The coming shape(s) of American politics

For a long time, I've thought that the current liberal/conservative dichotomy have been obsolete as ways of thinking about the American electorate. Always an oversimplification of how people really think, it worked as long as outliers (people who could not be accurately labeled either but were not moderates--e.g. someone strongly committed to environmentalism and socially conservative) remained small in number.

I think what were seeing in both the Democratic and Republican parties right now is a consequence of what we might call fragmentation. For Republicans, we have a what I'll call the conservative base. Conservative in the contemporary sense across the board (they stand for low taxes, are socially conservative and want a strong military, regardless of the difficulty of doing all those things) these people are uncomfortable with McCain, and had supported either Fred Thompson or Mitt Romney. The failure of those candidates reveals the way in which the conservative base has spent too much time in its conservative echo chamber of talk radio and Fox News. The re-emergence of Southern Populism caught them by surprise. As the base becomes more alienated, they lose the ability to actually be the base, and thus the Republican party has become rather fractious. Many groups that were once reliable partners in the Republican coalition have begun to look elsewhere. Some are embarrassed by Bush's incompetence, but others are trouble by the nuttiness of some key figures in Republican politics.

It isn't as if the Democrats don't have problems of their own. The current primary between Clinton and Obama demonstrates the well known split in the Democratic constituency between young, more or less well educated, and older, and not so well educated. And of course there's a race factor here. But let's be clear about this--Obama appeals to blacks for obvious reasons, but in the past many of those voters would ordinarily be strong supporters of Clinton.

So, what links these things? We're seeing I think a tension between demographics and ideology. The debates in the Republican party are currently about ideology, while the Democrats are dealing with demographics. Obama and Clinton are ideologically fairly similar. But they appeal to different demographic elements of the party. With the Republicans, by contrast, even small deviations from orthodox ideology are the cause of fragmentation. The problem is, those deviations are in the main responses to broader changes in the political and economic environment.

So, if the old liberal/conservative split fails to explain our political future, what does? I thin we're moving towards a split between what I'll call cosmopolitans and populists. Those are the nice words. The less nice words are elitist and reactionary. We're already hearing elitist and populist in this political season.

Cosmopolitans are open to the world--they're be in favor of free trade, untroubled by immigration, socially liberal, will favor more integration with various global bodies and be reluctant to use military force, preferring "soft power". They won't mind paying lower taxes, but will want services from government, especially in fields like education and health care. However, they will also be in general willing to let market forces operate most of the time. Demographically, they'll live in metropolitan areas, be well educated, and in general young.

Populists, by contrast, will be opposed to increasing globalization. They are going to be largely socially conservative, uncomfortable with immigration, and reluctant to engage in international organizations. They will be either isolationists or advocates of hard power. They will want a safety net, be in favor of maintaining Social Security and Medicare in its current form, and will not be swayed by arguments about market forces. Demographically, they will be older, less well educated, and living in non-metropolitan areas or rust belt areas and blue-collar suburbs.

Of course this is an oversimplification, and a number of major issues aren't really touched. What is interesting to me however, is how few real life politicians seem to recognize these shifts. Huckabee did speak to the populists. But who speaks to the cosmopolitans? Not Obama, not really, though they seem to like him.

No, the real figure who comes closest to speaking to the cosmopolitans is none other than President Bush. If you leave out his social conservative positions, and see the Iraq invasion as a mistake, you see Bush is more or less advocating cosmopolitanism. Certainly, that was the direction Rove wanted to take the party.