The Third Party

These people are not conservatives

Conservatism is dead.  If you don’t believe me, listen to the man who killed it.  Here’s Donald Trump at a recent Republican event in California:

I’m a conservative, but at this point, who cares?

Let that sink in.  Since at least the time of Ronald Reagan the GOP has been the furiously self-proclaimed party of conservatism.  And in the last few years Tea Party grassroots conservatives have crusaded against their own Republican establishment for being insufficiently fanatical in ideology and tactics.  But now, when given the opportunity, those same grassroots true believers have chosen for their nominee a man who not only diverges markedly from conservative doctrine, but who explicitly dismisses conservatism as irrelevant!  What gives?

Trump’s triumph has rudely revealed that there are really two Republican Parties, both of whom think of themselves as the true conservatives and the other as traitors to the cause.  What we think of as traditional conservatism, the conservatism that has dominated the party for decades, the conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan, is a program of free markets and free trade, scaling back the welfare-regulatory state, and maintaining American supremacy in the world.  Think of Reagan crushing the air-traffic controllers union or George W. Bush attempting to privatize Social Security.  The conservatives have a libertarian view of the federal government and a Social Darwinist view of capitalist success and failure.  Their core constituency is the investor class, and for decades these Reaganite conservatives have run the Republican Party, and they’ve run it for the benefit of that class, with the casual assurance that what benefits investors will eventually benefit everyone else.

But it turns out that much – perhaps even a majority – of the Republican constituency means something very different when they call themselves conservative.  For them conservatism means the blind conviction that America is the best country on Earth.  They see everyday, straight, white, Christian, American men, with their simple moral toughness, as the backbone of society and the best people in the world.  Some of those men regret the demise of the traditional American social structure, in which racial, sexual and religious minorities deferred to them, while some simply worry – not entirely without reason – that they’re now disdained and despised by American elites; and in practice the two perceptions readily blur together.  But either way, for decades the basic premise of this conservatism is that the social status of those men is unfairly under assault, and they’ve looked to the Reagan conservatives to protect and assert it. 

These white working class conservatives weren’t really interested in lowering capital gains tax rates or cutting Obamacare subsidies, though they made a good show of caring about such things.  Indeed, these conservatives actively support the welfare state; they’re all too anxious to receive the Social Security and Medicare benefits their Reaganite masters yearn to curtail.  And they particularly object to the free trade and lax immigration policies of the Reaganites, policies that send good jobs overseas and drive down wages at home.  But, for decades the conservative intelligentsia, in the think tanks and the magazines, on talk radio and Fox News, underwritten by big money, has worked to indoctrinate the grassroots in the intricacies of conservative dogma, while enforcing ideological rigidity among conservative politicians.  The populists may have been dissatisfied, but they couldn’t very well vote for liberals.

But Reaganite conservatism hasn’t kept its promises. Trump hasn’t really killed it, it was killed by its own abysmal failures, particularly the War in Iraq and the Great Recession.  It couldn’t survive its comprehensive inability to protect the interests and values of white working people.  It’s actually been dead since 2008, but tricked out to appear healthy with hefty doses of donor money, media bombast, and undying populist aversion to cultural liberalism and its racially and sexually suspicious beneficiaries.  What Trump has done is kill the illusion of conservatism.  As a man ignorant enough to overlook ideological considerations, rich enough to be indifferent to movement money, and self-assured enough (to put it mildly!) to dismiss received notions of propriety, he was perfectly constituted to override the conservative establishment and express and exploit the blunt instincts of those unhappy white populists, instincts he precisely shares.

And now that he’s exploited those instincts all the way to the nomination, they constitute the new conservatism.  The old conservatism, however, came to own the party through a very different strategy.  The Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan conservatives had to fight for years against the moderate Eisenhower establishment Republicans who controlled the party in the post-war years, and who had made their peace with the New Deal and Cold War stalemate.  Convinced that both the welfare state and international communism could be aggressively rolled back, they worked the grassroots, the media, the think tanks, the elections, etc., as they slowly took over the party from the inside.  Their first big triumph was the nomination of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964.  In 1968, segregationist and Democratic Alabama Governor George Wallace pulled white southern conservative populists out of the New Deal coalition when he ran for president as an independent, and they never went back (not at the presidential level).  Richard Nixon – who brilliantly straddled

Governor Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door to 
prevent the enrollment of black students 
at the University of Alabama, 1963

the moderate vs. conservative divide – added them and their white northern collaborators to his own coalition four years later.  At the same time, northern moderate and liberal Republicans – i.e. Eisenhower, Rockefeller and Lindsay Republicans – left the GOP for the Democratic Party.  And though Goldwater badly lost his general election, Nixon’s and Reagan’s cynical and skillful campaigning brought the white populists securely into the conservative movement and the Republican Party, leaving the Reaganites in charge.

