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+--- Thread: A big realignment in politics? (/thread-1407.html)
A big realignment in politics? - Admin - 09-10-2016
David Brooks in the NYT:
Quote:This is the last presidential election in which two baby boomers will be running against each other. In the years ahead, politics will no longer be defined by the hidden animosities of the Vietnam era, by the sexual revolution/culture war issues of the 1970s. Future candidates will not be nostalgic for some white America of ancient memory or the union-heavy labor markets of the 1950s. They’re not going to be fired up by the “paradise lost” hot buttons that excite the old guys who watch Fox News.Time for a Realignment - The New York Times
Politics is catching up to social reality. The crucial social divide today is between those who feel the core trends of the global, information-age economy as tailwinds at their backs and those who feel them as headwinds in their face. That is to say, the most important social divide today is between a well-educated America that is marked by economic openness, traditional family structures, high social capital and high trust in institutions, and a less-educated America that is marked by economic insecurity, anarchic family structures, fraying community bonds and a pervasive sense of betrayal and distrust.
These two groups live in entirely different universes. Right now each party has a foot in each universe, but those coalitions won’t last. Before too long the politics will break down into openness versus closedness, dynamism versus stability, what Ronald Brownstein of The Atlantic described in 2012 as the Coalition of Transformation versus the Coalition of Restoration.
The Republican Party is now a coalition of globalization-loving business executives and globalization-hating white workers. That’s untenable. At its molten core, the Republican Party has become the party of the dispossessed, not the party of cosmopolitan business. The blunderers at the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable bet all their chips on the G.O.P. at the exact instant it stopped being their party.
Not so fast there, David. party of the dispossessed? There is still a good deal of the old Romney elite left that see the world as takers versus makers, where job creators are the hero's, the government always the problem, never the solution, where markets cannot fail and which support across the board tax cuts for those job creators and blanket deregulation, or even making corporate malfeasance a whole lot easier.
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RE: A big realignment in politics? - fsilk - 09-10-2016
There is another part of the column:
Quote:This sort of divide is being replicated all around the world. The distinctly American feature is race. If the Republicans can drop the racial wedges — which admittedly may be a big ask — and become more the party designed to succor those who are disaffected from the globalizing information age, then it might win over some minority voters, and the existing party alignments will unravel in short order.
I think he's right that these the differences that play out in much of the developed world, and that race is a big barrier for the Republican's to become the party of the dispossessed, or, as Clinton called them, the 'deplorables' (which was a rather deplorable and sweeping characterization of half Trump's electorate)
RE: A big realignment in politics? - Martin K - 09-10-2016
Yea, this turning of the Republican party in the party of dispossessed (and/or deplorables) is still pretty far away when they wage war on Obamacare and withheld it from many in states where they rule whilst it has mostly benefited those dispossessed..