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Repubocrats or Demolicans: What's the difference?
(Click the pic for the full version)
Republicans and Democrats are different animals, no doubt about it, but their desires for you and me? Not so different after all.
I understand political parties by first defining property and then examining the tenets of a party as they relate to their treatment of property. The usefulness of this simple analysis is founded upon the notion of freedom. What is freedom but the ability to do as you please with what is yours? Because individual freedom is the fundamental virtue of human existence - a necessary precursor to all human action, it is appropriate to judge parties based on their approach to freedom, as exhibited by property.
Property can include your house, the money in your bank account, the things you create, and your body, among other things. Property is that which you own (Simple tautology). Accordingly, an understanding of Democrats and Republicans via property can be fairly simple. Both parties believe the government should control some subset of your property. The difference is merely in which types of property they wish to control.
Democrats tend to argue that the government should stay away from our bodily property (think, allowing abortion or marijuana use) while maintaing some significant control over our fungible property (think, tax-the-shit-outta-your-hard-earned-money). Comparatively, the Republicans push for governmental control over our bodily property (think, again, abortion or marijuana) while staying away from our fungible property (you get the idea).
The distinction doesn't always play out that way (where one party controls the bodily property and the other the fungible), but the general concept is clear. Dems and 'Pubs aren't so different from each other - at least, not on this base level. They both want to control how you and I live our lives: the difference is just in the "How."
This commonality between the two parties is likely why we never see drastic changes in government when different parties take control. It also brings irony to the idea of polarization: are people of different parties really so at odds with each other when both sides maintain that the government should severely limit our freedom?
Let's stop pretending that either party isn't about big government.