But conservatism has now split in two, or rather it has reverted to its two naturally antagonistic groupings, with each side considering itself the heirs of Reagan and seeing the other as the successors of the hated Eisenhower-ish moderate establishment.  Both groups are technically conservative, given their belief in innate natural hierarchy.  And that means that neither group is really libertarian, or classically liberal, though some conservatives perceive themselves to be; in practice they don’t defend individual freedom against social coercion.  And neither group is Burkean, or classically conservative in the aristocratic European sense, in that neither affirms pragmatism or conciliation; both groups are intensely idealistic, even utopian, consisting of righteous, low-church crusaders working to create the City of God on Earth.  And both groups hold to a Social Darwinism that sees society’s winners as virtuously deserving their winnings.  It’s just that Trumpians believe that the natural aristocracy consists of those aforementioned straight, white, Christian, American men, while the Reaganites believe it’s successful capitalists.  Trumpism is about identity, Reaganism is about money.  And the Trumpians are less principled, more expedient, more willing to play dirty to advance the interests of their tribe.  Such is the logic of tribalism.

We can agree – with Donald Trump! – to call the Reaganites the True Conservatives, since they’ve claimed the title for so long, and they probably are closer to the classically conservative Burkean ideal, with their worship of plutocrats as aristocrats born to rule at home and abroad.  A true Burkean would condemn Reaganite worship of free markets as destabilizing and intemperate.  But a true Burkean would even more forcefully reject Trumpian recklessness and thoughtlessness; as he would reject Trumpian majoritarianism, not because it fails to respect liberal individual rights, but because it fails to defer to its rightful aristocratic masters.  So even with their right-wing inegalitarianism, it’s fair to call the Trumpians Populists, since they share much substance with left-wing populists, in particular instinctual embrace of the popular and the everyday, and animosity toward the rich and powerful.

Given these ideological incompatibilities and conservatism’s abject policy failures, it was quite likely that something like Trumpism would come along and topple Reaganism from its precarious perch at the top of the GOP.  But the Trumpian revolt, unlike the Reaganite overthrow of the moderates, has occurred in one fell swoop.  That’s because they didn’t have to conquer someone else’s party; they didn’t have to convert anyone, or bring in like-minded outsiders, or drive out ideological opponents.  The party has been theirs for the asking all along.

Of course, the Reaganites fought against the Trumpian takeover tooth and nail, caucus vote by delegate count, negative ad by convention rule.  They’ve been on top so long, and they’ve spent so much time and energy convincing themselves they’re America’s ordained saviors, they can’t let go of the political party meant to be the instrument of that salvation.  And there are still Reaganites among the grassroots; that’s who voted for Ted Cruz.  Some have accepted their new subordinate status within the exotic new right-wing order and are supporting Trump as an evil lesser than Hillary.  But some diehards are promising to sit out the general election, some are working to deny Trump the presidency, some are considering a true conservative third-party campaign, and some are so unhappy with Trump they say they’ll even vote for Hillary!  Of course, much of the Reaganite opposition to Trump has less to do with the Trumpian program and more to do with the man himself, with his flagrant irresponsibility and doltish ignorance.  Though it’s hard not to wonder if some of those never-Trump folks would so adamantly oppose an irresponsible and doltish nominee who toed the Reaganite line.  After all, most of them defended Sarah Palin.

