The Shape of the Coming Realignment

-- By ZaneMuller - 22 Feb 2018

This idea is mostly built on Arnold’s Folklore of Capitalism and the Thomas Edsall piece posted to main page.

Political parties in the United States pop like soap bubbles every forty or so years. We’re due. The Republican Party’s flagrant screwing of its rank-and-file voters has been obvious since at least the 1980s, and is mirrored by the extent to which the Democratic party has forsaken its wards and ceased to seriously represent the interests of anyone without rich parents or at least an elite degree. Piketty calls this the “multiple elite party system”, or more colorfully, the Merchant Right vs. the Brahmin Left. I think he’s basically right in describing the state of affairs and diagnosing it as unsustainable.

The Republican soap bubble is showing more obvious strain, and I think the Democrats, despite their best efforts, might manage to make some lemonade for a cycle or two after Trump pulls down the pillars. But absent the singular appeal of Barack Obama (with whom the organization became dangerously overidentified), the only creed really holding the Democratic party together these days is a shared disinclination to overt sexism and white supremacy. There’s no reason to think that the Island of Misfit Toys that is the presumptive 2020 Democratic field won’t allow the Republicans to prolong our national nightmare for another term.

I’m not unafraid of what’s emerged from Pandora’s box lately. Even Arnold, after all, wasn’t exactly sounding alarm bells in 1937; societies sleepwalk to disaster. The risks of a Franz-Ferdinand-assassination-type event are real, but, I think, small.

I would bet our current political moment will be remembered more as a freakish death spasm of white nationalist patriarchy than the beginning of some broader, fatal unravelling of the global social order. 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. I picture a consolidation of the elites in which the Brahmins choose the aesthetics and the Merchants keep their property. Such a program could unite urban, educated top earners with a broad slice of the political middle who find it socially untenable not to act woke and thus resent the activist Left, which refuses to give them enough credit for liking Oprah and shopping at Whole Foods — that majority of white Americans that hasn’t changed much since Dr. King described them in 1968.

I imagine something like the political-institutional embodiment of this Exxon ad. Its creed is not unappealing: optimistic, brochure-diverse, solutions-oriented, smart, connected, and inclusive of immigrants (with advanced degrees). Such a party would have ample room for the enduring culture heroes of American mythology, but would of course find its purest archetypes in the ascendant Zuckerbergian elite. The tech billionaire, in his wisdom and generosity, ensures that every kid in every classroom gets a Chromebook and becomes a scientist. Charging Bull in partnership with Fearless Girl.

The corporate elite has long since ceded the identitarian ground in the culture wars. People of all colors, creeds and sexual orientations buy stuff anyway. It’s not hard to imagine the Merchant holdouts fully conceding the culture to the Brahmin Left in exchange for our continued help patching up the cracks in the capitalist edifice. The material circumstances of a post-industrial economy and the threat of destabilizing populism dictate a realignment of the people to whom the benefits of hot capital have accrued in opposition to those who have been burned. The elites will make common cause because we have little choice, because we are geographically concentrated, because we fear the populists and realize that something must be done about them. It will feel acceptable because we on the Left, with our more refined humanitarian sensibilities, will get to dictate the social norms; correct pronouns, etc. The material realities we will leave to the Merchants.

The policies, after all, matter less than the heroes. Take, for example, basic income, a moral-panic-inducing idea which would surely poison the work ethic of the Bootstrapping American Laborer, but could also surely gain traction with rational, thinking people if it could be shown to comport with capitalist dogma. Mix basic income with virtual reality as opiates for mass disemployment, add in (goes without saying) generous salaries for the more sophisticated servants (engineers, lawyers, etc), make sure all categories of people are represented in the promotional materials, and you have a new system that meets the new material needs. Such an exchange wouldn’t even represent a concession from the Merchants; profits from automating most of the economy would clearly afford insurance against the type of real-deal social cataclysm that might interrupt the steady concentration of capital. Brahmins could call it Progress; Merchants, the cost of doing business.

I imagine a party capable of declaring us innocent of racism, climate change, gross inequality and poverty, you name it. Personal freedom polls better than social justice in these United States, and privileged people are apt to confuse the two anyway. This future scares me because a lot of good people I know and respect would go along with it — because I think we of the Brahmin left are easy to co-opt.