Frank DiStefano's book The Next Realignment

[lpetrich]

Political analyst and former congressional aide Frank DiStefano has written a book on US political-party systems, "The Next Realignment". He notes that the US has had five previous ones, and he disagrees with a lot of others on a sixth one, thinking it a continuation of the fifth one.

Each party system has characteristic platforms and constituencies for each two parties - the US has always had two major parties. FDS proposes that the parties start out as offering solutions to some big problem that faces the nation, a different solution for each party. But the parties end up outliving this problem and descend into corruption. Parties that survive then get reformed for the next party system -- if they survive.

The two parties are always about the same size, and permanent majorities cannot exist. If one of them starts getting big, then it starts neglecting some of its constituencies, and they leave the party for the other party, shrinking it.


In the beginning, there were no political parties. Those of the Founders who expressed any opinion on that subject expressed very negative opinions. Political parties = hostile factions and strife.

But during the first term of the first President, George Washington himself, the politicians started dividing up into parties, politicians including some of the Founders themselves. They split into Federalists and Democratic-Republicans: Republicans for short. FDS explains them as addressing the question of what kind of nation the new nation will be. The Federalists, like Alexander Hamilton: an industrialized great-power nation with a strong government. The D-R's, like Thomas Jefferson: an agrarian isolationalist nation with a weak government, a nation of small farmers -- and also plantation aristocrats like him.

GW was symathetic to the Feds, and his successor John Adams was a Fed. The next Presidents were all D-R's, but they ended up taking over much of the Fed platform. TJ bought the Louisiana Purchase from France, a huge expanse about the size of the original US. He also sent military expeditions to punish the Barbary Pirates of the north-African coast.

During the War of 1812, New Englanders preferred a less hostile attitude toward Britain and even considered secession. NE was the Feds' stronghold, and the Feds got tainted by association with such dereliction of duty. James Madison, and then James Monroe, both D-R's, succeeded TJ, and the latter one saw an opportunity to destroy the Feds. Not only at the ballot box, but also by recruiting Fed supporters.

By the early 1820's, it seemed that the US was a one-party state with the D-R's as its only party. Something like the original ideal of a no-party state. This was the Era of Good Feelings, when Americans seemed very united.

 

[lpetrich]

The Second Party System emerged in the late 1820's and early 1830's, as a way of addressing what to do as the US expanded westward.

FDS: "Andrew Jackson and his Democrats offered an explosive vision of a popular democracy, demanding America directly empower ordinary people while sweeping away corrupt elites. Henry Clay and his Whigs proposed a counter-vision, one advancing a national vision of modernization, growth, and reform."

IMO, AJ went a bit too far with his populism, rewarding his friends with nice positions as a way of showing that one does not need an Ivy League degree to do those jobs. That was the spoils system: patronage and cronyism.

The Whigs are like the dinosaurs, most notable for their end. But dinosaurs did very well, even if one does not count their surviving offshoot: the birds. The Whigs also did well, as organized and as successful as their rivals, the Democrats.

The US ended up adopting parts of both Democratic and Whig platforms, and like the earlier D-R's, the parties were left without much to do. But by the 1850's, the US was facing a challenge that neither party was very well-equipped to handle.

Slavery was something the Founders papered over, and it was never a big issue for a long time, but by the 1850's, slaveowners and their friends in DC were starting to overreach, like sending slave catchers into the northern states. Northerners got pissed off, denouncing the "slaveocracy" or "Slave Power".

The Whig Party fell apart because of that issue, and it took a while for a party to fill the gap: the Republicans.

 

[lpetrich]

The Third Party System emerged in the aftermath of the Civil War. FDS:

The Republican Party that emerged from the Civil War was Lincoln's party of the Union, a pro-business party of moralistic reformers that had saved the nation, abolished slavery, and struggled to drag America into its postwar future. The Republicans were divided between two factions, the pro-business Yankees drawing on the party's Whiggish legacy and moral reformers descended from the crusaders who abolished slavery. They united around an ideology based on the sanctity and dignity of labor, one that simultaneously explained why slavery was an evil system, because it stole a person's sacred labor, and supported the industriousness and pro-business Yankee work ethic.

