In my search for a silver lining in this Presidential Campaign, I have found precisely one: it’s not boring.
Rod Dreher commends an article five months ago in Politico as “what I still think is the most insightful essay describing what’s happening, and what is going to happen, in US politics after this year.” It doesn’t immediately explain the turmoil of the election, but it’s evocative:
- What we’re seeing is a “reassembling of new Democratic and Republican coalitions [which] is nearly finished.”
- “Today’s Republican Party is predominantly a Midwestern, white, working-class party with its geographic epicenter in the South and interior West. Today’s Democratic Party is a coalition of relatively upscale whites with racial and ethnic minorities, concentrated in an archipelago of densely populated blue cities.”
- “In both parties, there’s a gap between the inherited orthodoxy of a decade or two ago and the real interests of today’s electoral coalition. And in both parties, that gap between voters and policies is being closed in favor of the voters — a slight transition in the case of Hillary Clinton, but a dramatic one in the case of Donald Trump.”
- “[C]ountry-and-western Republicans have gradually replaced country-club Republicans.” but the GOP platform and budget still reflect the priorities of the latter.
- “Social issues spurred a partisan realignment by changing who considered themselves Democrats and Republicans. Over decades, socially conservative working-class whites migrated from the Democratic Party to join the Republican Party, especially in the South. Socially moderate Republicans, especially on the East Coast, shifted to the Democratic coalition. Now, there’s little disagreement within each party on social issues. Liberal Republicans are as rare as Reagan Democrats.”
- “The rise of populist nationalism on the right is paralleled by the rise of multicultural globalism on the center-left.” Much of the Republican establishment is aligned with the center-left on globalism.
- In the next two decades:
- “The Republicans will be a party of mostly working-class whites, based in the South and West and suburbs and exurbs everywhere.”
- “The Democrats … will be even more of an alliance of upscale, progressive whites with blacks and Latinos, based in large and diverse cities.”
- The two parties’ coming ideologies are deeply at odds.
I believe I’ve written before that 1972 was a turning point for the Democrats: turning away from blue collar labor unions and toward teachers, intellectuals, and sexual revolutionaries.
It had not occurred to me that, the Supreme Court having decided all key social issues in the progressives’ favor, the Republican coalition would collapse because the platform social issue positions would be so clearly pandering blather.
Were I a Democrat mucky-muck, I wouldn’t be too confident about keeping blacks and latinos in coalition with yuppies. Maybe their common urbanity will suffice, maybe not.
I do know that if I were a Republican, I’d be fighting like crazy to retain the Electoral College, which, by adding Congress and Senatorial seats to determine a state’s electors, gives the numerous red flyover states a bit more say in Presidential selection, consistent with our bicameral legislative system. Direct election of the President will tilt things toward the populous blue states, mostly coastal.
This is all the law and the prophets (for today). The rest is commentary.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 