But Trumpism – with or without the man himself – is here to stay.  Reaganism is dead.  Because of its complex of think tanks and media outlets, the Reaganites will continue to make noise and influence the discourse for some time to come.  But for a long time to come, no GOP nominee will be openly advocate free trade or looser immigration policies.  And many supposedly conservative politicians and media personalities have already happily pledged support for Trump, demonstrating that they were really populists – or shameless opportunists – all along.  Even some of the right-wing media and think-tank crowd have turned out to be populists.  Some politicians, like Paul Ryan, are trying to finesse the differences.  Rush Limbaugh has shown himself just as brilliant at straddling the present-day Reaganite-Trumpian divide as Nixon was at straddling the Eisenhower-Reaganite divide of his day.  When there are full-fledged, self-consciously right-wing populist think tanks to confront the Reaganite ones, the dying roar of Reaganism will wind down to a whisper.

In the grand history of the United States, it may turn out that the ultimate role of modern conservatism will be to give birth to a powerful and resentful white populist nationalism.  Nixon and Reagan thought they had stolen Wallace’s power, but maybe all they really did was unleash it.  It’s likely that Trump is the Goldwater of right-wing populism, not it’s Reagan, and he’ll come in for a solid defeat in November.  But a smarter, shrewder, more presentable Trump is waiting in our future.  We may be saved from that coming populist Reagan by the continuing demographic shifts transforming our society, shifts that seem likely to make white nationalism an electoral dead end (at least at the presidential level).  But can anyone – other than demagogues, fanatics, and fools – desire greater racial polarization and animosity?  A popular white nationalist movement, even one with no chance of winning the presidency, can bring nothing but division and destruction and horror.  And, for the moment, it’s a white nationalist movement with a reckless sideshow clown as its leader. We stare, more starkly than we have in a long time, into the sinister side of our collective unconscious; we walk dangerously close to the edge of the deep, dark American abyss, with little more than Hillary and her bland, neo-liberal platitudes to keep us from falling directly in. 

Stupid’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose

That's all that Bobby left me

Busted flat in Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s conservative Republican Governor Bobby Jindal badly needs to take his own advice.  Last year, after the Republican Party’s second big election loss to Barack Obama, after losing the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, after losing Senate elections they easily could have won, after losing the nationwide popular vote for the House, the party began to wake up and reconsider its program, its message and its attitude.  Did they need to reach out to minorities?  Did they need to present themselves better?  Did they need better get-out-the-vote tactics and technologies?  Did they need – gasp! – to reconsider their priorities and principles?  At the time, Jindal made headlines by telling Republicans that they needed to “stop being the stupid party.”  But last week Jindal himself opened up the floodgates of stupid, publishing a truly bizarre column, inundating the nation and his party in a deluge of paranoia, resolute denial and utter foolishness.  Consider that according to Jindal, “the left wants: The government to explode; to pay everyone; to hire everyone; they believe that money grows on trees.”  And it goes on like that.  And on.  And on.  What has happened to Bobby Jindal?  Well the Republican Party and the conservative movement are in trouble and they don’t have a lot of options.  Is this how a frustrated true believer acts out when he’s got nothing left to lose?

Jindal’s winter criticism of the Republican Party was a little less substantive than usually portrayed in the media.  His use of the phrase “the stupid party” – borrowed from the characterization that the great 19^th century liberal theorist John Stuart Mill made of Britain’s conservatives – made his advice to Republicans seem more radical and more challenging than it actually was.  But this was a superficial understanding of largely superficial advice.  Jindal’s seven point plan from last November to refurbish conservatism consisted mostly of vague ideas about “modernizing, not moderating.”  That is, it was mostly about message, not content.  When it came to the stupid, he advised:

Stop being the stupid party. It's time for a new Republican party that talks like adults. It's time for us to articulate our plans and visions for America in real terms. We had a number of Republicans damage the brand this year with offensive and bizarre comments. Enough of that.

That is, Republicans didn’t need their Senate candidate from Missouri, Todd Akin, expounding his fascinating theories about “legitimate rape” and they didn’t need their Senate candidate from Indiana, Richard Mourdock, imagining that sometimes “God intends” for rape to result in pregnancy, and they didn’t need their Senate candidate from Pennsylvania, Tom Smith, comparing pregnancy from rape with out-of-wedlock birth, and they didn’t need their Senate candidate from Delaware, Christine O’Donnell, denying being a witch, and they didn’t need their Senate candidate from Nevada, Sharron Angle, talking about “Second Amendment remedies” to the continuing problem of liberal electoral success.  You get the idea.  But it doesn’t seem that Jindal was saying that conservatism needs to disown its loonier voices so much as muffle them.  It needs spokespeople who “talk like adults,” while selling the same old policies.