The Democratic Party that emerged from the war was a pro-business party of the South bound in an arranged marriage to other groups resentful toward Republicans. The party was mainly under the control of a faction often called the Bourbons, mostly the remnant of the old Southern plantation class eager to restore the Southern social system and economy in the wake of the war. The Southern Bourbons, along with some Northerners sharing their sentiments, celebrated Thomas Jefferson's vision of a decentralized republic with limited interference from the national government. They were strongly pro-business, although they favored the agricultural business of the South. At the grass roots, the party attracted many rural working people in the South, who blamed Northern Republicans for the wartime devastation and sudden uprooting of the slave-plantation economy that turned the South from among America's richest regions to its poorest. It also attracted Northern immigrants, many Irish Catholics, who organized in powerful urban political machines like New York's Tammany Hall to combat local Republican elites who looked down on them. The Democratic Party united these factions around their shared opposition to the Republicans, a party they considered an agent of privilege and centralization.

But by the late 19th cy., the parties were more and more stuck in the past, with their rehashings of Civil War resentments. They also became more and more corrupt, being in the pay of big industrialists and the like.

The US was industrializing, and industrialists built big industrial empires, getting very rich in the process. But many others did not see much of the wealth that was being produced, and this is why Mark Twain coined "Gilded Age". It only outwardly seemed like some Golden Age.

Many farmers were doing very poorly. They were at the mercy of the railroads, and they were often heavily in debt to distant banks. Both major parties were in the pay of their opponents, and neither party was doing much for these farmers, so they organized their own party, the People's Party, the Populists.

William Jennings Bryan was a Democrat, but he was sympathetic to the Populists.

William Jennings Bryan's story is so dramatic and improbable that if Hollywood ever made an epic movie about it, critics would complain the plot was preposterously unrealistic. A thirty-six-year-old from Nebraska, a failed Senate candidate with only two terms in the House of Representatives behind him, decides to run for president. He walks into the 1896 Democratic National Convention as the darkest of dark-horse candidates. He hardly has the resume or the political stature of a president. He has only four years of national office to his name, in the House at that, and he lost his last election. At the convention, this young man gives probably the best political speech of all time. He rails against the elites. He all but compares himself to Jesus Christ, ending his speech with his arms outstretched as if in crucifixion. The speech so electrifies the crowd that he walks out as the youngest person in history to ever be nominated for president by a major party. As if that weren't enough, he drives out his party's longstanding leadership, radically remakes its agenda, and all but adopts the ideology and message of a third party then sweeping over the American plains. Before long, Bryan's total transformation of the Democratic Party sparks a similar transformation in its Republican rival, and America launches a new party system eager to take on the new problems of a rapidly industrializing America.

 

[lpetrich]

The Democrats ended up absorbing the Populists, complete with adopting much of their platform.

The Republicans had a different response, incorporating the Progressive movement: "This Progressive Movement, which blossomed at the end of the nineteenth century, was intent on deploying planning and social science to improve society and address the downsides and abuses of an industrializing economy."

Progressivism was a new crusading spirit that bound an interrelated network of activists, journalists, charity workers, preachers, and politicians. It inspired a network of overlapping endeavors from settlement houses built to serve and uplift poor and working people in the cities; to the muckraking journalists who exposed corruptions and outrages in magazines like McClure's; to thinkers like Herbert Croly who wrote books and founded intellectual magazines like The New Republic; to the social reformers who fought for new laws to help workers; to preachers like Walter Rauschenbusch who proclaimed the need of a Social Gospel to reform America. Progressives took up a staggering array of causes and reforms, seeking to fundamentally remake America to tame the power of growing industrial business, eliminate abuses against workers, break up corruption in business and politics, bring rational efficiency and planning to the economy, ensure the purity of food and medicine, and protect the natural environment. They sought to improve the social condition of America among the poor and disadvantaged through personal charity and education. They fought against political corruption and political machines. They fought to prohibit child labor, enact maximum work-hour laws, treat the mentally ill, regulate worker safety, eliminate impure food and quack medicine, build parks, and conserve the natural environment. They sought to break up large monopoly businesses through antitrust laws.

