What will the upcoming political realignment look like?

Politics and religion
41

1970s? … Try 1840s. And the 1880s. And the 1900s. And the 1930s. And …

Different minorities at different times, mind you, and not necessarily what we consider minorities right now (today a German Catholic is as American as baseball; in the 1840s the Know-Nothings considered German Catholic immigrants to be insidious invaders who would subvert American culture and democracy.)

And of course African-Americans have been part of the political process since the 1860s, even with Jim Crow. Many a Republican big-city political boss - and before the New Deal there were plenty - kept the reins of power by courting the African-American vote.

This is closer to the truth, but still leaves a bunch of stuff out. Yes, in 1920 the Dems were the party of anti-African-American racists and the Republicans were more pro-civil-rights, and yes, by 1970 those positions had flipped.

But the partys’ positions on other issues changed at different times. For example, as late as the 1980s, the Dem’s party line was more vocally anti-immigration than the Republican’s (with the exception of the occasional Pat Buchanan; but go look up Reagan or Poppy Bush on the subject, and contrast them to guys like Richard Gephardt.)

This is a misnomer, at least when viewed through the political lens and using the political vocabulary of either 2020 or 1920 instead of 1960. Neither Herbert Hoover nor Grover Norquist would view any of the mid-20th-century “conservative Democrats” or “liberal Republicans” as conservatives.

They would have described them instead as New Deal politicians, which would have been correct. FDR’s New Deal completely swept away Hoover-era small government ideology as a significant national force for 60 years: any Republicans who wanted to hang on during this flood had to sign off on the idea of a welfare state. (Goldwater’s nom in '64 was seen as a fluke, and his crushing defeat as confirmation his ideology was dead: when Nixon was elected he created the EPA and put forth a proposal for a universal basic income.)

Which is an important thing to remember. The imagined golden age of bipartisanship in the 50s and early 60s was not people remotely like today’s progressives and conservatives reaching out across the aisle. It was instead of an age of New Deal dominance, where GOPers didn’t say “I repudiate the welfare state” but rather said, “I’m really quite like FDR, but with the following changes around the edges …” Whenever a modern GOPer invokes the Good Old Days to demand Dems reach across the aisle, the answer should be, “Fine, as long as you acquiesce to 80% of my economic agenda first.”

Eventually the powerless 20th century Hoover/Goldwater small-government conservatives figured out a way to form a winning coalition: team up with the racists (who had begun migrating away from the Dems in '48 and were wooed into the GOP by Nixon in '68,) the ardent cold warriors, and the evangelicals (who had been largely absent from national political debate since the '20s, when they were pro-prohibition) to elect Reagan in 1980.

42

There are always awful people, so I guess the question is, how low does the percentage of awful people have to be in a society to prevent that society from cracking?

43

I notice The Lincoln Project is now running pro-Biden ads. Not the “hey, at least he’s better than Trump” kind, but the “Biden is awesome, actually, and you should vote for him” kind. I know they’re bringing out the big guns for Trump, but it also makes me wonder if they’re trying to stake a claim in Biden’s neighborhood of the political spectrum and start a ‘new right’ there.

44

IIRC the switching of values between the Republicans and Democrats traces its roots to Theodore Roosevelt and his creation of the Bull Moose party that was made up of the progressive wing of the Republican party. Most of those guys eventually joined FDR & the Dems as part of the New Deal.

I’d imagine something similar would be required for major realignment if we were to stay in the 2-party model:

Trump Loses -> Creates MAGA party -> Fractures Republicans -> Ted Cruz joins Democrats. No other visible change.

45

They are. We can’t let them do that. That’s actually my biggest fear, if they succeed- I could see them driving off the youth vote entirely, and splitting the Dems early, or worse, a Republican corrupts Bernie’s message (someone like a Josh Hawley) and young folks make the devil’s bargain themselves.

