No one likes the status quo

Both bases of both major parties hate the status quo of today. The problem is that the leadership of the Republican Party knows this, but the leadership of the Democratic Party does not.

The Republican Base wants the following things: the elimination of the New Deal and Great Society programs; the restoration of a "Christian society", with church as the central organizing force in life, women taking care of the children at home to raise good families and the men working to support the economy and defend the country; the elimination of burdensome government structures and tax codes the eat up profits for businesses; and the elimination of threats to the nation, including Islam, homosexuality, feminism, communism, and anything else that can be identified as "other". All of the Republican leaders, along with the supporting think tanks, media, and colleges, support these ideas.

The Democratic Base wants the following things: the expansion of the New Deal and Great Society programs to include universal employment, whether by the government are by the private sector, along with universal health care; the rejection of the oppressive "Christian society" which eliminated the hopes and dreams of women and minorities; the full representation of all minority groups in business and government; the flattening of society through a progressive income tax so that there are no rich or poor, simply citizens who can enjoy the "good life" without having to compete with each other for resources; the inclusion of all alternative perspectives that support life, including Islam, Wicca, New Age, paganism, animal rights, environmental protection, etc. Essentially, the Democratic Base likes harmony, and believes that industrial capitalism destroys harmony, so the government must limit the reach of industry in order to protect harmony in the environment, in the family, and in society. However, the Democratic Leadership largely ignores these desires. The Democratic Leadership supports industrial capitalism because it benefits from industrial capitalism. It also does not see the connection between industrial capitalism and disharmony because it is insulated from the disharmony by the wealth it receives from industrial capitalism. As a result, the Democratic Base is forced to go against its desires and vote for leaders that don't agree with its agenda in order to prevent the Republican Leadership from making the status quo worse.

Thus, the current political environment is something like Star Wars, especially the Empire Strikes Back. The Republicans are constructing the political and military equivalent of the death star and they have routed the Rebel Alliance from their base. The mercenary general hired to help defend the Democrats, John Kerry, was tricked by the Republicans' Darth Vader, or Karl Rove, into thinking that the Republicans won the 2004 election even though he was being fed information suggesting this was not true. Hence, at the end, Kerry was frozen in carbon by his concession speech. The Jedi in training, Howard Dean, is trying to restore the Democratic Party to its ideals, just as Luke tried to restore the Jedi order. However, just as Darth Vader cornered Luke, the Storm Troopers of the Republican Party - the Democratic Leadership Council - are trying to corner Dean and prevent him from becoming the leader. Hence, the Rebel Alliance has been routed, their erstwhile leader is out of commission, and the only hope is that the Jedi in training becomes a Jedi so that he can restore the Democratic Party to new glory.

There are two ways that the Democratic Party can become a New Age Democratic Party. First, the Base need to become the leaders, or elect leaders who share their desires. This can only happen from the grassroots level, starting at the local and state level: city council, county boards; state assembly and senate. Once enough New Age Democrats are elected at the local level, they can start on the second way. They can change the ballot access laws and the districting lines so that (1) small parties that share their views can also be elected, and (2) Congressional House and Senate seats are no longer gerrymandered to produce 60-80 percent of the vote for incumbents.

The main reason the Democratic Part has lost so much ground since the days of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson is because it has been focused so much on change starting at the top. Top-down change worked from Roosevelt to Johnson, but then the rules of Congress changed and more interest groups started to gain power. In addition, primary voters started to gain power. Democrats have expected the person in the White House to do everything, when in reality it is the state and local representative who controls the distribution of resources. The secondary reason that the Democratic Party has lost so much ground is that it has failed to articulate the ideals of the Base to the leadership. If the Democratic Leadership is out of touch with the Base, we can expect it to be in touch with the rest of the country. The Republican leadership makes sure it is tight with the Republican Base, and then it forces the rest of the country to follow along with the leadership once it takes power. In contrast, the Democratic Leadership tries to go in many directions at once to appeal to different groups, and so it doesn't appeal to the base. This weakens its political power by hurting its ability to persuade.

