As Jay Cost notes in "Spoiled Rotten," all political parties in democracies bestow some amount of patronage on their supporters following an election triumph. However, the author asserts in this volume that this has practically become the modern-day Democratic Party's reason for being, and that the party has abused this practice to the extent that it is no longer capable of governing in the interest of the nation as a whole.
Since the era of Jackson, Democrats have viewed themselves as the party of the people and the defenders of the common man against privileged interests. But over the course of the twentieth century the party came to embrace what Cost refers to as "clientelism"--the showering of benefits on various interest groups who, in turn, regularly support the party. The author looks back at the last century of American history, describing how the Democrats themselves became a party of privileged interests and discussing how some of the many groups that support the Democrats came to do so.
Cost rightly avers that the modus operandi of the modern Democratic Party is "complaining loudly about inequality in society while enacting policies to advance the interests of its own clients," some of whom can in no way be described as needy.
By the 1970s, too many client groups had been added to the party, and the new presidential nomination procedures adopted following the 1968 election gave these groups even more power. Cost looks at the different ways that presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama dealt with the conundrum facing any Democratic president in this era--he must divert resources to keep his party's clients as happy as possible while also looking after the greater interest of the country as a whole, and the author shows why the party has now been so overwhelmed by client groups that it cannot govern as the Founders intended.
With our current debt level and unfunded liabilities, it goes without saying that this state of affairs cannot continue--social spending will of necessity decrease sharply at some point in the future. And if the severe recession that some expect arrives in the next year, the Republicans, unlike in 2008-09, have the House majority and this time will be able to block any stimulus boondoggles designed to insulate Democratic client groups like public-sector bureaucrats from the recession and will also be able to prevent any middle-class tax increases needed to pay for new social spending.
"Spoiled Rotten" is an outstanding analysis of one of the foremost problems facing the country, and Jay Cost is another of the brilliant young political scientists to have appeared on the scene in recent years. I look forward to reading his work for a long time to come.
- Amazon Business : For business-only pricing, quantity discounts and FREE Shipping. Register a free business account
