups that come together to support the same candidates also ally when it comes to passing bills in Congress," write Grossmann and Hopkins.

Which isn't to say that the Republican Party doesn't have plenty of interest groups demanding its fealty: the National Rifle Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and National Right to Life all hold enormous sway. Indeed, the relative paucity of interest groups on the right might make the ones that do exist stronger, as Republicans have fewer opportunities to play them off each other. But these numbers help explain why Democratic elected officials feel more pressure to deliver new laws than Republicans.

Democratic presidents talk more about policy, propose more specific policy ideas, and pass more significant pieces of legislation.

The numbers are stark. Since , Democratic presidents have put forward 39 percent more policy proposals than Republican presidents, and 62 percent more domestic policy proposals. New policies usually expand the scope of government responsibility, funding, or regulation.

There are occasional conservative policy successes as well, but they are less frequent and are usually accompanied by expansion of government responsibility in other areas. The chart above codes significant policy changes by whether they expand or contract the "scope of government regulation, funding, or responsibility. This is often true even when Republicans are signing the laws. President George W. Bush is a good example.

He passed a series of tax cuts which conservatives mostly liked. But his other major domestic accomplishments — No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D — sharply expanded the role of the federal government in education and health care, and today they're used as evidence that Bush wasn't really a conservative president. The cleanest way to shrink the size of government is to repeal laws and regulations. But it doesn't happen very often. In the American political system, Grossmann says, "it's hard to pass anything, but it's particularly hard to repeal a law that already exists.

For a time, ancient Rome had a republican government with elected magistrates before the establishment of the Roman Empire. While they helped create the term we now use, the actual first republican government is believed to have been in India. While the two major political parties we know today have been around awhile, the names of the major two political parties have changed over the centuries. George Washington won the elections of —89 and and served two terms as US president. Interestingly, the political party of Thomas Jefferson is actually the original source of the names of both modern political parties.

These Democrats would officially take the name the Democratic Party in , although the modern Democratic Party officially uses the Democratic National Convention of as its creation date. The initialism GOP that is still used today is credited to newspaperman T. Dowden, who used it in when he was running out of room in an article. One last thing to keep in mind is that while the two American political parties use the words democratic and republican in their names, capitalized forms of these words have been used in political parties in other countries that have completely different beliefs and platforms.

For example, the Republican Party of France and the various Christian Democratic Parties around the world are completely unrelated to the American political parties.

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