The Democratic Party must turn its attention to the local and state level first, and do that in every state of the country, before trying to capture federal offices. Only then can the Democratic Leadership reunite with its base to produce change.

Reject Populism

James Pinkerton writes that Democrats have lost power because they have lost touch with the Jacksonian origins of the party, including militaristic working class voters who are also anti-big government, anti-business, culturally conservative, and in favor of middle class protections. These voters tend to be rural, and they tend to vote Republican. These voters dislike complex arguments because they suspect it is a cover for fraud. Thus, they go for straight talk. They like bombast and swagger as a way to accomplish things both nationally and internationally. He argues that the way to get these voters back is to return to the Jacksonian tradition, and to favor economic populism that is anti-corporate, anti-wealthy, and in favor of a limited welfare state that helps the middle class.

This is an important argument because it is the most dangerous thing the Democratic party can do. To recall the Jacksonian element of the Democratic Party is like recalling the Lincolnian element of the Republican Party, which is in favor of government activism to deal with both social and economic problems. The Lincolnian element disappeared in the 1960s as the Republican Party became the Jacksonian Party. Today's Democratic Party is the party of Lincoln, while Today's Republican Party is the Party of Jackson. However, Lincoln is more fondly remembered, and for good reason.

It is impossible to take the Democratic Party back to the Jacksonian ideals because we deliberately rejected those ideas in the 1960s and 70s. Here are the basic problems of economic populism for the Democratic party. First, it is a temporary solution, not a long-term fix. It focuses only on the middle class and not on the need for a classless society. Second, and more important, the era in which Jacksonian ideals were needed has passed. Jackson fought the Indians, and the United States was expanding its frontiers. The Indians were determined foes, and they were best fought on the local level. Consequently, the best American ideal was the frontier spirit: direct, lofty, and willing to bear any burden. This ideal has been adopted as our national heritage as the U.S. keeps going after different frontiers, pursuing lofty goals.

180 years later, the environment no longer calls for the frontier spirit as much as it calls for a careful balancing act. The U.S. has extended its borders to both oceans, and is increasingly its population every year. Geographical frontiers are a thing of the past, and social frontiers are also gone since African Americans, women, Hispanics, gays, and other minority groups have won their rights. The frontier of space has been conquered. There are only two things left. The frontier of the mind and the frontiers of other countries. The frontier of the mind is always receding as we do more research. Basic scientific research is party of the American identity. The frontiers of other countries are also receding as the globalized economic system knits countries closer together. The challenge with these frontiers is the ability to process massive amounts of information and produce sound judgment from that information. Once the information is processed, the implementation of decisions requires a balancing act to keep different interest groups happy, and to communicate among the different fields.

The Age of the Jacksonian Democrat, in other words, is over. Technology and the information age ushered it out. Directness is fine when you live on the prairie or the frontier because you need to quickly coordinate a response to any given emergency. Today, directness is passe, and harmful, because we live in an age of different interest groups. There is so many protections against catastrophe that we no longer need direct communicate to avert emergencies. Even when we are caught off guard be a massive terrorist attack, it is not because of a failure to be direct but because of a failure to process massive amounts of information to produce a decision.

The citizen of the future will be highly educated and an urban or ex-urban dweller. It is not enough anymore to have a swagger and communicate directly. Now, we need careful explanations for everything, because science and technology are influencing every aspect of our lives.

It is necessary to consider this new age because that is what wins elections. The central problem with the democratic party at this very moment is that it thinks it lost the presidential election and the congressional election due to its failure to grasp cultural and moral issues. Yet, there is a massive amount of evidence out there that the 2004 election was stolen. The ever-accurate exit polls contradicted the final result by a massive amount, and they were contradicted only where electronic voting was used. There were numerous accounts of too few voting machines in democratic districts, but too many voting machines in republican districts. It is impossible for Bush to have won this election because even after he was declared "the winner", his approval rating was at or below 50 percent, with the most recent rating of 44 percent. A person who has just won re-election does not have an approval rating of 44 percent only 2 months later. Simply put, I predict that in at most 2 years, we will see evidence of fraudulent computer programs and conspiracy to manipulate the vote in favor of Republicans.

