By Brian Hawkins
Friday, April 29, 2016
Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ emergence into the
political scene has potentially irreversibly altered the political landscape as
we know it. Both candidates represent a form of their respective party’s
ideological populism taken to its logical extreme.
On the right, Trump has galvanized a faction of the
Republican Party that is more interested in protectionist trade and immigration
policies than in party orthodoxy on free markets and low taxes. On the left,
Sanders has satiated the Democratic Party base’s yearning for an unabashed
economic socialism to confiscate wealth from the rich to redistribute to the
middle and lower classes.
The success of both candidates has exposed deep
ideological rifts in their respective party’s governing coalition that has the
potential to undo a generation-old political order. The previous political dividing
line of liberals versus conservatives is no longer sufficient to describe the
fault line in contemporary politics; instead, the major difference fracturing
both parties is one of populism versus neoliberalism.
Destroying
Reagan’s Three-Legged Stool
The last major political realignment occurred with Ronald
Reagan’s ascendance to the presidency in 1980. Reagan built a Republican
coalition built on the three-legged stool of conservatism: fiscal conservatism,
social conservatism, and neoconservatism. In this political realignment, Reagan
seized disaffected working-class voters and foreign policy hawks from Democrats
to form, respectively, the social conservative and neoconservative legs of the
three-legged stool. This conservative coalition has been the foundation of the
Republican Party ever since.
The emergence of Trump as the frontrunner in the
Republican presidential primary, however, is an existential threat to the
Reagan coalition. Trump has dismantled the GOP’s reverence for free markets and
global trade with his support for single-payer health care and the Obamacare
individual mandate, and his proposals for increased taxes on hedge fund
managers.
On foreign policy, Trump has bashed the neoconservative
assumptions underlying the GOP’s interventionist instincts in favor of an
inward-focused foreign policy. Trump has hardly mentioned social issues, and
his lifestyle choices as an urban New Yorker have shown little to no interest
in the social conservative culture wars of abortion and gay marriage politics.
Sanders’ policies closely resemble Trump’s. Neither
expresses much interest in litigating old culture wars and both prefer a
noninterventionist foreign policy. More importantly, however, on economic
issues Sanders merely expounds upon Trump’s government-controlled economy by
calling for even higher tax rates and expanded government benefits to the lower
class.
Similarities
Between Trump and Sanders
The policy similarities between Trump and Sanders reveal
that their bases of support have more ideological commonality with each other
than with their respective parties’ establishment candidates, Hillary Clinton
and Sen. Marco Rubio, consequently revealing the new populist versus neoliberal
fault line in American politics.
In this realignment, the populists represent what Walter
Russell Mead describes as a Jacksonian American political tradition.
Jacksonians believe American foreign policy should pursue strictly national
interests and that government should actively use its powers to check corporate
influence. Populists not only embrace the contemporary welfare state but seek
to expand it. These are the voters who support expanded Medicare and Social
Security, pro-union labor policies, and higher taxes on the wealthy, and
adamantly oppose free-trade agreements.
The populists are motivated by nationalist appeals to
restrict immigrant labor from competing with American workers and reverse
decades of free-trade agreements that have forced America’s manufacturing
industry to improve to compete. Internally, populists test the limits, if any,
of expansive government powers. As heirs to the old Irish-Scot constituency,
the populists would have strongholds in Appalachia and other rural areas of
country.
On the contrary, neoliberals would comprise Mead’s
Jeffersonian American political tradition. Jeffersonians believe the United
States should actively participate in international relations and pursue a more
business-friendly domestic economic policy. Neoliberals represent the business
elites who favor global trade agreements, interventionist foreign policy to
protect American interests abroad, and pro-business economic policies.
Neoliberals support subsidies to business, liberal immigration policies,
industry deregulation, and a lighter tax burden. The neoliberal’s base of
support would exist primarily in the coast and urban centers.
Along with Trump and Sanders, current politicians from
both parties who would identify with the populists include Democratic senators Elizabeth
Warren and Joe Manchin and, for Republicans, Rep. Steve King and former Sen.
Rick Santorum. Neoliberal contemporaries, along with Clinton and Rubio, would
include Democrats Sen. Ron Wyden and Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican Speaker
of the House Paul Ryan and Gov. Jon Huntsman.
These New
Coalitions Also Contain Inconsistencies
Of course, this projection is not perfect; however, it is
still arguably more representative of today’s ideological divide than the
status quo. Even within this realignment, however, internal divisions and
seeming ideological inconsistencies will persist.
For example, populists would express a streak of
libertarianism in favoring stronger Second Amendment protections, whereas the
neoliberals would be amenable towards more strict gun control laws. On
counterterrorism and surveillance, however, civil libertarians would side with
the neoliberals, who are skeptical of government force, whereas the populists
support unrestrained government powers to counter terrorism.
Furthermore, although conservative populists would now
have a party to unabashedly advocate their economic interests, free market
libertarians would again be without a natural political party, eschewing both
the neoliberals’ corporatist inclinations and the populists’ fervor for an
expansive welfare state. Evangelicals as a monolithic voting block will probably
be excluded from both parties, but judging by their embrace of Trump, it can be
surmised that evangelical voters are no longer animated about the morality
issues that defined them in the Reagan coalition.
As the insurgencies of Trump and Sanders have shown, the
current political parties do not adequately represent the ideological
composition of their constituents. The current left-right political coalitions
no longer apply, and soon enough voters will sort themselves into more mutually
beneficial ideological alliances.
Shifting coalitions has long been a part of the American
two-party tradition. It was only a matter of time before the
liberal-conservative axis went the way of the Federalists, Whigs, radicals,
Know-Nothings, silverites, and New Dealers. In this emerging political
realignment, neoliberals will unify to defend the neoliberal world order that
has served them so well for the past 30 years. In contrast, the populists who
have been borne the economic burdens of globalism will seek to regain the
economic benefits lost to the status quo.
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