Die Neue Zeit
8th May 2016, 04:51
The Emerging Populist-Neoliberal Political Realignment (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-hawkins/the-emerging-populist_b_9478260.html)
In this realignment, the populists would represent what Walter Russell Mead describes as a Jacksonian American political tradition. Jacksonians believe that American foreign policy should pursue strictly national interests and that government should actively use its powers as a check to corporate influence. The populists would not only embrace the contemporary welfare state but seek to expand it. These are the voters who support expanded Medicare and Social Security, pro-union labor policies, higher taxes on the wealthy and adamantly oppose free trade agreements. The populists are motivated by nationalist appeals to restrict immigrant labor from competing with American workers and reverse decades of globalization that has decimated America’s manufacturing industry. Internally, the populists would test the limits, if any, of expansive government powers. As heirs to the old Irish-Scot constituency, the populists would have strongholds in Appalachia and other rural areas of country.
On the contrary, neoliberals would comprise Mead’s Jeffersonian American political tradition. Jeffersonians believe that the U.S. should actively participate in international relations and pursue a more business-friendly domestic economic policy. The neoliberals represent the business elites who favor global trade agreements, interventionist foreign policy to protect American interests abroad and pro-business economic policies. The neoliberals would support subsidies to business, liberal immigration policies, industry deregulation and a generally light tax burden. The neoliberal’s base of support would exist primarily in the coast and urban centers.
Donald Trump's candidacy is going to realign the political parties (http://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2016/3/1/11139054/trump-party-realignment)
So here's my prediction: Over the next decade or so, the Republicans will split between their growing nationalist-populist wing and their business establishment wing, a split that the nationalist-populist wing will eventually win. The Democrats will face a similar split between the increasingly pro-corporate but socially liberally Clinton wing and a more economically progressive Sanders wing, a split that the Clinton wing will eventually win.
Eventually, the Democrats will become the party of urban cosmopolitan business liberalism, and the Republicans will become the party of suburban and rural nationalist populism (similar to what my colleague Michael Lind has predicted).
The Coming Realignment: Cities, Class, and Ideology After Social Conservatism (http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue-4/the-coming-realignment)
Thanks to generational shifts in values like these, it is likely that in the decades ahead there will be a dramatic realignment in American politics. Although it is likely to reshape the two major parties, it will not be a mere “partisan realignment” of the kind studied by political scientists. Rather, it will be a realignment of American public philosophies or political worldviews. This worldview realignment will be accentuated by a number of long-term demographic and cultural changes. But the chief catalyst of the realignment will be the near-universal victory of social liberalism. In a nation in which both parties are socially liberal, existing coalitions are likely to break up and reform in striking ways.
[...]
When political and economic attitudes are correlated in this way, four worldviews result:
Liberalism: social liberalism combined with economic liberalism.
Conservatism: economic libertarianism with state enforcement of conservative values in the social realm (for example, laws against abortion and sodomy).
Libertarianism: anti-statism in both the social and economic realms.
Populism: a combination of economic liberalism and social conservatism.
[...]
For the purposes of this discussion, and to avoid premature assignment of emerging worldviews to the left or the right, I propose to call the two broad political movements that I am predicting liberaltarians and populiberals.
The term liberaltarian is already in use, to describe a broad camp including neoliberal Democrats skeptical of government in the economic sphere along with libertarian Republicans and independents who recognize the need for more government than libertarian ideologues believe to be legitimate.
Populiberal is my own coinage. It describes social liberals who share the liberal social values of liberaltarians, but who tend to be more egalitarian and to favor a greater role for the government in matters like social insurance, business-labor relations, and redistribution of income.
[...]
At the risk of burdening readers with too many neologisms, I propose calling these societies Densitaria and Posturbia. Densitaria is the natural political-geographic base of liberaltarianism, just as Posturbia is the natural political-geographic base of populiberalism.
[...]
As the working class and many middle-class professionals abandon Densitaria for the cheaper housing and office parks of Posturbia, the high-density downtowns and suburban villages are coming to have an hourglass-shaped social structure, with wealthy individuals at the top, many of them rentiers living off their investments, and a large luxury-service proletariat at the bottom. Increasingly, the service proletariat in Densitarian areas in the U.S., and also in Europe, is foreign-born.
[...]
While Densitarian urban areas have an hourglass social structure, the Posturbian suburbs, exurbs, and small towns tend to have a diamond-shaped class system, with few rich, few poor, and a dominant middle. In this environment, universal social insurance—based on the bargain that everybody works, everybody pays, and everybody benefits—can be expected to seem more practical and to win more political support than in the hierarchical Densitarian downtowns.
[...]
My argument is that, as a result of spreading social liberalism, in the realm of public philosophy today’s divisions among liberals, conservatives, populists, and libertarians will gradually be simplified into a binary division among liberaltarians and populiberals who share social liberalism but disagree on other things. Each of these worldviews, moreover, is likely to have a home address—the income-stratified communities of Densitaria, in the case of liberaltarianism, and the less unequal communities of Posturbia, in the case of populiberalism.