"Much like similar reform campaigns before the Civil War, progressivism particularly flourished among educated middle-class and wealthy women for whom it provided an important outlet to participate in the public square."

Becoming activists and muckraking reporters, and pushing for their sex having the vote.

 

[lpetrich]

That was the Fourth Party System, the Democrats with the Populists and the Republicans with the Progressives.

But by the 1920's, both movements had achieved much of what they fought for, and the parties degenerated into squabbles over Prohibition. Then the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.

Herbert Hoover has a bad reputation nowadays, because of his failed response to the Great Depression. FDS argues that this reputation is undeserved, that he was actually a good leader. But he apparently underestimated how bad the Great Depression was. He expected it to blow over in a few years, but it got worse and worse over his Presidency.

He was thus like Jimmy Carter, a very earnest President who was sunk by things that he failed to handle very well.

 

[lpetrich]

Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President in 1932, in the middle of that horrible economic collapse.

His response was the New Deal.

The first version of it was some business-stabilization efforts to keep businesses from competing with each other too much. That was a common belief, that many businesses were playing "Chicken" with their finances and risking bankrupting themselves to put their competition out of work. But this attempt at Progressive economic planning wasn't very successful, and it strikes me as very harebrained.

The populist base of the Democratic Party found its champion in Senator Huey Long, the rabble-rousing Democratic boss of Louisiana. Long rose to national attention as Louisiana's governor during the late 1920s by turning the state's poor and working class against its former ruling elites. Long was brash, unconstrained by democratic tradition, and sometimes thuggish. As governor, he converted the Louisiana government into a powerful and often vindictive political machine loyal only to him, hounding enemies out of jobs, harassing journalists, and collecting funds through corruption to reward allies. Armed state policemen constantly followed Long around as personal guards in a show of force. Yet Long actively used his vast power to shower tangible benefits on the poor and working Louisianans who enthusiastically supported him. He used the money taken from wealthy elites and corporations to build hospitals, erect public works, and provide free schoolbooks to children. While maintaining his complete control over Louisiana from the Senate, in 1934 Long brought his populist revolt national. Attacking Roosevelt as a rich man in bed with bankers and businessmen, and his New Deal as a useless program that left the rich man rich without relieving the masses, Long proposed a plan he called “Share Our Wealth” that promised to make “every man a king.” Long's plan would cap personal fortunes and limit top incomes by confiscating all income over one million dollars and personal fortunes over five million to guarantee every American a minimum income, free college education, old-age pensions, veteran's benefits, a free month's vacation, and a maximum thirty-hour work week. The plan became a movement that spread over America, with struggling Americans forming their own “Share our Wealth Clubs,” which reached eight million members.

He was joined by Father Charles Coughlin, with policies like (to quote FDS) "income guarantees, high taxes on the rich, labor protections, and public control of industry for the public good." Also California medical doctor Francis Townsend with his "Townsend plan" for an old-age pension for every American.

 

[lpetrich]

FDR and his "Brain Trust" of advisers then came up with their Second New Deal. That is what most people likely think of when they think of the New Deal.

• Social Security, inspired by the Townsend Plan
• "Soak the rich" progressive taxation, like a 79% marginal income tax
• Jobs programs like the Works Progress Administration, whose workers built parks, roads, public buildings, and bridges, and also financed writers and artists
• Support of labor unions, a minimum wage, and maximum hours

It continued the Populist movement, while the First New Deal continued the Progressive movement. The result was a new ideology. FDS explains:

"It was progressive in its confidence that neutral experts can use knowledge and planning to continually push the nation toward progress. It was populist in defining progress as moving toward a society that sided with the people against the elite, particularly in empowering the least well off."

"Traditional progressivism was moralistic, hoping to improve the lower classes to remake them into mirrors of their upstanding betters. Roosevelt's ideology wasn't about improving the working class and the poor but putting progressivism to work in their service. Traditional populism was suspicious of reformer elites wielding federal power. Roosevelt's ideology trusted it could enlist these reformers as allies. This new ideology, unlike anything that had existed before, has been the heart of the Democratic Party ever since."