46

This is, I think, not a thing to be worried about. What we will get from Biden will be what the House and Senate want, so the scope of legislation is largely going to be constrained by the Senate, which will surely be more conservative than either the House or Biden. In the near term, the Lincoln Project boys aren’t going to get any votes in the Senate at all, even if Biden felt himself beholden to them, which seems unlikely. And in the longer term, their contribution will be forgotten. They aren’t going to transform the Democratic Party.

This strikes me as actively looking for something to be afraid of. There will come a time when members of the Democratic coalition will be disaffected, of course, but it isn’t going to be because of anything the Lincoln Project does now, and it isn’t going to happen soon. It will happen when the coalition has become so large, the tent so big, that it can’t actually reasonably satisfy all of its constituencies. That strikes me as pretty far down the road, given the list of things they need to do that pretty much everyone agrees on.

47

They’re litteraly going to die in a few years.

48

On Jan 2021, Joe Biden will be my president also. He gets an automatic 18-month honeymoon because isn’t Donald Trump, 6 months because he isn’t Bernie Sanders and 6 months because he was mensch to the McCain family. I may criticize his policy just like I’ve done every President in my life, but you won’t hear me bitch about the man until sometime in 2023 at the earliest.

Other Never Trumper may have different time lines, but I bet virtually all of them or going to root for Joe Biden to succeed.

49

To be clear, I never thought there was any hidden purpose behind the Biden support. I’m sure it’s legit.

But some of their ads feel like they’ve got a much longer game in mind. Supporting BLM, attacking the confederate flag, propping up MLK and RFK as “real leaders”, dunking on the reopen protestors, and not really mincing words about any of it. Not exactly what I’d expect from never-Trumpers.

It feels like they’re angling to rebuild a 2024> conservative party without all the trash aspects. They’ve got a pretty good reason for expecting a void to fill coming up soon.

50

It’s actually exactly what I’d expect. Here is my theory.

They’ve been conservatives. Not “Fox News conservatives” but actual ones. They played along with the racism, stupidity and the rest of it, because it won elections, which got them laws, judges and the rest of it. The Greater Good, if you will.

Then came Trump. And they saw that their “side” wasn’t just milking these rubes to get come out ahead. Their movement was those rubes. The racism and stupidity, it wasn’t something you pretended wasn’t there to win an election. It was the heart of the entire Party. It wasn’t a conservative party. It was a racist party full of idiots. It was a threat to America. The road to fascism or some other form of authoritarianism. These are generally Cold War people, who dedicated their lives to fighting those systems (YMMV on how well they did overall).

It wasn’t until Trump that they fully realized it. Their solution isn’t to coddle those racist idiots. It’s to airlock them out of politics completely. No more pandering. No more dogwhistling. Out the airlock with all of them.

They want the new party to be one not beholden and reliant on that shit. They want to make the party what they always lied to themselves and told them it always was, when in their hearts they knew or at least suspected it wasn’t.

Now if they can succeed is another question entirely, but I think this is the thinking behind it.

They know America needs a party to challenge the Democrats, but they also know that party can’t be the party of racist idiots or it will devolve into the First American Reich. They also know that any unopposed party will trend that way as well.

It’s a big swing imo, but more power to them.

51

How is that a GOP stand, or anything that can be reinterpreted as a GOP stand.

52

You nailed it . It is 100%, how I feel. When our man, John McCain told the racist Republican voter. “Barrack Obama is a good family man, that I disagreed with” we cheered. We cheered John, when he stood up to Putin,or China or any other authoritarian thug . “Why courage matters” is the title of one McCain’s books, and while we don’t expect every politician to have McCain courage, we do expect a certain toughness. Reagan, both the Bushes and Romney all had that. Plus we really believed in things like smaller government, and giving more power to the states, and private enterprise creates jobs and wealth not government.

It was one thing to make a deal with Christian evangelist to support limiting abortion, and protecting Christian groups to meet a school, in exchange for their support for free trade, tax cuts, and an assertive foreign policy. I’ll admit, I always felt a bit guilty that working-class Republicans would go along with capital gains cuts that helped me and my wealthy techy friends, i.e milking the rubes.

