The truth is that votes seldom change Party's in blocks, nor do any Religion's faithful all cast their vote for the same Party in any one election. A trend toward changing party might run across two elections or more and be well defined within the group that believes in one religion or another but those changes eventually swing both ways. Families tend to vote alike within sex defined groups from one generation to another. But in the vast mixed racial and religious melting pot of the USA no candidate can be as sure of any group's vote as they would like. Bush senior lost the enthusiastic support of his base for some reason, a lot of his party thinks it was taxes. Some people think it was one or more of the other significant decisions that he made that caused his loss of a second term. No one thinks it was a lack of character or integrity or a general falseness about how he led us during his one term.

Democrats are generally working folks, and defined by their need for work in order to provide for their families. Most often today they are defined by the fact that they are increasingly living in economically marginal circumstances. They are far more likely to have no medical insurance than Republicans, unlikely to own their own business, less likely to have graduated from college, more likely to have served in the military as enlisted personnel at one time or another. They are less likely to have inherited much money from prior generations than Republicans, less likely to own their own home, and less likely to be employable today than they have been in the past. I suspect that the markers that define the boundaries between the two parties are about to undergo a change. I predict that this change will be driven by money, not religion, particularly by the economics of the family.

If the current trends in gains in efficiency of production, and shipping jobs overseas continue then we seem likely to have passed the peak of economic expansion of wealth across class boundaries for the present. I know there is going to be a lot of talk about the ownership society by the Republicans this time around but the average family in this country is less independent that they were in my grandparents time, around the turn of the century just past. Their ownership of any land beyond the quarter acre or less that the house they live in sits on has all but vanished. The ownership society that existed in the rural USA in1900 is vanished in the production revolution. The production revolution brought us two cars in every garage and two chickens produced by a huge poultry farm in every pot. The production revolution did not bring the vast majority of people who participated in it as workers ownership of anything beyond their depreciating cars and a home that is largely owned by the bank.

Many families in our society own less than a home and a car and are burdened with debt on top of their empty pockets and job dependent status. More and more of them are young and living harder and harder lives in a nation that needs the product of their labor less and less. This is a recipe for disaster and the Republicans are right to recognize it as a problem that can be solved by ownership. The question is how do you get to own anything when you work for seven dollars an hour and your car keeps breaking down? The rightness of Republican's who want to distribute ownership in our society more broadly is hampered by the wrongness of the tax reduction approach to encouraging it.

Now I think that there are a lot of practical barriers in this nation that will make the change to an ownership society slow and difficult. I do think that such a transition is needed but it will not come without redistributing a lot of the wealth that is concentrated at the top or creating a lot of new wealth that doesn't wind up there. The last time we had an ownership society in this country it was driven by homesteading land that was taken from the American Indians. The redistribution of their (the Native American's) wealth drove our agrarian society in the century in which my grandparents were born, the 1800's. The Indians in India are likely to gain more ownership of wealth than our own citizens out of this current economic transition, if I am reading the tea leaves correctly. The Democrats need to drive toward their own version of an ownership society and it can not be socialistic if it is going to succeed. The Republicans will never get us there but their idea is good enough to steal and make our own. How we execute this process will define our society for the next three generations; it is important!
I am driven by hope for our world and our society. I get up every day and write one of these essays not because it pays my bills but because I care about our nation and the people that live here. It requires that I exercise all of the discipline learned over a lifetime to listen to the news and read the papers every day. They are full of crappy news and unfunny comics these days. I am reading a lot because that is the best method that I have to learn things which help me think about problems like this. How do we get to a generalized ownership society from where we are today?

Perhaps the answer is in changing our educational process from one dedicated to turning out workers to one that turns out entrepreneurs. That simple change, to a society of entrepreneurs, could help a lot and could not hurt anything since we have fewer jobs to offer the next generation that are worth keeping. If you have any ideas that could help us make this change I would welcome them. I am not prejudiced, so Republicans and Democrats and even those who are ashamed enough of our political process to reject both Parties and call them selves Independents are welcome. I am still thinking about this myself, but it is not an easy issue to resolve fairly. The Native Americans could tell you about that if any of us could still remember just how that last transition occurred. God bless and keep you all safe and warm and well fed in these cold, cold times of changing our people from workers to owners.