And he made sure that no one doubted his commitment to conservatism’s “core principles”: low taxes, low government spending and projections of strength abroad. Many of his other points were either uninspired (“stop looking backward”), tactically aggressive and uninspired (“going after every vote”), uninspired re-phrasing of conservative platitudes (“bottom-up government that fits the digital age”),  or even more uninspired re-phrasing of conservative platitudes (“treat all people as individuals rather than as members of special interest groups”).  And amidst all this sloganeering he protested that Republicans had to “stop reducing everything to mindless slogans and tag lines for 30-second ads.”  Well, maybe it’s not fair to criticize politicians for spouting thoughtless clichés; a creative politician is a rare creature indeed.

His plan, however, proposed one interesting change: conservatism should become more consistently “populist”; it should oppose all “big” institutions, including “big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, or big anything”.  The Republican Party “must not be the party that simply protects the well off so they can keep their toys.”  Instead it should grow and protect the middle class.  Actually, it should “make clear” that conservatism was never about bigness and it was always about helping the middle class.  It actually is quite radical in conservative circles to say anything remotely critical of the wealthy and how they got and keep their wealth.  What exactly was Jindal getting at here?  Is it possible he was criticizing the stridency with which conservative media and Republican Party leaders insist on keeping marginal income tax rates low?  Was he saying that such policy is not genuinely conservative?  Not likely.  In practice, Jindal has proposed lowering taxes on rich Louisianans and raising them on the lower orders.  He seems to be interested in merely giving conservatism a populist veneer.  Jindal’s populism sees government as the handmaiden of elitist, dishonest interests and it sees free markets as automatically benefiting everyone, not just the rich.  It’s not that he doesn’t want to let the rich keep their toys; it’s that letting them keep their toys must not be an end in itself; it must be seen as the means for letting everyone else get toys too.  But believing that what’s good for the top 1% is good for the rest of us is a rather odd version of populism.  If that’s all it amounts to, then, ultimately, this is (once again) more about changing the message than about changing the policy.

There wasn’t much real substance to Jindal’s winter criticism, but what it lacked in boldness it made up for in bland circumspection.  Who could disagree with sounding less stupid?  But with his recent column Jindal jumps on board the stupid train and runs it completely off the rails.  He enlightens us as to what liberals really want:

The government to explode; to pay everyone; to hire everyone; they believe that money grows on trees; the earth is flat; the industrial age, factory-style government is a cool new thing; debts don’t have to be repaid; people of faith are ignorant and uneducated; unborn babies don’t matter; pornography is fine; traditional marriage is discriminatory; 32 oz. sodas are evil; red meat should be rationed; rich people are evil unless they are from Hollywood or are liberal Democrats; the Israelis are unreasonable; trans-fat must be stopped; kids trapped in failing schools should be patient; wild weather is a new thing; moral standards are passé; government run health care is high quality; the IRS should violate our constitutional rights; reporters should be spied on; Benghazi was handled well; the Second Amendment is outdated; and the First one has some problems too.

What the what?  Will Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock now denounce Bobby Jindal for being stupid?  That’s quite a grab-bag of conservative crack-pottery, especially for an elected official, especially for a governor, especially for a potential presidential nominee.  His tirade includes McCarthyite paranoia (“they want the government to explode”), moralized gold-buggery (“money grows on trees”), simple crazy (“red meat should be rationed”), sexual constriction (“pornography is fine”), cultural populism (“people of faith are ignorant and uneducated”), blinkered cultural jingoism (“the Israelis are unreasonable”), deliberate obfuscations (“the Second Amendment is outdated”), extreme exaggerations (“32 oz. sodas are evil”), and damnable lies (“the IRS should violate our constitutional rights”).  This is just a wonderful exposition of the darkness lurking in the American conservative unconscious.  When the fever dream speaks, this is how it sounds.

