This isn't going to work, I don't think. Looking around my apartment, I can't even keep this place vaguely decent, so I definitely don't have time to be updating a blog. But now that I've had a bit to drink I guess it's time to sit down and try. With Ahnold now The Gubernator, I think about how he potentially could be, for me, the closest thing to a perfect candidate I've seen in any election for a while, as he appears fiscally "conservative" and socially "liberal" (I'll explain the quotes in a later entry; suffice to say I find both titles ridiculous). His stances (or lack thereof) in this campaign made me think a bit about why I do not identify with either the Democratic or Republican party, even though I imagine most people I know would peg me as a Democrat - to me, both partys are trying to control our lives in unacceptable ways.
The Democrats want to control how we deal with each other. Political correctness, legislated charity (welfare, etc), some of which may have an arguably useful social purpose, but all of which has a political purpose. They try to form their utopian society through the engineering of society on a whole.
The Republicans want to control how we live our private lives. Now-defunct sodomy laws, the war on drugs, prayer in schools. I'll put in things like video game and television violence and/or sex here too, even though people now associate that with Joe Lieberman - trust me, he may be a democrat, but he's not a "liberal".
Interestingly, both partys for the most part (or maybe just in my mind) have developed a reputation of trying to fight, or at least lessen, the control the opponents have on their chosen aspect of society. But it seems, at least in this obviously Beamtenherrschaft age, that were sliding slowly into more and more state control, regardless of any recent changes or setbacks. The state will always strive for more control, and has not, in my opinion, come close to representing the will of the people in a couple hundred years. Not that thats a bad thing.
I think there's a wing of the Republican party that wants to control private lives, but I don't think wing has a lot of power. There wasn't much resistance to the elimination of the sodomy laws you mentioned, for instance.
You can point to abortion, but pro-lifers don't consider that a "private" issue, since they believe that the fetus is a human being.
The War on Some Drugs is not purely a Republican construct, either, and I'm not aware of anyone advocating mandatory prayer in schools.
I think Republicans can be most criticised for protecting some big businesses from competition, and for the run-of-the-mill pork spending that everyone does.
The big difference that I see is that Democrats don't really love democracy, they love control -- they're really closer to fascists, in my opinion, than true liberals. They're very elitist, and all about doing "good" for people whether they want it or not.
Republicans certainly want to be in charge, too, but they seem to be much more comfortable with the idea that the populace gets to decide who runs things. For instance, the night of the recall, every Democrat I saw on TV was bitter and angry, and couldn't want to start another recall drive to pull Arnold out of office. The Republicans I've seen (in '96 for instance) just didn't seem that terrified and angry.
But then, I'm certainly biased.
Looking at this as less of a Republican/Democrat thing, and more of a Right/Left thing, it seems to me that the Right is content to control behavior, while the Left wants to control our thoughts, as well. Hence the demonstrable tendency of the Right to generate authoritarian regimes, and the Left to generate totalitarian ones.
My general inclination is to say, "A pox on both your houses!", except that the Right seems less destructive of the economy. And if you've got money, you can generally at least privately violate the Right's behavioral rules, while if you're poor, you're totally screwed.
I don't think the left/right dichotomy is really an accurate representation of reality.
That is, Communism and Fascism are really very similar in practice, despite their supposed differences and the fact that they're normally put on opposite sids of the left/right spectrum.