I think we’re in a situation analogous to the 1930s, but there’s no good ideas on the left floating around outside a tiny echo chamber of upper middle class intellectuals. The public simply won’t vote for them because they’re in the thrall of dead, discredited zombie ideas. They aren’t dumb; they’re just so soaked in the previous worldview they can’t conceive of any alternatives, and no one is even trying to sell them on one. Imagine the 1930s with the progressive movement but no working class union members; it’s a joke, as back then the ratio of working class to everyone else was way bigger.
It took the incredible disillusionment of World War 1 and the Great Depression to break public opinion, break the Supreme Court, and elect unbelievably large majorities to change things. During that period public opinion was molded by rabble rousers, union members, share-the-wealth cultists, Land Tax proponents, Huey Long, shared appliance freaks, and other “crazy” people. At no point were elected officials or normal politics in the driver’s seat. It’s difficult to believe today, but FDR was the conservative end of public opinion about what reforms needed to be taken. We’re lucky we didn’t get a populist technocrat theocracy.
By contrast today, near as I can tell the only non-Democratic party groups of significance out there on the left are 100% focused on non-economic and non-foreign policy issues - the environment, civil rights, etc; with the exception of Israel, I guess, which given post-9/11 public opinion is pissing into the wind. The only group that still cares about the economy and what it means for workers, unions, are back pre-1900 levels of power; arrayed against them is basically every single conservative voter and issue group in the country.
Containment does sound like a strange example, but I think it’s useful. The specific policy was a decent choice from the available options - which is why having component officials in charge is a good idea - but it was chosen in a political space of near-hysteria about the “threat of Communism”, and that situation was not created by elected officials or organized party politics. A variety of right of center and centrist groups figured out how to use the post-war situation (USSR in half of Europe, playing hardball with the rest, China lost to communists when we had this incredible pre-war fascination with them) and the incredibly strong nationalism created by WW2 to push for a strategy that would be literally inconceivable pre-war. The politicians picked it up and ran with it.
On foreign policy today, the logical end point of the thinking brought about by the Cold War has us with a Roman Empire mindset. Vietnam but a big dent in it, but the end of the Cold War apparently cancelled that right back out. Then we blew it in Iraq 2, but we’re still not back to Vietnam-level; public opinion is still incredible nationalist compared to any other rich country on the earth.
To elaborate on what IL is saying, I suppose a war that killed an enormous number of American troops for little or nothing but might shake the public out of it, which isn’t exactly something to hope for, but barring that you need sustained outside thought-model convincing of the public or consistent pressure on the political system. We’re just not getting it, so the only countervailing force to Nationalist Crazy is well-educated upper middle class types, which is bringing a dead frog to a knife fight.
I suppose over the 50+ year long-run demographics might help, but unlike racial politics I don’t see a reason that a bigger non-white population has to necessarily change nationalist opinion.