But Trump, first has no character, second was dyed in the wool protectionist that was two big strikes. But the last straw was going along with racist and the xenophobes in the party FUCK NO. Then they sheer horror to realize that racist and xenophobes weren’t a small minority like we always been told, but more like the majority of the party. It is why the party needs be destroyed. It is atonement on our part.

I believe there are plenty of decent Republicans out there, and I don’t think they all need to be destroyed, just the racist and the Republicans in Congress who enabled Trump.

53

I’ll say this , with Bush, as horrible as I thought he was, I never felt like he wanted to kill American freedom the way I think Trump did (though I was kinda wrong, he was just more subtle)

I’ll never trust the never-Trumpers, to me they’re a group who is perfectly fine with the dogwhistles, and while some are horrified at the Trumpies, I suspect most of them are more concerned that the base will take away their tax cuts than they are the actual racism, and think the Dems might be more pliable.

Are these folks decent in a sense- yes. I think they don’t want to destroy American freedom, they’re not traitors the way Trump and the current crop of Republicans are. In terms of what is good for Americans they’re just as bad though.

If these folks took over the Democrats I’d leave the party entirely. Biden’s going to have to show he isn’t just going to be a tool for these folks. (I think he’ll show this, I just realize there’s a chance he won’t, and a lot of young folks are more skeptical than I am)

54

Eliminating gerrymandering and mandating ranked choice voting might remove our most extreme politicians (who, frankly, are almost all Republicans), but that will not however see an end to exploitative politics - entrenched interests will always find a way to co-opt a political party almost regardless of political structure. Australia e.g. has mandatory voting and multiple parties but that does not stop their Liberal party from being just a step removed from American Republicans (or prevent people like Pauline Hanson from winning elections.) I don’t know, maybe that’s just inherent in human societal structures - there’s been an ‘elite’ class since the dawn of civilization.

Problem with that being we have never faced the challenges about to hit not just human civilization but the world’s life support systems. Because we have always done X, will we always do X and it will be fine isn’t going to fly for much longer. (Sorry, unproductive tangent but it’s always top of mind for me.)

At any rate, for the more immediate problem of extremism in US politics:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/pops.12681

The Paranoid Style in American Politics Revisited: An Ideological Asymmetry in Conspiratorial Thinking

It is often claimed that conspiracy theories are endorsed with the same level of intensity across the left-right ideological spectrum. But do liberals and conservatives in the United States embrace conspiratorial thinking to an equivalent degree? There are important historical, philosophical, and scientific reasons dating back to Richard Hofstadter’s book The Paranoid Style in American Politics to doubt this claim. In four large studies of U.S. adults (total N=5049)—including national samples—we investigated the relationship between political ideology, measured in both symbolic and operational terms, and conspiratorial thinking in general. Results reveal that conservatives in the United States were not only more likely than liberals to endorse specific conspiracy theories, but they were also more likely to espouse conspiratorial worldviews in general (r=.27, 95% CI: .24, .30). Importantly, extreme conservatives were significantly more likely to engage in conspiratorial thinking than extreme liberals (Hedges’ g=.77, SE=.07, p<.001). The relationship between ideology and conspiratorial thinking was mediated by a strong distrust of officialdom and paranoid ideation, both of which were higher among conservatives, consistent with Hofstadter’s account of the paranoid style in American politics.

55

Yes, I agree that’s certainly what they are doing.

I think this captures the emotional state quite well.

As to whether they can succeed, the problem they will face is that the natural, non-trash constituency for conservatism within a given polity is small. What I mean is, if a population is naturally small-c conservative (attached to tradition and long-standing norms, resistant to change, cautious rather than adventurous when it comes to policy) then all the parties in that population are going to have an element of conservatism in them. To get a governing majority, an actual Conservative party (a party primarily devoted to reducing taxes, reducing social spending, reducing regulation, promoting free market capitalism, and protecting the wealth and power of the privileged) will need conservatism plus something else. Historically, the something else has been achieved by deception or by appealing to the trash.