Many of the ideas that New Age Democrats have overlap with the populist manifesto, but they contain a different them. A populist wants you to benefit economically, and therefore be financially secure and free. A New Age Democrat wants you to be able to benefit economically so that you don't have to work two jobs, but can instead stay in one job that is closer to what you desire as your purpose in life. A populist wants you to have health care coverage so that you are not forced to choose between health care and food. A New Age democrat wants you to have community health care coverage provided by a local doctor, but he especially wants to prevent health care problems by practicing preventive medicine. A populist has strong nationalistic sentiment, but a New Age Democrat knows that nationalism doesn't work well in the era of globalization. Thus, the New Age Democrat favors community on an international scale as well as on a local scale.

In sum, there is a reason why the Democratic Party rejected the Jacksonian ideals of the blue-collar, middle class worker. Jacksonian ideals promote domestic brutality, low education, ignorance, and cultural conservatism, all of which the New Age Democrat dislikes. Direct language is brutal language, and it leads very easily to physical brutality. The New Age Democrat wants everyone to learn to live with each other peacefully, meaning that we must choose our words carefully before we speak so that we consider the reaction of the listener. Low education, or a suspicion of complexity, is a handicap in today's world that operates on complex systems. The New Age Democrat is highly education and loves complexity because he is integrated with those systems. Cultural conservatism must be eliminated as the U.S. incorporates more of a global culture that includes Hispanics, Asians, Africans, and Arabs. The U.S. is the promoter of globalization, and so it is the first global country. That means that the U.S. is no longer a Christian nation. The U.S. is a pluralistic nation, giving the rest of the world a perfect example of how people from different cultures can live together in harmony. The U.S. will no longer force immigrants to learn English or adopt a Judeo-Christian ethic because we know that we want immigrants to maintain their traditional cultures. Instead, the U.S. accommodates those immigrants, using its superior information technology to facilitate communication between all cultures. Indeed, the U.S. is now taking over the role of the biblical Tower of Babel. That is what the New Age is all about: global unity and free information exchange. The Jacksonian Democrat is inherently a social separatist, an economic protectionist, and an anti-community individualist. The world no longer needs that type of person. Today's world is the world of the harmonious collective, well-balanced so that all people can achieve their dreams with their community intact.

Out of the Fire

The reason I call myself a New Age Democrat is not because I am New Age or a Democrat. The New Age is a hybrid of Eastern and Western religions that incorporates meditation, yoga, crystal healing, homeopathy, channeling of Ascended Masters, and other things. A Democrat is a member of an American political party who wants to elect Democrats to public office. I do not practice any of the activities associated with the New Age, and I have voted for some Republicans for high and low public offices. I am a New Age Democrat because we are living in a new age of autonomy and democracy. The 1990s gave us the Internet, ubiquitous cell phones, and other information technology. This new technology has given the ordinary person a great deal of control over himself and other people. So much control, in fact, that we don't really need centralized authorities to help us coordinate the affairs associated with a state. Sure, we need a state that can enforce contracts and create a central monetary unit, as well as provide for the common defense, but we no longer need a state to provide us with information through a bureaucracy. For all purposes other than defense and finance, I am now the state.

