As every irritable Libertarian is aware, the terms “Left” and “Right”, applied to politics rather than street corners, are vague to the point of uselessness.  The Republican party, for example, is usually considered to be “on the right”… but by now we should all be aware that it’s really split into a great many factions, most of which have precious little in common besides the arbitrary designation of “conservative”.  Economic conservatives* who want lower taxes spar with national-greatness conservatives who want an expanded — and more expensive — military.  Small-government conservatives (known in the 19th Century simply as “liberals”) who want less public-sector interference clash with social conservatives who want to legislate morality.

How do you make a party out of half a dozen or more such warring factions?  They stick together (most of the time) because they all think that the Republican party can give them some of what they want, and because by and large their other major-party choice — the Democrats — is even more strongly opposed to their agenda.  Small-government conservatives might cringe at the Department of Homeland Security… but then Joe Biden or Charlie Rangel starts talking about reinstating the draft, and somehow the idea of taking off one’s belt and shoes to go through airport security starts to look like the lesser of two evils.

It’s surely reasonable to wonder whether the Democratic party is as deeply divided, and just a few seconds’ contemplation will show that it sure is, and that it sticks together for the same reasons.  Environmentalist Democrats, for example, are often at odds with union Democrats — the former want to curb Americans’ enthusiasm for large automobiles, while the latter are more interested in keeping Ford’s SUV plants open and churning out Expeditions.  If those two factions compromise on, say, massive government subsidies to keep the factories operating and convert them to build hybrid SUVs, they incur the wrath of anticorporate Democrats not unreasonably opposed to such “corporate welfare”.**

You might insist that this example simply doesn’t apply (particularly if you’ve read the footnote) — that it’s too hypothetical.  Here’s a rather less hypothetical example:

• How Barack Obama helped defeat gay marriage in California (Below the Beltway)

The basic thrust of the (well-referenced) article is that most of the “new” black and latino voters who came out to vote for Obama also voted for Proposition 8.  Mataconis goes on to argue that gay-hating is a generational rather than an ethnic thing, but quotes an article that suggests the generational split is wider in “minority communities”.  Go on, read the whole thing; I can wait.

These divisions continue on a somewhat more personal scale.  Consider that the 2008 Democratic primary was fought so nastily that I half-expected it to destroy the Dems’ best chance for the White House in living memory.  Now, while Senator Clinton swallowed her pride and gamely stumped for Obama past the DNC (and the PUMAs amounted to sweet fuck-all in the election itself), and Obama seems to be willing to return the favour with a SecState appointment, not everyone’s thrilled by the idea:

• Not everyone is happy about Hillary as Secretary of State (Below the Beltway)

From his supporters on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, to campaign aides of the soon-to-be commander-in-chief, there’s a sense of ambivalence about giving a top political plum to a woman they spent 18 months hammering as the compromised standard-bearer of an era that deserves to be forgotten.

“These are people who believe in this stuff more than Barack himself does,” said a Democrat close to Obama’s campaign. “These guys didn’t put together a campaign in order to turn the government over to the Clintons.”

An overlooked theme in Obama’s primary victory was his belief that the Clinton legacy was not, as the Clintons imagined, a pure political positive. The Obama campaign had no compunctions about poking holes in that legacy and even sent out mailings stressing the downside of the last “8 years of the Clintons” – enraging the former president in particular.

The more I think about it, the less sure I am about where the “Clinton Democrats” and the “Obama Democrats” differ on honest-to-balls policy issues.  I get the sense that the Clintonistas tend to favour leaving things pretty much as they are — only with a Democrat in charge — while the Obamans hold that sweeping changes — of some sort — are necessary to “fix the country”, but their policy planks are next to indistinguishable to an outsider like me.

Now that I’ve done my best to convince you, dear reader, that the Dems are just as divided as the Republicans, you might be wondering why you should care.  It’s simple, really: one of the reasons the GOP fell from grace was that its leaders refused to recognize its divisions, and ran the party as if they were all homogeneously “conservatives”.  When the GOP was winning elections — 2004 perhaps excepted — it was being run as a newsworthy coalition of a great many different types of “conservatives” (as partly enumerated above).  It made sense to talk about the Republicans as a “big-tent party”.

When the Republicans turned into a homogeneous, one-issue — “OMG TERR’ISTS” — party, they lost.

The Democrats — or at least the Democratic leadership — are starting to look very much like a party which expects their supporters to be homogeneous.  (This fits with my previous complaint about the Dems: if you start to believe that you’re special, that you alone know the Way Forward, then you start to run out of reasons to cooperate with others… after all, you know what’s good for them better than they do.)  If they go down that path, and the Republicans figure out how to exploit it, they’re screwed.

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* In a world that made sense, that’d be “economic liberals“, since they’re mostly in favour of greater economic liberty.  Alas, we’re stuck with this one, where “liberal” means “illiberal” as often as it does “liberal”.

** This actually happened… only it was Canada, not the US; GM, not Ford; and the NDP, not the Dems.  The look on Jack Layton’s face while he tried to figure out how to be both pro-labour and pro-environment was priceless.