And it confirms what we already knew: conservatives see themselves as fighting to protect American moral purity against liberal corruption; all issues are moral issues and they demand ironclad commitments to the right moral principles and the policies those principles express.  Liberals are bad because they don’t know what’s good.  That’s why they so foolishly support sexual corruptions such as gay marriage, pornography and abortion.  That’s why they oppose such obviously righteous policies like a balanced budget and a strong dollar.  And it’s moral blindness that delivers liberals to that ugly statism that so hungers to control our economics, our religion, our media, our guns, even our food!  Here we see the real source of that foolish, misguided, destructive philosophy called liberalism: liberals think “moral standards are passé,” that reason and individual choice can substitute for moral correctness.  But conservative misapprehension is understandable: to a simplistic moralist, letting people make independent moral judgments is indistinguishable from relativism.  But conservatives actually have a point here: liberal tolerance may prove to be only the half-way stopover between the starting point of conservative moralism and the final destination of post-modern relativism.  Once you begin emancipating individuals from external constraints it’s hard not to see the notion of objective morality itself as just one more arbitrary constraint.

OK, so liberals really, really suck.  What else has Jindal got?  Boatloads of denial.  The time for conservative self-reflection is definitely over.  The new Jindal rages against “excessive navel gazing”, that is, against the very sort of self-reflection the old Jindal advised.  He now says, “No more self-analysis; we’ve had our catharsis. The season for navel gazing has passed.”  Huh? Did anyone understand the need for conservative re-appraisal as merely therapeutic?  Wasn’t it meant to address the widespread perception of structural Republican failure?  Apparently not, because, according to Jindal there’s been little real failure:

Let’s remember a few things:

1) We have 30 Governors

2) We took control of the House in 2010 and held it in 2012

3) Obama ran a tremendous campaign in 2008, and our outgoing president was unpopular

4) The just completed presidential campaign strategy of playing it safe and assuming a poor economy would win it for us was an obvious mistake.

There is some truth in this analysis, of course; Republicans are not dead yet.  Yes, presently 30 governors are Republican (and actually govern roughly 60% of the population); Republicans did clobber the Democrats in the 2010 elections for the House of Representatives and they did hold the House in 2012; the 2008 Obama campaign was very good; Romney’s 2012 campaign was quite bad.  But there are unnerving responses to all these reassurances: Democrats won 52% of the votes cast in the 13 gubernatorial elections that took place in 2012 (only 4 of which took place in blue states); Democrats won about 1.4 million more votes nationwide in the 2012 House elections (Republicans won more House seats only because of skewed districting); the outgoing president in 2008 was indeed unpopular, but so was the party that faithfully supported him on his most egregious failures (Iraq, the deregulation of Wall Street that caused the recession); Obama is the only president to win re-election with the unemployment rate as high as it was.  Obviously, part of Jindal’s job is to spin.

But the GOP has real problems, and they boil down to one word: demographics.  Conservatism may not be dead, yet it withers before our eyes.  The current conservative movement is essentially the institutional vessel for all the cantankerous, old, straight, white, Christian, male prejudices and resentments that Jindal’s column so well expresses.  Meanwhile the country becomes younger, less sexually constricted, browner, more secular, tolerant and experimental, less patriarchal.  We become more liberal every day, more accepting of gay marriage and recreational marijuana, more open to government intervention in the economy, more open to non-traditional sex and religion.  But as the country moves, the conservative rump refuses to budge.  They isolate themselves and polarize the country.  Their passionate conviction, their natural and well-rehearsed cohesion, their ideological inflexibility – all these allow them to continue to exert influence beyond their numbers.  This is how they came to dominate American politics from the late 60’s till just a few years ago.

But the traits that served conservatives so well in their ascent now only hasten their fall.  They really only have two choices: change or double down.  And despite hopes to the contrary it’s pretty clear which path they have chosen for now.  Conservatism may not be dead, yet it decays before our eyes.  And Jindal has decided his job is to make sure no conservative perceives the decay.  He aims to stamp out conservative doubt.  And the putative political strengths of American conservatism – the passionate conviction, the natural and well-rehearsed cohesion, the ideological inflexibility – make Jindal’s job all too easy.  Those traits readily inhere in anyone who believes that all issues are moral issues, that all problems surrender to the stern application of clearheaded righteous force.  It’s such conviction that makes conservatives notoriously resistant to unwelcome facts and reasoning (consider the furor over the debt ceiling).  Conservative incapacity for self-doubt isn’t incidental, it’s of the essence.  In the past conservatism sometimes actually contributed to the American discourse: it proposed reasonable critiques of the welfare state, it provided fortitude for fighting the Cold War.  There used to be more to conservatism than just its id; there was intellect and even conscience.  Sadly, the latter have faded in recent years to irrelevance and ineffectuality.  They are utterly absent from Jindal’s angry discharge.  To Jindal and his audience, self-analysis, the reconsideration of received truths, self-doubt, etc. are not just inherently threatening to conservatism, they are vaguely un-American, even un-masculine!  “Stop the bedwetting,” scolds Jindal and “put on your big-boy pants.”  Yes, put on your pants and put on your blinders.  Self-doubt may be the prerequisite to self-awareness, but self-awareness is for liberals and sissies.