The problem with states, from the local to the international level, is to coordinate with each other through trust. Now matter how many laws or institutions we create, we must trust those institutions and the decisions of the institutions in order to join them, and we must trust each other when institutions are absent. This trust is contingent on communication and empowerment. Technology gives the ordinary individual an incredible amount of power (what Thomas Friedman called super-empowered individuals, like Osama bin Laden), but it is the responsibility of the individual to use that technology to help other people, including himself. The more we help each other, the more we help ourselves. The new technology is based on the power of networks, but human networks have dissolved over the past 40 years. We need to restore human networks through communication. Hence, I am a democrat because I believe that the purpose of government is to act as the facilitator of communication on all levels. That is why I call the government a "Central Information Processor", similar to a computer. A government uses elected officials to communicate with the people and expedite decision-making. I do not follow the Burkian or Hamiltonian notion of representative democracy whereby we elect officials every two or four years and then simply say, "do as you wish, I delegate my authority to you, and I will check in two or four years to make sure you have been responsible with that authority." Instead, the people are the government, and the only reason we have elected representatives is to give us information that we cannot ordinarily get by ourselves, such as information on the internal affairs of other countries, or analysis of why things are happening in our own country. After all, even though we have a great deal of information at our fingertips, we, as ordinary individuals, do not have the ability to process that information on a daily basis. Processing, analyzing, and drawing conclusions, is the job of a government. This is the ideal of an open, democratic society.

This ideal is threatened by two things: stupidity and religious zealotry. Stupidity has been a constant threat to democracy since democracy was conceived. Democracy depends on intelligent citizens who can process some information and then intelligently share information with the proper analytical tools. Those analytical tools are given to the students by the government or by private institutions. However, private institutions to not serve democracy because they do not serve the public. They do not hurt democracy either, but they don't necessarily help. So, the common good must be served by state-employed educators who pass down the analytical tools that graduates can use to make decisions about their affairs. When citizens choose not to accept those analytical tools, or they use those tools improperly, the citizens damage democracy. Stupidity increases when we do not have enough time to adequately discuss issues, or to apply the analytical tools to those issues. Stupidity also increases when the state-employed educators do not understand the analytical tools they are passing to the students, or do not pass the tools to every student who needs it.
Religious zealotry is closely related to stupidity, but it is an even greater threat. Religious zealotry forces people to ignore analytical tools and cite authority instead. It also persuades citizens to kill their fellow citizens based on that authority. Thus, religious zealotry turns the open society into a closed society, while stupidity makes the open society impotent.

There has been a rise in religious zealotry over the past decade, associated mostly with the new millennium. Religious zealots from other countries have been trying to destroy the American economy and military, while religious zealots in the United States have been trying to destroy the open society. The best way to combat stupidity is to allocate more time to education and debate: make it easier to attend public universities (make them free, for instance, or very cheap); give more time for public television - 2 or 3 hours instead of 30 minutes or 1 hour. The best way to combat religious zealotry is to promote more religious dialogue through interfaith discussions and use the analytical tools acquired from education to establish the ground rules of the dialogue. While religion is fine as a motivating factor, it must be replaced by accurate facts when used for analysis. Thus, it is OK for Christians to use the Holy Bible to talk about their internal motivation, but it is not good for them to use the Bible to talk about how education or the government should operate. It is not good for them to use the Bible to make decisions about natural resources or about international affairs because the Bible is wrong on both issues. There aren't infinite resources provided by a benevolent God, and there will be no apocalypse or Armageddon. Religious zealots have been thinking there are infinite resources for millennia, and they have been thinking Christ will return for two millennia. Christ will not return, and resources are finite.

Consequently, it is time for religious zealots to get out of the fire. There is no hell, but we can create heaven if we desire it. Heaven is not some place you go to after death, but a condition that you can exist in on Earth, like good health. It is the responsibility of government, and of New Age Democrats in government, to give us the analytical tools to create Heaven on Earth.

The Seven Principles: Do, Be, Cope, Exist, Truth, Love, and Communication

Thanks are due to Publius for promoting this endeavor.

My father developed a philosophy based on the Seven Principles of Life: Do, Be, Exist, Cope, Truth, Love, and Communication. These principles can be applied to the Democratic Party to show how to beat Republicans at all levels of government.

