The Two Parties Are Now Officially One. And That's Not Good News.

on Dec 5, 2024

SAN DIEGO -- More evidence has just rolled in proving once again that the American people and the two major political parties that claim to represent them really do live on completely different planets.

At a time of deep political acrimony, when American voters have divided themselves into teams -- one blue, one red -- it is increasingly difficult to get anyone to acknowledge that the other side is right about anything or has ever had a good idea.

Meanwhile, the parties themselves don't appear to have received that memo. They're not on the same page as the voters. While they refuse to admit it, when it comes to a variety of issues, they borrow, steal and repackage each other's ideas all the time.

In January 2009, outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney told a reporter that the day would come when President-elect Barack Obama would be grateful that the George W. Bush administration that preceded his own had fought the legal battles necessary to effectively fight the war on terror. That's what happened. Obama preserved many of the Bush anti-terror policies, in addition to keeping open the military prison at Guantanamo Bay despite promising to close it.

On the domestic front, Obama also preserved the Bush administration's education reform law, "No Child Left Behind," which relied on high-stakes testing and withheld federal funds from failing schools. Obama kept the testing feature but tinkered with the incentive structure -- dumping the idea of cutting funds from schools that did poorly and instead offering additional funding to schools that did well. Obama rebranded the education reform effort as "Race to the Top."

On immigration, presidential candidate Joe Biden promised during his 2020 campaign that if elected, he would scrap all of President Donald Trump's border enforcement policies and build "not another foot" of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Once in office, Biden kept many of Trump's policies and built several miles of wall along the border. Biden also expanded Trump's unlawful rollback of the asylum process.

And finally, when it comes to tariffs, Trump is pledging to bring them back. Even though, for the most part, they never really left -- especially with regard to China. Have you ever wondered why organized labor seemed so evenly divided between Trump and Biden? It's because they have virtually the same policy when it comes to the idea of imposing a tax on imports into the United States in order to encourage U.S. consumers to "buy American."

Beyond policies, sometimes the parties even mimic each other's language.

Consider Biden's pardon of his son, Hunter, on federal gun and tax evasion charges and the Trumpian language that Biden used to justify it. Biden went on the offensive and blasted his own Justice Department for what he called the "selective prosecution" of his son.

"Raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice," Biden said in a statement.

In the background, you could imagine President-elect Donald Trump -- who has himself been charged by the Justice Department and considers himself a victim of selective prosecution resulting in a miscarriage of justice -- saying: "I'll have what he's having."

At least Biden didn't decry the so-called "weaponization" of the criminal justice system. That line would have come right out of Trump's playbook.

Nevertheless, Democrats winced at Biden's words. Listening to what members of Congress and others on the left had to say, it's clear that what bothers other Democrats is not the pardon itself but rather the fact that Biden -- in going out of his way to claim that the prosecution was politicized -- obliterated the moral high ground on which he and other Democrats had been perched. For the better part of the last year, the narrative ginned up by liberals had been that Trump was a threat to democracy because he was meddling with the judiciary and ducking responsibility for his own actions.

Does Biden sound like someone who is pushing his son to take responsibility for his own actions?

Both parties have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to convince voters that they're the better brand of detergent. Yet from my vantage point, I don't see a difference. The clothes still look dirty.

Partisans usually push back and insist that the two parties believe in completely different things.

That's adorable -- and misleading. The parties claim to believe in different things. But in politics, claiming and doing are not even remotely the same thing.

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To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.