 
When a prominent conservative worries that conservatives are losing the religion, it’s noteworthy.  Jindal hates liberals – clearly! – but he’s disappointed in conservatives.  His rage is really directed at them.  And his rage has obscured his perception and his judgment; it has made him as stupid as the Akins and the Mourdocks.  Jindal comes home; now he endorses the stupid.  The problem for conservatives is that they’ve got nothing left to lose.  They thought they owned the soul of America, the “real America” as Sarah Palin called it.  For decades they won elections by portraying their opponents as enemies of American values and subverters of American prosperity and betrayers of American security.  But, inexplicably, those tactics have stopped working and the temptation is to turn up the volume even louder, to just shout the accusations that much more vehemently.  The country is changing under their feet, and they are in real trouble, but many of them seem incapable of doing much more than merely shouting louder and louder.  But now they’re not just shouting at liberals and independents and moderate Republicans; now they’re even shouting at themselves.

Demographics and Inevitability

Conventional wisdom has congealed around the notion that Obama was re-elected largely because of the demographics.  That is (as revealed in exit polls), Republicans have become the party of old, white, straight men; while Democrats represent what Ron Brownstein has called the “coalition of the ascendant”, i.e. racial minorities, gays, the young, urban professionals, and women; that is, everyone who is something other than old, white, straight and male.  (The chart above is by Tom Scocca of slate.com.)  For decades the demographics have been moving slowly in the Democrats direction, and will continue to do so for some time to come.  Consider that in 1984 whites were 89% of the vote and in 2012 they were 72%.  And at the same time that the voting public has become less old, white, straight and male, the Republican Party has become more and more conservative; that is, it increasingly tailors its policies to the interests and sensibilities of old, white, straight men.  The broad liberal constituency continues to grow while Republicans appeal more and more exclusively to their narrow and shrinking base.  And the recent election seems to have been the tipping point.  With a few breaks, or a better ground game, or a better advertising strategy, or better messaging, or more specificity, Romney might have won the presidency, but he’s very possibly the last Republican who could have won by relying upon that shrinking base.  The demographics just roll slowly on, unstoppable, like a glacier transforming the landscape.

Historically, American partisan alignment has been defined by ethnicity and religion, less so by ideology.  For example, 19^th century Irish Catholic immigrants all joined the Democratic Party for reasons of practicality and solidarity.  But now party affiliation is both ethnic/religious and philosophical.  Before the American welfare state was created by Progressives and New Dealers, working class liberalism opposed a strong central government, because they saw it as a tool of the rich and connected.  That is, the American populist instinct viscerally fears both big business and big government.  But the success of the New Deal created a contradiction within economic populism.  Big government was now the instrument of populism and economic egalitarianism, and a vast majority was quite happy with the results.  But most voters retained their conservative, i.e. anti-government, instincts, even as they happily received all the benefits of big government.  They held fast to the myth of undiluted individual responsibility while they cashed their federally-mandated paychecks and Social Security checks.  Pragmatism overrode ideology; it overrode it all the way to the bank.

This explains the truism that – as Jonathan Chait is so fond of reminding his readers – “the American people are ideological conservatives but operational liberals.”  Put another way, welfare state capitalism works better than the laissez-faire variety.  This explains such strange incongruities as Tea Partiers angrily wielding signs that read, “Keep government out of my Medicare.”  Even government-hating conservatives only hate government in general but love it in the particulars.  But from the 1930’s to the 1960’s white working people voted the pragmatism side of that pragmatism-vs.-ideology dialectic; since the 1960’s they vote the ideology.  What happened?  Well, what major social development occurred in the 1960’s?  Yes, that’s right, the end of racial segregation.  Racial minorities had been excluded from the material and social benefits of the welfare state until the 1960’s, and during that time white belief in anti-government ideology was not particularly troubling.  But whites could not abide a welfare state that also benefitted blacks, Hispanics, etc.  Their racial prejudice overpowered their pragmatism and they swung over to their ideology.  Blind fear made them choose instinct over interest. With a little help from conservative intellectuals (like Bill Buckley) and politicians (like Ronald Reagan) shrewd enough to exploit white populism, they began to vote for scaling back the welfare/regulatory state.  It suddenly made sense to oppose a government that ladled out goodies to Cadillac-driving welfare queens.