Do: Right now, the Republicans are masters of illusion (or delusion) while the Democrats sit back and say "that isn't true". The problem is that while the Democrats are trying to say the truth, the Republicans are ACTING to implement their version of the truth. As a student of revolution and international politics, I understand that in order to change anything, there must be unity between the elite and the masses. They must want the same thing and be willing to implement it. In the 2000 election, Gore was fighting to get every vote counted in Florida, but the left didn't think he was any different from Bush, so they stood by while Bush took Florida from Gore. In 2004, the Left was willing to fight for every vote and uncover what looked like evidence of massive fraud, but this time it was Kerry who misunderstood the stakes of the election, thinking it was simply another election to win or lose while the Left saw it as life or death. There has been a schism between the Democratic Base and the Democratic Leadership because of this. The Democratic Base was forced to vote for Clinton in 1996 even though he moved to the right. They were forced to vote for Kerry to get rid of Bush. Since Kerry gave up before the fight even really started, the key step for Democrats is to stop talking about policy and actually find candidates who will start to win at the local level. The Republican party has a base that is unified with the party leadership. The Democrats must stop talking about their core ideals and start implementing them by picking leftist candidates, not centrist candidates, who are unified with the party base.

Be: This gets us to the second principle. The Republican party is strong because it has a cultish nature: it has a secure ideology, and it weeds out any candidates or officials who do not agree with this ideology. The ideology is reinforced by think tanks, talk radio, and church. Republican candidates repeat the same things all the time and never deviate from message. In contrast, the Democratic Party keeps trying to tailor a message to small interest groups and balance those interest groups. This is all well and good, as long as the party has a central guiding philosophy. But it doesn't. At the moment, the only guiding philosophy it has is "don't make anyone mad", including interest groups, swing voters, and even conservatives. This needs to change and go in the opposite direction. The Republicans, and their core supporters, have played emotional jujitsu with the American public. A conservative tends to be angry, rebellious, and hateful. Just listen to talk radio or watch cable news shows, such as Bill O'Reilly. Anger is the dominant emotion that they express, and it is pretty effective at mobilizing voters, as well as entertaining. Yet, the politicians tend to be touchy-feely types: look at Reagan and Bush (the younger), both of whom used optimism an a naive attitude to seem like "common people", even though they were not. The Democratic party in 2004 did the opposite. It preached love and community from its base, but the primary candidates expressed anger, especially over the Iraq war.
What the Democratic party needs to do is get very comfortable with anger, and even hatred, because that's what the Republicans are throwing at us. Bush Hatred is not enough. Hatred of Conservatives and Republicans is the only solution. If Democrats preach love and peace and angry, hateful people, the angry people simply think we are wimpy, weak pushovers. Thus, the Democratic Party needs to learn how to fight for its ideals. This isn't just about protest. This means using cable television and talk radio in the same way the Republicans have done it: get angry at Republicans for destroying everything that Democrats hold dear. Don't try to convince or persuade Republicans. What Republicans really want to do is fight. That's why they use anger to spark conflict. Democrats should take the fight to them and beat them at their own game.

Exist: This goes to the third principle. The Republicans are not in this to govern the country effectively, They literally want to eliminate the Democratic Party and Destroy liberalism. In this sense, they are taking a page from the play book of Fascist philosopher Carl Schmidt, who argued that politics is about eliminating the opposition, not about communicating with them. This is the game plan that Republicans have, and that is why they have no problem suppressing liberal voter turnout and constantly telling lies about liberal candidates. Again, match Republicans at their own game. Do not try to communicate with someone who does not want to communicate with you. The only option is to destroy them. Engage in the same tactics they engage in. When fighting for your right to exist, the last thing you want to have is a sense of morality or ethics. The Republicans preach morality but practice immoral behavior when it comes to politics. When there is a contest, unless both players act ethically, the unethical person wins. That is why we have arms races. The person who decides to be peaceful will be eliminated by the person who is aggressive and warlike. This is not politics. It is war, and the Republican Party wants to destroy the Democratic Party to end the war. It is our job to prevent that from happening, and instead work to destroy the values of the Republican Party.

