Here in the U.S., we have two large political corporations, also known as parties. One is called the Democrats and the other is called the Republicans. Each has its own unique corporate culture.
The Democrats are known to line up on the political left. They support wealth redistribution and expansive government involvement in everyday life, but most of all they try really hard to win elections. They have to, because their policies are fairly unappealing. So, in order to succeed reasonably often, their corporate culture strongly emphasizes closing ranks so as to present a unified front.
Republicans, on the other hand, are more concerned with identifying public sector problems and formulating realistic solutions. As such, they are constantly squabbling over the correct answers to their questions. This aspect of their culture emerged just the other day, when particularly committed conservative Republicans threw in with the unified Democrats to oust Speaker McCarthy. The compelling issue was the process of budgeting. A handful of hard-line Republican fiscal conservatives helped the completely unified Democrats throw the house into turmoil. The Dems think they showed the world that they can flex their muscles. But the process continues.
Another aspect of Democrat corporate culture is various dogmas. Primary today is climate crisis hysteria. Failure to be totally on board with complete adherence to fossil-fueled global warming is nothing less than heresy. The media are also seriously embedded in this dogma. Just recently, a financial reporter for CBS radio attributed the decline of the stock price of Levi-Strauss to global warming. How? Because denim clothes are warmer than those made of some other fabrics. Really? How about all of the new companies that also make denim clothes? We call that competition. And where’s the evidence that weather has been warming up? Last year’s record Sierra snow-pack, recent icebergs in Boston Harbor...yeah, Indian summer heat waves and torrential storms. Weather is typically chaotic. Get used to it.
Within the context of corporate culture, Republicans are significantly less disciplined than Democrats. They succeed, when they do, in electoral competition because they have better ideas. None other than Morton Kondracke said just as much after the Democrats’ electoral drubbing in the 2010 midterms. Better ideas, however, do not fully neutralize extraordinary media bias when struggling to get out a message. Ronald Reagan was called The Great Communicator because he had the ability to get around their barriers.
Humans being imperfect creatures, both political corporations have stragglers who deviate from established orthodoxy. Most are Republicans — but not all. Poor ol’ Joe Manchin is a red-state Democrat senator who’s now making noises about going (ahem) independent...just like Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Manchin has pretty serious motivation, since Trump got over 70% of the votes in West Virginia in 2020. It may also be said that the Democrats who still manage to think like adults are being repulsed by the endless pandering to all of the various “oppressed minorities” about the evils of capitalism and personal freedom as particularly espoused by the “Democratic Socialists” who’ve infected their corporate culture.
Republicans, for their part, have some former Democrats who supposedly have seen the light but still sort of favor big government and are especially eager for the U.S. to flex its muscles on the world stage. True-blue right-wingers owe their allegiance to the memory of Robert Taft, who, while Senate minority leader, strenuously opposed the Marshall Plan — but eventually came up short. Yes, he was the son of the former president who was limited to one term because he pissed off Theodore Roosevelt — so we got commie-racist Thomas Woodrow Wilson instead.
Also within the Republican ranks are the small “L” libertarians — such as the (currently) junior senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul. His father, Ron, was the Libertarian presidential candidate three times. Both are physicians as well. Libertarians are certified fiscal conservatives while also being pro-freedom and socially liberal. Unlike the neocons, they are typically non-interventionist when it comes to foreign policy.
Corporate culture does sometimes manage to evolve over time, often due to a changing environment. Fossil fuels became an issue back in the 1960s, largely because of air pollution in places such as the Los Angeles basin and also because of the finite limits on their supply. Then the adoption of the catalytic converter reduced automobile exhaust, and fracking vastly expanded the amount of available petroleum resources. All that was left to sustain the war against fossil fuels was the hypothetical problem of atmospheric heat-trapping.
Global warming/climate change was moved up to the front burner when the midterm election of 2006 made Nancy Pelosi speaker of the House. As an issue, its main source of political traction lies in the pervasive lack of knowledge of earth science among the general public and the political establishment as well. Mental midgets such as Al Gore and subsequently John Kerry have been the perfect champions for such nonsensical fear tactics. How an issue based on chemistry and physics can captivate the public policy agenda is a wonder to behold.
Image: JSMed via Pixabay, Pixabay License.