-

So Universal Basic Income is far from new - it goes all the way back to the 1930's.

Looking at AOC and her friends, they seem to support an updated version of the New Deal. In fact, the Green New Deal was named in honor of the original New Deal. Medicare for All is named after a later bit of New Dealism, Medicare. But they emphasize racial justice, a rather gross omission of the original New Deal, something that AOC herself has mentioned.

 

[lpetrich]

Needless to say, there were a lot of people who didn't like the New Deal, people who considered FDR an autocrat. He certainly expanded executive power, it must be noted.

But at the time, there were many people who looked at the Fascist and Communist regimes in Europe, and those regimes seemed more successful in getting their nations going. Sure they didn't believe in democracy, but that seemed like a small price to pay. The Bonus Army that marched on DC in 1932 seemed to some people like it might attempt a coup, Huey Long ruled like some one-party autocrat, and some business leaders planned the "Business Plot" against FDR.

Communism was rule by one party that claimed to represent the working class, and Fascism was rule by one party that claimed to represent the nation. What they had in common was rule by one political party.

But FDR and his friends never made the US a one-party state.


The New Deal's opponents made "liberty" their rallying cry, freedom from all that alphabet soup of government agencies. Even if it sometimes seems to me like freedom only for business leaders. Authoritarian people wailing about "freedom" I find a very odd sight.

Thus modern conservatism emerged.

 

[lpetrich]

FDS then discussed "left" vs "right", and he called that division incoherent, that they are "temporary and arbitrary coalitions".

He then discussed personality features.

It's our common intuition that certain personality traits usually correspond to certain political views. It's said that liberals on the left are creative, open to experience, and eager to improve things—but also sometimes imprudent and blind to risk. Conservatives on the right are said to be more practical, reliable, and stable—but sometimes hidebound and resistant to necessary change. This roughly corresponds to how we use the words “liberal” and “conservative” in ordinary speech. If we ask a colleague to be conservative in estimating figures for us, we mean a cautious forecast. If we ask a friend to spoon out a “liberal” portion of ice cream, we mean a heaping scoop overflowing the dish. These stereotypes of liberal and conservative personalities seem to support the incorrect notion that our political coalitions must be driven by our nature.

Then mentioning Big Five personality traits: liberals high in Openness and conservatives high in Conscientiousness

Jonathan Haidt in his moral-foundations work finds that liberals care most about caring and fairness, while conservatives also care about authority, loyalty, and purity/sanctity

He notes that political conservatives support change toward policies that they like, and liberals resist change from policies that they like, so this psychological concept does not map well onto politics.

"Why don't conservatives, said to value authority and loyalty, favor a stronger government with a highly regulatory state? Shouldn't conservatives dislike the chaos of free and unregulated markets and the disruptive changes of capitalism?"

I think that a possible solution here is that many conservatives are authoritarians who believe in the absolute sovereignty of business leaders over their businesses, and that governments shouldn't interfere with that sovereignty. Different authoritarians believe in different sources of authority.

Prof. Bob Altemeyer, researcher into authoritarianism, notes that supporters of Communism in the Soviet Union seemed much like authoritarians on the political right, supporters of established systems.

"Why do liberals, said not to value highly the morality of the sacred, embrace an environmental politics rooted in a sacred value, the purity of nature?"

Very good point about environmentalists, I must note.

 

[lpetrich]

FDS discussed "The American Ideal of Liberty" - he discussed how disliked leaders were often labeled tyrants. Some early ones, Andrew Jackson, FDR, ...

I must say that if that is made into an absolute, it produces contradictions, because people's actions may interfere with each other. If I stand on a spot X and claim that it's my freedom, someone else may claim that my standing on X interferes with their freedom to stand on that spot.

In "The Virtue of a Republic" he notes that "What the Founders called republican virtue is ultimately just another way to say culture or norms." Like not sticking one's snout in the public trough or treating opponents as enemies to be destroyed.

