Could the pending political realignment come from the Right?
What if the Right ditches the plutocrat class the way the Left ditched the working class?
Will the GOP truly abandon its plutocratic economic agenda and become a true “workers’ party” that combines social conservatism with a defense of using an activist government to improve the lives of working-class Americans? Or will the Democrats double down on its ambitions to use government to improve the lives of working-class Americans while moderating considerably on social and cultural issues?
Neither has really happened (yet?) because our elections are decided by pretty narrow margins, which leads each party to be very skittish about alienating a faction of its electoral coalition. Republicans are afraid of pissing off libertarian donors and small-business owners who want low taxes and fewer regulations. And Democrats are afraid of pissing off college-educated professionals who want ever-more-expansive demonstrations of social progressivism. Jettisoning either would mean that party potentially losing a lot of voters without knowing it would pick up an equal number or more new ones. That’s our problem. We just don’t know yet if we will ever accomplish such a realignment, or when.
Damon Linker,
Many people, including me, assume that the current political interregnum will end with a pronounced lurch to the left. Well, the economic left at least. (As I’ve noted previously, polling suggests Anglosphere voters are now significantly to the economic left and cultural right of most of their elected representatives.)
As I’ve banged on about interminably in these pages, after four decades of being told a rising tide would lift all boats, many people, especially many young people, are looking around and seeing a vast expanse of slowly submerging tinnies and, far off in the distance, the vague outlines of a few gigayachts sailing away to create a libertarian seastead far away from the prying eyes of the tax authorities.
The default assumption is that a growing public appetite for a more Scandinavian distribution of wealth, now the failures of neoliberalism are becoming ever harder to gloss over, would benefit parties of the Left and, conversely, disadvantage parties of the Right.
I’m not so sure that’s the case. Bear with me while I lay three reasons that the political realignment that now seems inevitable might prove to be a godsend for centre-right parties.
Reason one: The Left has spent four decades trashing its wealth-redistributing brand
Say what you will about the Left, but for a long time everyone accepted that it was sincerely committed to furthering the economic interests of those on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder.
That changed when what were once known as ‘Third Way’ politicians, but what are today viewed as standard-issue neoliberals, started signing free-trade agreements, privatising government assets, ostentatiously paling around with right-wing billionaires, enriching themselves after leaving office (or while still holding office), musing about how intensely relaxed they were about people getting filthy rich, ending welfare as we know it, and generally shrugging their shoulders as wealth cascaded upwards.
With some justification, Hawke, Keating, Clinton and Blair could argue the Labor, Labour and Democrat parties had suffered a long and demoralising succession of election defeats and that they had no choice but to make a big show of chugging down the Freidmanite Kool-Aid. That may or may not be true. Either way, the result has been that working-class and lower-middle-class voters no longer assume that centre-left parties are looking out for their economic interests. Even worse, low and middle-income earners now assume that centre-left politicians aren’t much interested in them or are actively hostile to them, unless they tick one of the intersectional status hierarchy boxes. (Ideally, being non-white, trans or Muslim. Or, even better, being a non-white trans Muslim).
Given a choice between a party that isn’t going to advance their economic or cultural interests and one that at least pays lip service to their socially conservative values, many millions of workers, including lots of unionists, became Reagan (and later Trump) Democrats, Howard Battlers and Boris-voting Red Wallers.
Reason two: The enormous values gap between the Left’s old constituency and its new one
It should be noted that it’s not unusual for political parties, especially ones that have been around for a while, to gain and lose constituencies. If they were in a position to vote at all, many African-Americans voted Republican in the later part of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century. Conversely, White Southerners largely voted Democrat until the late 1960s. Likewise, up until circa 1975, if someone in the Anglosphere had a university degree they were more likely than not to support their nation’s centre-right party. But ever since the mid-70s, the university-educated have swung in ever more solidly behind parties of the centre-left or even hard-left.
So, in theory, it should be far from impossible for a centre-left party to win back its traditional constituency. In practice, it’s likely to be extremely difficult given the university-educated, culturally, if not economically middle-class voters centre-left parties having been attracting for around half a century are monomaniacally obsessed with “ever-more-expansive demonstrations of social progressivism”.
The centre-left’s new constituency, which long ago largely wrested control of centre-left parties from the industrial wing of the labour movement, is all in on “post-materialist” issues. Issues such as a rapid transition to renewable energy (regardless of the costs involved), diversity and inclusion, re-joining the EU, defunding the police, establishing a Voice for Indigenous Australians etc. It’s these issues that now get left-leaning activists, politicians and pundits fired up, not pursuing wage justice for the working man.