In this realignment, the populists would represent what Walter Russell Mead describes as a Jacksonian American political tradition. Jacksonians believe that American foreign policy should pursue strictly national interests and that government should actively use its powers as a check to corporate influence. The populists would not only embrace the contemporary welfare state but seek to expand it. These are the voters who support expanded Medicare and Social Security, pro-union labor policies, higher taxes on the wealthy and adamantly oppose free trade agreements. The populists are motivated by nationalist appeals to restrict immigrant labor from competing with American workers and reverse decades of globalization that has decimated America’s manufacturing industry. Internally, the populists would test the limits, if any, of expansive government powers. As heirs to the old Irish-Scot constituency, the populists would have strongholds in Appalachia and other rural areas of country.
On the contrary, neoliberals would comprise Mead’s Jeffersonian American political tradition. Jeffersonians believe that the U.S. should actively participate in international relations and pursue a more business-friendly domestic economic policy. The neoliberals represent the business elites who favor global trade agreements, interventionist foreign policy to protect American interests abroad and pro-business economic policies. The neoliberals would support subsidies to business, liberal immigration policies, industry deregulation and a generally light tax burden. The neoliberal’s base of support would exist primarily in the coast and urban centers.
Donald Trump's candidacy is going to realign the political parties (http://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2016/3/1/11139054/trump-party-realignment)
So here's my prediction: Over the next decade or so, the Republicans will split between their growing nationalist-populist wing and their business establishment wing, a split that the nationalist-populist wing will eventually win. The Democrats will face a similar split between the increasingly pro-corporate but socially liberally Clinton wing and a more economically progressive Sanders wing, a split that the Clinton wing will eventually win.
Eventually, the Democrats will become the party of urban cosmopolitan business liberalism, and the Republicans will become the party of suburban and rural nationalist populism (similar to what my colleague Michael Lind has predicted).
The Coming Realignment: Cities, Class, and Ideology After Social Conservatism (http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue-4/the-coming-realignment)
Thanks to generational shifts in values like these, it is likely that in the decades ahead there will be a dramatic realignment in American politics. Although it is likely to reshape the two major parties, it will not be a mere “partisan realignment” of the kind studied by political scientists. Rather, it will be a realignment of American public philosophies or political worldviews. This worldview realignment will be accentuated by a number of long-term demographic and cultural changes. But the chief catalyst of the realignment will be the near-universal victory of social liberalism. In a nation in which both parties are socially liberal, existing coalitions are likely to break up and reform in striking ways.
[...]
When political and economic attitudes are correlated in this way, four worldviews result:
Liberalism: social liberalism combined with economic liberalism.
Conservatism: economic libertarianism with state enforcement of conservative values in the social realm (for example, laws against abortion and sodomy).
Libertarianism: anti-statism in both the social and economic realms.
Populism: a combination of economic liberalism and social conservatism.
[...]
For the purposes of this discussion, and to avoid premature assignment of emerging worldviews to the left or the right, I propose to call the two broad political movements that I am predicting liberaltarians and populiberals.
The term liberaltarian is already in use, to describe a broad camp including neoliberal Democrats skeptical of government in the economic sphere along with libertarian Republicans and independents who recognize the need for more government than libertarian ideologues believe to be legitimate.
Populiberal is my own coinage. It describes social liberals who share the liberal social values of liberaltarians, but who tend to be more egalitarian and to favor a greater role for the government in matters like social insurance, business-labor relations, and redistribution of income.
[...]
At the risk of burdening readers with too many neologisms, I propose calling these societies Densitaria and Posturbia. Densitaria is the natural political-geographic base of liberaltarianism, just as Posturbia is the natural political-geographic base of populiberalism.
[...]
As the working class and many middle-class professionals abandon Densitaria for the cheaper housing and office parks of Posturbia, the high-density downtowns and suburban villages are coming to have an hourglass-shaped social structure, with wealthy individuals at the top, many of them rentiers living off their investments, and a large luxury-service proletariat at the bottom. Increasingly, the service proletariat in Densitarian areas in the U.S., and also in Europe, is foreign-born.
[...]
While Densitarian urban areas have an hourglass social structure, the Posturbian suburbs, exurbs, and small towns tend to have a diamond-shaped class system, with few rich, few poor, and a dominant middle. In this environment, universal social insurance—based on the bargain that everybody works, everybody pays, and everybody benefits—can be expected to seem more practical and to win more political support than in the hierarchical Densitarian downtowns.
[...]
My argument is that, as a result of spreading social liberalism, in the realm of public philosophy today’s divisions among liberals, conservatives, populists, and libertarians will gradually be simplified into a binary division among liberaltarians and populiberals who share social liberalism but disagree on other things. Each of these worldviews, moreover, is likely to have a home address—the income-stratified communities of Densitaria, in the case of liberaltarianism, and the less unequal communities of Posturbia, in the case of populiberalism.