In "The Fury of Populism", FDS notes that populism is essentially virtuous common people vs. corrupt elites where the rulers ought to come from the common people. Populists come in a lot of different ideological stripes, with different identifications of "people" and "elites".

 

[lpetrich]

In "The Last Hurrah of the Fifth Party System" FDS discusses what happened after FDR's Presidency. He has a lot to discuss, like the rise of conservatism. Eisenhower was criticized by right-wingers as too accommodating of the New Deal. Or even being an agent of the international Communist conspiracy, as John Birchers believed.

Then Barry Goldwater's uncompromising conservatism in his 1964 Presidential run. Though he lost, his candidacy attracted a lot of activists. Nevertheless, movement conservatism's first President was Ronald Reagan in 1980. His Presidency helped change the national conversation in the direction of conservatism and away from the New Deal, to the point that a successor Democrat, Bill Clinton, claimed that "the era of big government is over".


Gilded Age II is usually considered part of a Sixth Party System, but FDS considers it a continuation of the Fifth Party System because the issues are still similar. However, the constituencies have changed over the decades. The Republican Party has successfully used Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy of appealing to white people with racial resentments.

Nevertheless, the Fifth-Sixth transition is not very well-defined, with proposed dates ranging from the early 1960's to the early 1990's. This is from the rather gradual change in constituencies over that time.

 

[lpetrich]

In "The End of the Industrial Era and the American Century"

The vision of industrial-era America that we take for granted as “normal,” in fact, is grounded in a specific and unique economic system, cultural system, and international system unlike anything that came before or anything that will come again. Its backbone was the economic system we all take for granted but that's actually historically unique—the industrial manufacturing economy. Twentieth-century America meant massive organizations mass-producing physical objects, from automobiles to refrigerators to music records to Ovaltine to transistor radios. Americans today have a hard time even envisioning an economy that didn't mainly involve people getting hired into jobs at large corporations to perform some small part of making something to be sold to others. Yet, for most of human history, people didn't have “jobs.” They worked on little family farms or ran a little store or performed a service like medicine or law for the people in their own communities. They worked for themselves, with their families or maybe a few business partners.

Industrial-style employment gradually grew in the 19th cy, and I don't think that it will go away very quickly.

When we transitioned from an agricultural to a modern industrial economy, we rearranged our entire way of life to accommodate the new economic model that supported us. Building cars or steel or television shows takes massive investments of capital that few can get, and needs specialized workers who cooperate to succeed, so we built a unique economic and social infrastructure to support it. We moved from little towns around America to sell our labor to large enterprises that mass-produced things or sometimes services. Since many of us no longer owned little family businesses, but depended instead on salaries, we needed pensions and retirement funds to support us once we aged out of the labor market. Medicine moved from small-town practitioners to impersonal hospital corporations with industrial MRI machines, so now we needed health insurance. Since we no longer depended on intergenerational family farms, we began to live in households consisting only of one immediate family. We needed bigger houses to store our new industrial inventions, particularly the cars in our garages, so we built cul-de-sacs in the suburbs where we could commute to our corporate urban jobs. We became more egalitarian with sex roles, particularly after women joined the workforce during the war, although we still mostly expected men to be breadwinners and women to get married and maintain the homestead.

It's surprising that conservatives don't object to industrial capitalism as collectivist, when it is very obviously very collectivist. Could their denunciations of collectivism reflect their unease with what they are so loud in defending? Military forces are similar, also very collectivist.

On the plus side, conservatives may like the model of lifetime employment, because conservatives claim to like stability.

 

[lpetrich]

FDS then turns to Obama and Trump, calling them the last Presidents of the fifth party system.

Why did people love Obama so much as he was campaigning, and why did people love him much less after he was President for a while?

FDS has a theory: "The key to understanding the Obama phenomenon lies not in conventional explanations but in what Obama promised and what he was actually able to deliver. Without realizing it, Obama promised America he would be the first president of America's next party system. Instead, he governed as one of the last presidents of the system that was falling away."