So e.g. Reagan appeals to fiscal conservatism and racism and wins and then blows up the budget deficit. Bush 2 appeals to compassion and wins and then abandons victims to Katrina and kills a few hundred thousand people needlessly, ushering in state-sponsored kidnapping and torture along the way. The point of the examples isn’t just to criticize those particular leaders, but to make it clear that the path to electoral victory is paved with lies; conservative parties have to deceive voters in order to win.

How does a re-imagined conservative GOP overcome that? What do they add to conservatism that isn’t racism or hate or lies to attract enough voters? Are they going to be for higher taxes on the wealthy, to fund more social spending? Are they going to be for the broadening of voting rights?

56

They’ll either expand the definition of white, and do politics as usual against the “other”, or they’ll try to make whites the “other”. The first is a lot more likely.

Conservatives cannot win long-term without racism, electoral corruption, or an ineffective left.

57

The Patriot Act? Illegal surveillance? Suspension of habeas corpus? The ludicrous and ineffective security apparatus we have at airports? Not to mention torture, rendition, black sites in former Soviet bloc countries, Guantanamo Bay? Bush was not subtle. It’s just that people have forgotten.

58

The interesting is that the GOP tried to expand the definition of white in the 80s by going after Hispanics … and succeeded to some degree (Cubans in Florida.)

But it was a movement pushed by party leadership and resisted by racists in the party base. And over time the base pretty definitively undid with Trump what Reagan, the Buses, McCain etc. had attempted to build up earlier. The result today is that the GOP is in a huge hole with Hispanics - Biden is up on Trump with Hispanics by 39 points - and there’s no obvious new demographic to go after that the base would accept. (And just saying, “Hey! At least we’re not racist any more!” is unlikely to pull over enough Dems to compensate for the loss of the base.)

So as scott says, the GOP needs some other element to form a large enough coalition to win. Reagan was able to get over the top with the help of cold warriors, people who thought Carter was weak on national defense and anti-communism. Bush Jr. benefited enormously from people worried about terrorism. But national security as traditionally defined is a dead issue for the GOP today - attempts to get the public interested in a war with Iran have failed, Trump’s defined China as a purely economic issue, and obviously today’s GOP isn’t going to talk much about Russia … (Even if the Lincoln Project were to turn anti-Russia in a bid to win moderate Dems to the GOP, they would face a huge credibility gap - you failed to see the bad thing coming, now you want us to trust you? - much as the Dems had a similar credibility issue after the Iran hostage situation and the USSR’s crackdown on Poland and invasion of Afghanistan.)

Another pillar of Reagan’s coalition is also not what it was: for the last 30 years, evangelicals have lost every battle in the culture wars not related to abortion. From the perspective of a 1960s evangelical, modern America is a hellscape, with gay marriage, women working, pot being legalized left and right, porn just a click away … and all those things are widely popular. Meanwhile, church attendance continues to dwindle away.

59

This is where my prospective answer is that they leverage Trump’s fake working-class populism into a real working-class populism–the kind that also appeals to some Bernie Sanders people. Soak corporations and tax imports to promote small businesses and restore a more balanced industry to the US. I’m not saying it’s extremely likely, but there are people on the right thinking this way and some politicians like Hawley and Rubio (probably neither charismatic enough to make it a movement) pivoting toward it.

60

Seems highly unlikely to me. The Republicans have done well for decades by adopting a position of subservience to the elites. The pro tax-cut, anti-business-regulation planks in the party platform have ensured a constant flow of money to their election efforts. They can’t realistically let that go.

If they take a beating at the polls bad enough to make them contemplate deep changes in direction as a national party I’d say they pivot on a few social issues before they abandon their lucrative arrangements with the rich.