Cope: This principle naturally follows because, when defeated electorally, Democrats must not think of the defeat as a temporary setback and say "we'll get them next time". The time to deal with an election is when the ballots are being counted, not when people are voting. The Republicans have mastered the art of making sure votes aren't counted. Thus, no matter how many new voters democrats sign up to vote, the Republicans will make sure those voters never get to the voting booth due to long waiting lines. The Democrats must have the equivalent of a rapid reaction force for every election. Every election must be fought to the bitter end, even if it means suing many times, challenging votes in the state houses or congress, or asking judges to throw out votes. The Republicans are liked used car salesmen who are knowingly and deliberately selling the lemon of democracy, when in reality they operate under and authoritarian structure. The Democrats must be the good mechanic and show "lemon" votes for what they are: not a true representation of the people's will.

Truth: This principle gets to the heart of what it means to be democrat. Democrats tell the truth, Republicans do not. Democrats take the time to tell the whole truth, Republicans do not. Instead of telling the whole truth, Republicans used facts to embellish fantasy. There is global warming, but Republicans will use some facts to tell you that there isn't global warming.

Love: This principle tells Democrats how to win elections. Instead of preaching love in order to win votes, they must show love by rebuilding communities. Alliances start at home. Democrats need to preach the virtues of family, friendship, and the neighborhood.

Communication: Finally we get to the tactical aspect of being a democrat. The Republicans shun communication and promote secrecy. They tell followers to trust leaders to make the right decision because the leader is a moral leader. In contrast, the Democrats promote communication as the lifeblood of democracy, including dissent and challenging authorities. Democrats must show that they have superior communication abilities. It isn't enough to make a decision that is pleasing to people. Democrats must tell why the decision is good, and, if they change their minds, why their change the minds. A Democrat, at root, is a person who wants to turn the community into a group of people that is capable of self-governance. Self-government depends on vibrant discussion and debate. The Republicans have all but eliminated the public sphere, preventing any debate or communication from occurring, and relying almost entirely on faith to make decisions based on trust in a strong leader. The Democratic Party is based on empowering ordinary people to be leaders by communicating with them about the principles that organize our society.

New Age Values for a New Age Democrat

The democratic party uses government intelligently at all levels to help local communities become and stay physically, socially, environmentally, economically, mentally, and spiritually healthy.

In the American Prospect, Lind, Judis & Teixeira, and Sirota think that the "values" debate needs to be marginalized in order for Democrats to succeed with economic issues. Yet, they do not offer a way to neutralize cultural issues without making Democrats look weak.

The problem is that it is impossible to neutralize cultural issues because conservative voters think that cultural issues trump economic issues. There are two reason why conservatives favor cultural issues over economic issues. The first is that, as cultural conservatives, they have accepted the argument from Protestant Christianity that economic prosperity is temporary, while pleasing God gives ever-lasting life. The second is that they think the Democrats represent the negative cultural forces that they think were unleashed in the 1960s and 70s: abortion, social decay, homosexuality; feminist movements, etc. Thus, while democrats can temporarily benefit from economic downturns that knit together a coalition, the cultural issues will keep coming back to hurt democrats.

The only way to take away the sting is to meet the cultural issues head-on. Right now, the best way to understand the national contest between Democrats and Republicans is to understand how cultural dynamics work. The first place to turn is culture itself: television, movies, comic books and novels. The first rule of a cultural product, no matter what the medium, is that there must be a protagonist and an antagonist. The second rule is that the skills of the antagonist must almost be equal to the skills of the protagonist. If there is inequality, then either the protagonist or the antagonist will always win the fight, and there will be no tension. We always know the outcome.