As a gazillion conservative commentators, as well as a handful of self-aware progressive ones, have observed, lower-income voters are typically uninterested in, or actively hostile to, the ever-more esoteric cause célèbres that tickle the dopamine receptors of the kind of people who quote Foucault at dinner parties.
If generative AI starts laying waste to the careers of professional-managerial class types, I suspect a lot of ‘post-materialist’ voters will abruptly become far more materialist. But that day is yet to dawn. And there isn’t much evidence the leadership class of the modern-day Left is much interested in bread-and-butter distributional issues, with the possible exception of housing unaffordability. There certainly aren’t any recent examples of prominent Labor, Labour or Democrat politicians being willing to seriously antagonise business elites. It’s impossible to imagine any recent Democrat president (or Labor/Labour Prime Minister) boasting about being hated by plutocrats and crowing about welcoming their hatred.
Reason three: Conservatives are more competent revolutionaries than progressives
Maybe I’ve watched too many Jordan Peterson videos, but I’ve increasingly come to believe that progressives and conservatives have very different psychological make-ups and that this results in them possessing different strengths and weaknesses.
There are exceptions on both sides of the political fence, the aforementioned FDR being one of them. But, as a rule of thumb, Leftists are great at the vision thing but not so good at the execution side of the equation. Conversely, Rightists tend to be clear-eyed pragmatists who get things done but aren’t so good at thinking up ways society might be improved.
Malcolm Turnbull, a man often accused of political hermaphroditism, was fond of observing that governments can survive as long they demonstrate either conviction or competence. If pushed, I suspect Turnbull would further observe that centre-right governments tend to be effective if uninspired administrators and centre-left ones tend to be chaotic change agents.
Whether or not that theory holds, it’s certainly the case that those on the Right have historically been perfectly content to oversee a moderate redistribution of wealth and political power to the lower orders, especially at times when a far more comprehensive redistribution was on the cards.
Around a century and a half ago, Benjamin Disraeli pioneered one-nation conservatism, aka Tory democracy. Disraeli made the eminently sensible point that both the upper and lower classes belonged to the same nation and should probably try to broker some sort of win-win deal. (In practice, this translated into greater protections for the working class.) Likewise, Otto von Bismark, not exactly a latte-sipping Leftie, introduced a substantial social safety net in 1880s Germany that took the wind out of the socialists’ sails for several decades.
Tory PMs from Churchill to Heath accepted almost all of the post-war Keynesian settlement, as did their equivalents (Eisenhower, Menzies) in the US and Australia.
Two decades before his fifth cousin offered Americans a New Deal, Teddy Roosevelt – a Republican – offered them a Square Deal. No doubt to the horror of the Republicans’ donor class, the Bull Moose busted trusts (i.e. monopolies or cosy oligopolies), brought railway owners to heel, and ensured Americans didn’t have to worry about being poisoned by the food or medicines they purchased. (He also wanted to introduce a national income tax, prevent businesses from practising ‘lawfare’ against unions and introduce an eight-hour working day and workers' compensation scheme.)
And the elevator pitch given to what were then called ‘industrialists and landholders’ a century ago by the likes of Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler was, “Either accept the soft-core socialism we are advocating or take your chances with Communists who will seize your assets and put a bullet in your head.”
Postscript: The Right’s dual-consistency issue
Astute readers will have already mentally noted that the Right has its own dual constituency headache. Centre-right parties in many nations have attracted millions of working-class and lower-middle-class voters in recent decades. Nonetheless, these parties were set up to represent the interests of Capital. And just as socially progressive policies are a turn-off for the masses, so are ‘business friendly’ ones. (Especially given four decades of business-friendly policy settings haven’t, shall we say, entirely worked out to the best advantage of those in the bottom four quintiles of the income distribution.)
Much in the way their predecessors informed the aristocrats and robber barons of old that they could either agree to cede some of their wealth and power voluntarily or risk having it all taken away from them forcibly, I’d presume the more prescient and shrewd centre-right politicians will soon start telling their financial backers that they can either play their part in making sure a critical mass of people feel they have a stake in society or attempt to negotiate with pitchfork-wielding mobs full of people who don’t own property, can’t afford to get married and have children, increasingly feel like strangers in their own country, and constantly worry about falling victim to automation or offshoring.