This is why ideology, not pragmatism or compromise, has come to dominate American politics.  When white working people – the dominant demographic in the 1960’s – began voting for conservative Republicans it spelled the end of the New Deal.  White anti-government ideological instincts became the dominant theme of American politics.  The white working class abandoned liberalism and liberals rejected the white working class in return.  This Great Rupture has polarized all subsequent political, social and cultural developments.  As that Tea Party sign reminds us, the tension between ideology and practicality remains.  This forces the conservative intelligentsia to dare ever greater heights of hysteria – Obama is a “Kenyan anti-colonialist”, Obamacare is really racial reparations – to ensure that working class whites discount their practical concerns in favor of their ideological instincts.  Thus our era, the era of ideology over pragmatism, is also the era of bitterness and rancor.

Democrats, in the meantime, have become the party of the young, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, gays and women (particularly unmarried women); that is, all the groups that until relatively recently had to defer to old, white, straight men.  But the liberal re-alignment isn’t based simply in practicality; it is as ideological as the conservative version.  Conservatives may console themselves with the thought that minority votes for Obama were based upon little more than racial solidarity and they may encourage themselves with the hope that Hispanics, for instance, can easily be had with an liberal immigration policy; but they are kidding themselves.  Non-whites, for the most part, simply don't share the anti-government instincts of the white majority; those instincts appear to be an exclusively white cultural artifact.  Michael Brendan Dougherty of the American Conservative:

Recent Hispanic immigrants may be entrepreneurial and have some traditional religious values, but they most definitely do not come from political cultures that make them receptive to the GOP’s message of slashing the social welfare state.

Since whites historically kept racial minorities from assimilating to white society they didn’t absorb white political culture, and multiculturalism has done little to disturb that alienation.  Minorities simply don’t have to agonize over being anti-government while benefitting from big government; they can vote for the welfare state in good conscience.  This is why the post-60’s alignment is so ideological.  To a large extent, you actually can guess someone’s view of the welfare state based upon her race.  Party means tribe means philosophy.  And with the slow demographic shift in favor of the pro-welfare-state constituency the pro-welfare-state party is winning more and more elections.

We appear to be witnessing the demise of the populism that has dominated American politics for two centuries.  A majority is arising whose instincts are more at ease with big government.  This may be the end of American exception from the general trend of Western welfare state social democracy.  We may be becoming Europe after all.  How will the white rump react?  But before you consider that question, remind yourself that whites, particularly old, male whites, still control most of the money and probably will continue to do so even as they become a numerical minority.  Maybe our future is not Denmark, but South Africa.  As polarized as our present politics is, with its ideology-race equivalence, imagine how bad it will get when it becomes starkly ideology-race-class.  A situation in which whites hold all the economic power and non-whites hold all the political power is not a sustainable one.  Maybe our future is not South Africa, but Venezuela.  Obama won, but nightmares abound!  How is it possible that the victory of such a broad, multi-racial, pragmatic, moderate, social-democratic majority could be so ominous?  What will post-populist America look like?

