Posted by Jim at November 21st, 2004

One thing I found particularly interesting in sociology and anthropology was looking at the relationship between a group’s available resources and their ways of thinking about the world.

Thus it’s been rather amusing to watch the Republicans and Democrats “discover the wisdom” of the other party’s beliefs on particular issues. For example, the Republican party isn’t pushing term limits quite so hard now that it’s the party of the incumbents. Then, of course, there’s also deficit spending. As the party in power, deficit spending is awfully tempting when you’ve got something to accomplish and you don’t have the will to either

a) cut spending, or
b) raise taxes.

Another area of amusement for me is the change in the area of ethics. When the Republicans came to power, they decided to hold their leaders to a higher standard–one that they’ve just repealed. Now Tom DeLay can be indicted, but, still keep a leadership position–just like the Democrats could have.

Democrats in turn have discovered that deficit spending is a bad thing and according to Salon Democrats will have to turn to state’s rights arguments to allow Democratic policies that differ from federal (Republican) policies.

I’ll be curious to watch these changes continue. Will the Republicans become the party of big government? Will the Democrats suddenly become big on defense spending?

While I don’t believe that people’s circumstances entirely dictate their belief system, I do think that the amount of power a party has affects their ideology. For example, being against deficits gives you extra leverage when the other party proposes something you don’t like. Not only is that thing bad, but you can tell people that we just can’t afford it.

Whatever the case, we’ll get to see just how strongly the parties hold to what some people regard as unchangeable characteristics of each party.