The Realignment

Joel Kotkin had piece in Spk!ed last week, "Why the right is eating the left's lunch". In it he carefully chronicles shifts in western electorates: "parties and movements that were once associated with the upper classes – such as the American Republicans, Canadian Conservatives and the British Tories – increasingly depend on working- and middle-class voters. These voters have been the force behind the rise of Donald Trump, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, France’s Marine Le Pen, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders and various right-wing parties in Sweden, Finland, Spain and Denmark." He cites three issues driving this: "climate policy, immigration and divisions over cultural attitudes". All enjoy universal support among the CEOs of large public companies, government bureaucrats, and their employees, but are economically or socially catastrophic to the working class (and, increasingly, the lower stretches of the professional class). Shockingly to the race-obsessed left, these impetuses have transcended skin color, driving blacks & latinos into the Repbulican party in the US.

Fine & good– Kotkin ably chronicles and sources these dynamics. I'm more interested the larger implications of this. This isn't (just) a statistical shift; a change of a few points here & there in this demographic or that; it is a realignment. Decades into the information age (long gone from the industrial age), America's coaltions are once again shifting, and the fault line is class… or perhaps for want of a better term "place".

America has from its inception sorted itself into two competing coaltions of interests that manifest themselves as political parties. The most recent sorting came at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and gave us the Democrats & the Republicans. Multiple decades into the information revolution, we are overdue for a new realignment. The shape of that realignment is increasingly clear: Codevilla called the new coalitions the "ruling class" and the "country class". Martin Gurri calls them "the center" and "the periphery". While the names are in flux, we all understand the distinction: those on the inside of the institutions that increasingly order our lives, and those on the outside.

But the emergent country-class coaltion contains the seeds of its own defeat: "Rather than yearning for a return to Thatcherism or Reaganism, younger voters seem more amenable to expanded government. Indeed, with the exception of Argentina, ascendant right-wing parties do not generally want to limit the welfare state, at least for their existing citizenry." Indeed, modern-day populists in the Republican party (for now) have been described as "socially conservative & fisacally liberal." This cannot hold, and we see the outcome in California today. The result of a high-tax, high-service model of government is an extremely large government. Not only do you need people to collect all those taxes & administer all those services, government is now a large, significant part of our lives: this gives birth to a secondary orbit of people who are not state employees, but nevertheless make their living from the state: contractors, consultants, attorneys & so on. And here's the thing: the people who go into this line of work are not "Live Free or Die" sorts of people; they are not imbued with a Lockean, expansive view of liberty. I've talked to them: their conception of government is coercing (they would say "nudging") the citizenry to act in accordance with their wishes ("for their own good", of course). They do not let little things like elections get in the way of what they see as "doing the right thing". To put it more bluntly, when you are dependent upon a class of people, you cannot at the same time claim their respect.

01/07/24 17:08