But consider that racial alienation doesn’t explain why the young are part of that new democratic coalition.  They have an entirely different explanation: culture. Younger white Americans have grown up without all that crazy pre-60’s baggage and they can’t fathom why anyone would oppose racial inclusion or equal pay or gay marriage.  They have been bred on the notion of individual expression utterly unconstrained by categories of race, gender or orientation (actually, unconstrained by much of anything).  They are the product of post-60’s liberal individualism, with all the accompanying libertine notions of sexual and social freedom.  The irony is that conservative embrace of individualistic rhetoric has only fed that unconstrained libertinism, as has the modern culture of capitalist marketing.  Liberalism made individualism about personal expression and growth.  Conservatism made it about freedom from government interference.  And capitalism made it about material acquisition.  Each in its own way has helped create that culture of relativism, materialism and atomism that so dominates American youth.  But here’s the rub: that individualism seems to make the young more suspicious of government intervention in the economy.  For example, those under 30 are more in favor of privatizing Social Security and Medicare than their elders.  And though the economic views of younger Americans are not entirely clear (for example, they don’t perceive the government to be as inefficient as older ones do), their openness to laissez-faire economic policies conflicts with the views of racial and ethnic minorities, particularly traditionally Catholic groups whose views on economics are informed by the church’s egalitarian teachings on social justice.  This libertinism-vs.-community contradiction may prove to be as difficult for the new non-white liberal coalition as the pragmatism-vs.-ideology contradiction has been for the old white working class.

This might conceivably present an opening for a future conservative re-alignment.  That is, if the Republican Party (or its successor) becomes more broadly libertarian – promoting both lower tax rates and gay marriage – a large number of the young might, as time goes by, switch over.  But no; but that’s just not gonna happen.  Conservative individualist rhetoric aside, the conservative heart beats to the tune of authority, tradition and hierarchy.  The unpredictable, mercurial, rebellious nature of libertine youth culture could never be reconciled with that conservative propriety.  Also, even if the Republicans became libertarians tomorrow, it would take them twenty years to lose the stink of cultural, racial and sexual philistinism that so repulses today’s liberal youth.  Another conservative option is to become more economically liberal while remaining culturally conservative; but this is also utterly at odds with conservative obeisance to social hierarchy.  And most damning, American conservatism has played too long on white racial fears to accept the new demographic reality.  And such racial fear-mongering precludes the last right-wing hope, that social conservatism might appeal to religious blacks and Hispanics, that racial minorities might be converted to broad conservatism.  Those minorities, lacking the visceral anti-government instincts that have so molded white views, are not susceptible to conservative arguments.  Conservatism is simply incapable of addressing our current crisis.  It can only exacerbate it with strident calls for more unconstrained capitalism, more racial animosity, more fundamentalist unreason.  All conservatism can do is make an embattled rich, white minority more angry, more bitter, more self-righteous in its wealth.  The road of Limbaugh-ism leads only to bleak civil, cultural and economic alienation.

For the time being minorities and the young will not become Republicans.  But, given the new demographic realities, what will working-class whites do?  This is the question that must be answered.  Is it possible to bring them back to welfare-statism by appealing to their naked self-interest?  Probably not, since the last 40 years of ideological indoctrination and purification have made them less susceptible to pragmatic arguments.  American idealism has caused much American foolishness.  No, the only real solution is to make liberalism utterly race-neutral.  The Great Rupture between liberals and working class whites must be healed.  If a new, post-multicultural, post-relativist, community-oriented, morally passionate liberalism could embrace a genuine color-blindness (like that of the early Civil Rights movement) it might make whites feel as welcomed by liberalism as do blacks and the other racial groups.  Such a liberalism – severe in its anti-racism while earnest in its color-blindness – would have real credibility when claiming to speak for working people of all races.  It might appeal to both the pragmatism and the idealism of white working people.  This is neither a populist future nor a multicultural future, it is a united future, one in which our common American commitments to freedom and justice overcome our divisions.

The irony of Obama’s re-election is that it actually makes it harder to reach this united future.  A coalition that wins without the support of white working people is a coalition that is unlikely to try to appeal to those people – particularly if doing so would require it to abandon its diversity fetish.  Since the election there has been much speculation as to whether Republicans will learn to adjust to the new demographic and ideological reality.  My argument is that they can not without abandoning conservatism altogether.  But the more important question is: Will Democrats do the right thing in the face of their newfound demographic dominance?  Can Democrats resist the momentum of the last decades and whole-heartedly accept working class whites back into their coalition?  It’s true that Obama did garner white working class votes in the Midwest – mostly because of his rescue of the auto companies – and Obama himself seems genuinely eager to help struggling people of all races.  But it’s just not clear if his coalition will consistently support the interests and values of white working people.  As the demographics keep moving in their direction, Democrats simply won’t need to do so to keep winning elections.  But they will need to do so to avoid the even more horribly divided future that awaits us.  If liberals can’t heal the great rupture with working class whites they will still inherit America, but it may not be an America worth inheriting.