His Presidency? "The record of the Obama administration turned out to be the traditional Democratic agenda one had come to expect from post–New Deal Democrats."

"Without realizing it, Obama implicitly promised America he would bring about the next great political realignment. He promised he wouldn't just be a good administrator of government, or a champion of New Deal liberalism, but he would forge a new agenda from scratch like Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Clay, or William Jennings Bryan—and he probably had a fair chance to do it."

But he wimped out. Consider his meekness toward Republican obstructionism. He ought to watch that video of Mitch McConnell chuckling as he recalled keeping Obama from appointing another Supreme Court Justice.

 

[lpetrich]

FDS proposes that the US now satisfies three conditions for a realignment.

"First, the great debate of the Fifth Party System era—our debate over New Deal liberalism—is over." - we like some of it, but not all of it.

"Second, a legion of new issues and concerns has risen to which no one yet has answers."

"Third, America increasingly faces national disruptions."

"Added to all that are the disruptive political figures that inevitably emerge as the walls of a party system begin coming down." Like Donald Trump.

The sorts of cultural traits we associate with conservative politics—rural, traditional, religious, sensitive to perceptions of East Coast snobbery, and glorifying “real American” tastes in music, sports, and hobbies—are in reality just identity markers of traditional working-class America. The traits we associate with liberal politics—urban, secular, socially conscious, and glorifying the “refined” tastes in music, sports, and hobbies common to the educated and wealthy—are lifestyle habits of the modern professional and executive class.

However, these are divisions by social class and geography, not necessarily ideological ones.

Who are "moderates"?

The people labeled Republican moderates and Democratic Blue Dogs are essentially people in the correct party based on the New Deal debate who disagree with their party on the ancillary issues of the culture war. The people labeled neoliberal “moderates” are the reverse, people philosophically at odds with some of their party's beliefs based in the New Deal debate, yet who accept all of its positions on the culture war.

The first sort of people are are often right-libertarians, socially moderate to liberal and economically conservative. Such people are very prominent online, at least in my experience.

 

[lpetrich]

About the two major parties,

They're acting like parties too often act near the end of party systems, treating politics as an empty game for capturing offices instead of as a mechanism for debating the problems America wants and needs to have solved. The present situation in America looks a lot like the politics of the 1840s and 1850s, right before the traumatic Whig collapse. Which brings us to the destabilizing administration of Donald J. Trump.

"Donald Trump's campaign in 2016 was, in many ways, the mirror image of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign."

While Obama was calm and optimistic and committed to working within existing structures, Trump was brash and grim and wanting to smash those structures. He defeated several experienced politicians and dismissed them all as losers and failures. "Only I can fix it" he said about him and the nation's problems.

"After his election, some thought Trump could be another Andrew Jackson." But "Trump, it turned out, had no interest in the yeoman's work of party reform or political renewal." All he cares about is his power and popularity, it seems.

Instead of being like the Progressive Era or the New Deal area, this is more like the last years of the Whigs.

The Republicans had their Tea Party insurgency, and the Democrats now have a left-wing insurgency.

 

[lpetrich]

FDS has a nightmare scenario in "What Comes Next"

Imagine a world that divides humanity into two classes, Alphas and Betas. No one in this world has more social or political rights than anyone else and every citizen is equal before the law. However, the class to which you're assigned during your education determines your job, your salary, and your opportunities. Alphas do intellectual and managerial work—they're the leaders, the professors, the scientists, and the CEOs. They see their role as their society's guardians, obliged to use their superior educations and opportunities to guide society toward a better future. In return, they believe their hard work, extraordinary ability, and superior skill has earned them a right to a better lifestyle. Betas do hands-on work—manual labor, service jobs, and desk jobs that involve executing orders. Betas receive a modern education sufficient to become good workers, employees, and citizens, although without a detailed understanding of the fields in which they will never work, such as economics, science, history, or foreign policy. Betas live comfortably, although not as well as Alphas. Naturally, they resent the Alphas who give them orders and get things and opportunities Betas don't.

