The Shape of the Coming Realignment

No, the two present parties have been stably in existence, unpopped like ball bearings, since 1860. There are cycles of dominance, at the somewhat misleading federal level, but the metaphor you've chosen misrepresents rotation in office as existential failure.

We’re due.

I don't understand this yet. The United States became an aristocracy, characterized by extremely concentrated ownership of the society's wealth and income, from the end of the Vietnam War. Because wealth is concentrated enough to control politics, the parties naturally adopt the policies favoring fractions of that dominant class (regional and cultural). The parties then arrange to get their votes by the usual means, which have little to do with rational debates about policy. What is unstable about the political arrangement, which is not only familiar but conventional? Are you saying that the social arrangement of wealth and power concentration is not sustainable? It can't be static, but that's hardly the same thing.

Is this rhetoric only? What is the analysis actually contained in this paragraph? I should think, if we are going back to the process of identifying parties with policies, that the policy offerings of the Democratic Party go far past what you've stated. Commitment to expansion of national health insurance, significant energy behind the idea of public guarantee of some higher education through community college at public expense, activist climate policy, efforts to increase unionization of the private economy and reverse de-unionization of the public sector, are surely all identifiable as parts of the party's policy basket. But why are we treating parties as primarily made of ideas for the thinking man?

Nor is it clear what epithets directed at potential candidates mean. Arnold would be asking how adroitly individuals might arrange to be the right sort of screen against which disparate groups of voters could project their hopes. What is the theory of a candidate's role that backs your expression of judgment?

I should think everyone bets that way, because no one wants to bet on the fatal unravelling of the social order. But while the language is lively, what is the actual idea of betting on how a moment you are living in will be remembered by some other people?

The old, bad, hard Right has emerged temporarily from the basement, but it’s more aggrieved, skulking gamer than aggressive, striding brownshirt. Demographics are not on their side, and, most importantly, racism is bad for business. It’s true that the Weimar crack-up opened the door for the fringe Right, but when one or both of our political parties implode, I just don’t see anything comparable happening; the nation isn’t humiliated enough. Things are still going too well for too many people.

My sense is that a more likely bad outcome is the consolidation and ascendancy of a technocratic-libertarian Soft Right — the McKinsey? Right — that promises lower taxes, data-driven solutions to social problems, more ‘personal freedom’ (social and economic) and a seductively agnostic, corporatist and ostensibly racially-inclusive solution to our polarized, stagnant present.

What is the sense that is sensing this likelihood?

But one would have to know how to do this. The problem with the analysis is that, like some contemporary political activity you don't identify with, it's all just fantasy about some TV show describing a reality that isn't actually real. Nobody knows how to enact a universal basic income in the United States, and you show as little interest in the realities of the earned income tax credit as the current president himself. We can say, for sure, that a "retail offer" to solve the opiate addiction problem, so that young people stop dropping dead in the front yards of decent, hard-pressed working-class voters, will have an immediate effect on the distribution of votes in the next Electoral College. But someone has to do what to do and how to make it happen.

The most important route to improvement here, from the mechanical point of view, is learning to kill your darlings. Your effort to harness rhetorical energy needs am additional injection of restraint. As the critic Wilfred Sheed once wrote, in a phrase that helped me over the years, "If you try to slay your audience with every sentence, you run the risk that you may succeed."

Substantively, as I've noted above, the most important route to improvement is to give the problem of governing a little attention in the discussion of politics. When everyone is a super-punchy talking head on video, it becomes difficult to explain how the garbage is actually collected and how roads are built. (Either by hordes of immigrants flooding over the borders to reduce wages and destroy civilization or not at all, one is left to suppose.) But when you ask how people getting involved with politics actually do engage, you get a better lawyer's theory of social action out of it.