Both the Republican and Democratic Parties are essentially the parties of the ruling class, and those who are petty producers (e.g., family farmers, small businessmen, doctors and lawyers who have private practice, etc.) and higher-income workers (e.g., tenured university professors, doctors and lawyers who are employed by firms, international union presidents, etc.) -- two groups that many would bundle together in the category of so-called "middle classes" -- don't set either party's fundamental economic agenda.
The Democratic Party does offer a comparatively more liberal cultural agenda and minor economic incentives (e.g., higher minimum wages, more generous social programs) that the Republican Party rejects, so as to allow a segment of petty producers and higher-income workers attached to the Democratic Party to serve as brokers between the Democratic Party and various sectors of petty producers and workers whom they claim as their constituencies. At the same time, the Democratic Party is better than the Republican Party at creating social conditions that allow the ruling class to extract more surplus values from the working class.
Voting for the Democratic Party probably still allows workers to get comparatively higher real wages and more generous social programs than voting for the Republican Party, but the differences are smaller than the aforementioned brokers make them out to be. Moreover, voting for the lesser of two evils still means voting for a worse bargain than what either party offered 30-40 years ago. Therefore, the brokers attached to the Democratic Party are becoming increasingly out of touch with their respective constituencies, who can see through the nature of the bargain even though they may not have the vocabulary to describe or explain it.
The Democratic Party brokers themselves and the higher-income end of their constituencies may be still content with the bargain that the Democratic Party strikes with them. After all, the Democratic Party does make efforts to, for instance, extend the tax cuts and tax credits that the Republican Party would give only to the rich to middle-income Americans. The poorer half of the Democratic Party brokers' constituencies, in contrast, have little to nothing to gain from what the party does offer. If you are chronically unemployed, you can't benefit from a higher minimum wage. If you don't know how to get enrolled in Medicaid, disability benefits, etc., you can't benefit from them either, even if you are eligible for one or more social programs. Worse yet, the programs that you do depend on may be destroyed by the Democratic Party's initiative, as in the case of the "Welfare Reform."
Whether the contradiction between the interests of the Democratic Party brokers and those of the poorer half of their constituencies is temporary or has become more or less permanent is an interesting question. What is clear is that the Democratic Party's overall economic agenda, set by the ruling class, would not allow the Democratic Party brokers to deliver much to their middle-income constituencies and compel them to neglect or even sacrifice the poorer half of their constituencies almost completely, even if the brokers honestly believed in serving them. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>