This is largely how the Democratic Party relates to the Republican Party. The problem is, the Democratic Party doesn't know it.

The Republican Party has been radicalized over the past 30 years, starting in 1964. It not only has radical ideas based on a systematic ideology, but it has a core of supporters who talk about those ideas on talk radio, cable television, think tanks, and in church. Those supporters have voted for radically conservative candidates, such as Reagan and George W. Bush.

The Democratic Party has a radicalized base that believes in different cultural values, but its leadership is not radicalized. Thus, there is a contest in the Democratic Leadership for the soul of the party. This contest is between Centrist Democrats who care mainly about economic issues and Liberal Democrats who care mainly about cultural issues.

Imagine a contest between the comic book villain The Joker, archenemy of Batman, and Barney Fife, the bumbling deputy sheriff of Mayberry from the Andy Griffith show. It is obvious who would win such a contest: the Joker, since he has superior skills and is willing to be ruthless.

The Democratic Party was radicalized in the 1960s and 1970s, thus provoking the radical reaction from the Republican Party. Since then, Republicans have used cultural issues to argue against all liberal, democratic beliefs, but Democrats have not responded in kind. Instead of avoiding discussion of values, the Democratic Party should now propose a different set of beliefs. The Republican Party is willing to do whatever it takes to win or steal elections, including the suppression of voter turnout, the challenging of voters at the polls, and the elimination of votes through computer fraud. All of this happened in the 2004 election, yet the Democratic leadership did nothing about it since they wanted to appeal to conservative people on economic issues in the future. Well, it is impossible to appeal to conservative people on economic issues, because they care most about cultural issues.

So, here is the values statement of the Democratic Party:
1. The Democratic Party values community and those forces the preserve communities. This means that the Democratic Party is against corporations that tear communities apart by eliminating small shops that serve local needs and replaces them with chain stores. The Democratic Party is against the value of greed, which spurs the destruction of communities, and for the value of happiness, which is a balancing of prosperity, or wealth, with the needs of the community. Finally, the Democratic Party is for all those forces that are helping people to reconnect with their communities: The Internet (websites, weblogs, email); community benefits; and neighborhood watch groups. The Democratic Party is against all those forces that take people out of their communities: jobs that force people to commute 1-2 hours per day, taking them away from their families and friends; jobs that force people to work 60-80 hours per week, thus preventing them from spending time with friends and family.

2. The Democratic Party favors feminine ethics over masculine ethics. This means that the Democratic Party uses government as an extension of the family to help out the disadvantaged in society. The Democratic Party promotes helping others through the redistribution of resources, talent and information. The Democratic Party believes that when taxes are cut and government is reduced, people help each other less. Democrats believe that government is a force for good, and that at its best, it serves the collective interest of society. Thus, the Democratic Party believes strongly in using government to nurture all elements of society to reach their fullest potential. We do not simply tolerate differences, we believe that our differences make us stronger by giving us more ways to help each other. We believe that individualist people are the loneliest people, and the people most in need of help because they have separated from people who are able and willing to help them. We believe that it is necessary to promote partnership between men and women in every aspect of life, from the family to the corporation to the government. Otherwise, men are unbalanced as they promote environmental destruction and warfare.

3. The Democratic Party promotes unity with mind, body, spirit, community, and earth. Thus, the party favors environmentally friendly practices. The party supports initiatives that promote happiness and well being in society, including harmony with nature. The Democratic Party believes that a happy human being is a healthy human being, and so it promotes government oversight of unhealthy practices in all areas of life, including unhealthy relationships, unhealthy business practices, unhealthy environmental practices, unhealthy social practices, and unhealthy individual practices.

4. To summarize, the Democratic Party believes in using government at all levels to help communities become healthy and stay healthy, starting with local government and local empowerment. The Democratic Party believes that the local level, where communities have the most power, is the most important level. Thus, the Democratic Party promotes initiatives that help communities fix problems at the local level first.