Every two years, this society elects a governing council. Council candidates court one of society's two natural voting blocs, the Alphas or the Betas. Alpha candidates prize efficiency, rational policy, progress, and good government to expand and create new opportunities. Beta candidates care most about fairness, focusing less on expanding opportunities and more on who gets what. As one might expect, elections get nasty. Alphas resent the “backward” Betas, secretly wondering why Betas even get to vote at all since the uninformed policies Betas support will inevitably break complex systems Betas don't understand. Betas think Alphas are soft, decadent, and greedy. For Betas, prosperity doesn't come from Alpha schemes but the fierce work of the Beta hands actually implementing what Alphas order. Betas fear Alpha plans for “good government” and “progress” will, in reality, entrench the wealth and status of Alphas, leaving Betas like them farther behind. Alphas don't understand Beta resentment, since they support policies meant to improve life for everybody. Betas don't understand Alpha priorities. As Betas see it, Alphas treat Betas as insignificant workers too ignorant to govern themselves, while the Alphas act morally superior for their “help.”

FDS then gets into three disruptions the US is going through.

1. Decline of the industrial economy and rise of a global information economy
2. "The rise of the rest of the world"
3. The legacy of existing institutions

After going on an excursion into these disruptions, he gets back to "the new coalitions we don't want"

 

[lpetrich]

FDS considers four factions: populists, progressives, virtue conservatives, and liberty conservatives.

The New Deal era had coalitions (populists, progressives) and (virtue cons, liberty cons).

But FDS considers a likely set of new coalitions to be (populists, virtue cons) and (progressives, liberty cons)

(populists, virtue cons)

Populists and virtue conservatives thrive within the same communities—mainly rural, suburban, and “Red State” America. Both are suspicious of elites—the financiers, professionals, Hollywood celebrities, academics, C-suite occupants, and meritocrats eager to move America into new global economy and leaving many working Americans behind. Most important, they each worry about the same postindustrial changes, economic and cultural, that disproportionately harm people like them. Populist resentment at elites and virtue conservative notions of protecting culture increasingly lead to the same place."

...
A coalition of virtue conservatives and populists would rally under a banner of reversing the nation's rush toward the global postindustrial world. Its ideology would be dedicated to preserving the nation's virtues for the benefit of ordinary Americans. It would cherish the values of traditional America—patriotism, hard work, Judeo-Christian values, and traditional cultural conservatism—and fight against the power of both economic and cultural “elites” pushing changes harmful to the “people.” It would celebrate the virtue of ordinary working people. It would denigrate “out-of-touch elites” living in rich communities as dangerous “others” more loyal to the global elite than working America. It would launch populist attacks against college professors, ivy league schools, and residents of upscale neighborhoods in “creative class” cities, but also against CEOs, hedge fund managers, and venture capitalists benefiting from the changing economy while “the people” do worse.

(progressives, liberty cons)

Demographically, liberty conservatives increasingly come from similar cultural backgrounds as progressives—highly educated suburban and urban professionals from the upper-middle class and economic elite who are “economically conservative and socially moderate.” They live in similar communities, share common backgrounds and cultural tastes, and are similarly positioned to take advantage of the opportunities this emerging world provides. Most important, liberty conservatives and progressives share a common approach to the disruption of the postindustrial era—they embrace it."

...
A coalition of progressives and liberty conservatives would unite under the banner of advancing human progress. It would draw on the progressive impulse to employ planning and expertise to create the conditions necessary for national progress. It would seek to help working people but not to empower them. It would hope instead to improve them through education and cultural change to nudge them into becoming more like the professional and upper classes. It wouldn't worry about the power of “the corporations” or “the rich” so long as some of the excess could be redistributed to those in need and general conditions improved. It wouldn't view the world through the lens of nationalism but multinationalism, hoping to integrate the American economy into global opportunities while viewing it as a moral duty to assist non-Americans in need equally to Americans. It would be a party that was technocratic and meritocratic looking something like “Third Way” neoliberalism, something like moderate libertarianism, and something like the ethos of Silicon Valley. It wouldn't worry about elites but seek to harness expertise and elite power for the benefit of the human race at large.

 

[lpetrich]

Liberty cons and virtue cons? There is a conflict between doing whatever one wants and doing what is right, and some conservatives try to reconcile the two factions by claiming that "true" freedom is the "right" to do what is right.

"Populist-leaning Republicans often demand the Republican Party divorce Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce, while business Republican groups openly gripe about the party's populist direction."

Like Trump and "Make America Great Again".

"Democrats have similarly reached toward a technocratic liberalism seeking not to empower poor and working people but to instead improve them."

"Wealthy national elites that in a prior era would have been natural business-class Republicans—Silicon Valley moguls, Wall Street bankers, and powerful CEOs—have drifted toward the Democrats."

FDS then gets into the social-equity movement, often derided as "Social Justice Warriors".

An equity-progressive coalition would leave liberty cons without a place to go, but it would be demographically similar to a liberty-con-progressive coalition.

"Despite the sometimes harsh rhetoric equity and progressivism both sometimes direct at the wealthy and corporations, it would also most naturally draw a distinction between the immoral wealth of the few, of the corporations and billionaires, and the moral and earned wealth of the meritocracy—exactly as prosperous turn-of-the-century progressives who railed at the trusts and John Rockefeller also once did. It would, in other words, still be a party with a vision to benefit all society but mainly appealing to cultural and economic elites."

 

[lpetrich]

New Deal: (populists, progressives) and (virtue cons, liberty cons)

Possible future: (populists, virtue cons) and (progressives, liberty cons)

The remaining kind of coalition: (populists, liberty cons) and (progressives, virtue cons)

I'm not going to speculate about how those coalitions might work.

FDS notes that his possible future coalitions are roughly what the Third and Fourth Party Systems looked like - from the Civil War to FDR's Presidency, roughly 1864 to 1932.

The virtue and populist political party would do well in rural areas, small towns, industrial areas, urban cores, and the South. Its base would be the South and the rust belt, and socioeconomically it would be the party of the poor and working class. The liberty and progressive party, or alternatively the progressive and equity party, would dominate dominate the suburbs and exurbs. Its base would be on the coasts, the West, and the North. It would socioeconomically be the party of business, professionals, white-collar America, the upper half of the middle class, and the “meritocracy.” It would effectively recreate the political map of the pre–New Deal era. The virtue-populist party would win states Democrats used to win. The liberty-progressive or progressive-equity party would win states Republicans used to win. These arrangements aren't only possible, they're well-tested. Far from creating something novel, this realignment would restore a political order that ruled America just outside our personal memories.

Or even the first and second ones also, as he explains.

"For most of American history prior to our era, it was the wealthy and educated—not the working classes—who supported progressive modernizing policies." Like the Federalists, Whigs, and pre-New-Deal Republicans, with their support from the wealthy and from professionals.

"At the same time, it was the working classes and new immigrants who usually supported populist parties of social traditionalism that opposed modernizing plans." Like the Democratic-Republicans, Jackson Democrats, and Bryan Democrats, with their suspicion of banks, business, and aristocratic pretensions of wealth.

 

[lpetrich]

FDS suspects something very disturbing about the upcoming coalitions: "They divide America not around clashing ideas but zero-sum battles for spoils." and "This new party system that appears ready to emerge would exchange a politics of clashing ideas for one of clashing interests. It would concentrate those who benefit most from the information-age economy into one party while concentrating working-class and poorer Americans who benefit least into another."

Then he talks about agenda parties vs. opposition parties, parties with agendas or parties that mainly oppose their rival parties.

1. (1796 - 1824) Federalists: agenda, Democratic-Republicans: agenda
2. (1828 - 1854) Democrats: agenda, National Republicans / Whigs: opposition
3. (1856 - 1894) Republicans: agenda, Democrats: opposition
4. (1896 - 1930) Democrats: agenda, Republicans: agenda
5. (1930 - after 1974) Democrats: agenda, Republicans: opposition
6. (1980's? - present) Republicans: agenda, Democrats: opposition (usual identification; FDS considers it a continuation of the 5th)

(Wikipedia's dates)