Online August 2016 PA discussion of Nationalism-Globalism realignment

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

Stumbled upon this message board thread from August 2016 back in 2019, thought the discussion of electoral trends, coalition shifts, and partisan realignment was interesting. The thread is no longer visible to the public so I saved it as a PDF.

I probably read many of these articles and blog posts during the 2016 election cycle- definitely the original Michael Lind and Jonathan Haidt pieces that were responded to at least. Sharing here for fellow Leipists to nerd out over how much of this has actually come to pass over the last 7-8 years.

Michael Lind, "This is What The Future of Politics Looks Like" (Politico), "Trumpism And Clintonism Are The Future" (NYT), and "The Coming Realignment" (BT)
* The 2016 presidential race is realigning the Democratic & Republican parties in profound and lasting ways; by the 2020s and 2030s, partisan platforms will have changed drastically.
* The "culture war" is coming to a close now that gay marriage has become law. Social conservatism will fade away in the coming decades, leaving the two major parties to be defined mostly by economic issues.
* The GOP will become the party of middle & working class whites (and possibly Latinos) based in the South, West & Mountain states, and outer-ring suburbs, exurbs & peri-urban areas everywhere (what Lind calls "Posturbia").
* While Trump's candidacy may fail, "Trumpism" - i.e. Trump's populist platform of economic protectionism, controlled immigration & support for Social Security & Medicare - reflects the interests of the white working & middle classes that form the GOP base and will become major parts of Republican ideology in the future. Lind previously refered to "Trumpism" back in 2014 as "Populiberalism," signifying a mix of right-wing populism & economic policy positions previously considered "liberal" (in the sense of FDR-style social democracy).
* These populist economic stances, as well as the nationalism inherent in Trumpism, can have trans-racial appeal to Latinos provided racism is pushed out of the GOP's mainstream. Lind also suggests that Latinos may assimilate into white American culture, just as did previous European ethnic groups that weren't originally considered "white". This shift would allow the GOP to survive America's changing racial demographics.
* The Democrats will become the party of upper class professionals & civil servants, along with minorities & immigrants, based primarily in major cities and inner-ring suburbs (what Lind calls "Densitaria"), especially in the Northeast & West coasts.
* As the Old Left trade unionism dies out, Democratic leaders will embrace free trade & other policies friendly to international business. Instead of Social Security & Medicare, they will tend to favor means-tested welfare programs to keep the urban poor afloat. Lind refers to this as "Clintonism" referencing both the "New Democrat" policies of Bill Clinton in the 1990s and Hillary Clinton's center-left policies today. Lind previously referred to this political ideology back in 2014 as "liberaltarianism", essentially a mix of free market ideology with modest regulation and social liberalism. Now, Lind argues that promoting identity politics will be the way Clintonite Democrats get their constituents to reconcile themselves to less radical economic policies.
* Lind argues the more radical economic policies of Bernie Sanders will fizzel out in popularity, and that Millenials who now support Sanders will eventually moderate their views just as the Boomer hippies of the 1960s gradually transformed into yuppies by the 1980s.

1) Response from Paul Rosenberg in Salon:
* Peter Turchin's theory of 50-year conflict cycles in American history (next peak is 2020) are linked to the pro-social or anti-social behavior of elites
* "The question on the left is can Clintonian incrementalism possibly deliver the kind of sweeping reorientation that Turchin’s study of history sees coming, while the question on the right is what’s driving Trump’s redefinition of conservatism, and what chance is there for different sorts of resolution to the tensions fueling that redefinition. Whatever happens this election cycle can only raise these questions, not answer them."
* Rosenberg mentions political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler who claim that when the GOP rebranded itself as the party of "law & order" under Nixon and then engaging in "culture wars" against progressivism from the 1980s to today, they attract most of the Americans who were authoritarians. This led to growing tension between the GOP "country club Republican" leaders and an unruly GOP base.
* Rosenberg cites political scientist Richard M. Skinner, who says that besides authoritarianism there are 4 other factors at work: ethnocentrism, lack of ideology, distrust and negative partisanship. Ethnocentrism makes people back social insurance for the "productive classes" like Social Security & Medicare but resent welfare recipients. And since federal government is the "delivery system for most progressive policies", as people lose faith in government they reject progressivism. Negative partisanship is alleged to be a result of the GOP being more ideological and the Democrats (at least the center-left leaders like Bill Clinton & Obama) of being more into practical policymaking, but the GOP assumes the Democrats are heavily invested in socialism & identity politics and dig in their heels to avoid compromise. "Lack of ideology" essentially means that Trump is appealing to low information voters who don't care that he's not a traditional conservative.
* Rosenberg reviews Lind's predictions and critiques them on two points: (1) While some socially conservative policies (like opposition to gays) may be in decline, the core aspect of "group privilege" is not fading away anytime soon, (2) a decline in social conservatism will reshuffle the "alternative" ideologies (currently libertarianism & communitarianism) so that we can't predict the future outcome.
* Rosenberg argues that Lind's analysis of the shifts among progressives is flawed as well. He sees Bernie Sanders as having the right policies that could defuse Turchin's conflict cycle by redistributing the wealth, but he sees Hillary Clinton as continuing the "rigged economy" with only minor fixes which will still lead to disaster.

2) Response by Lee Drutman in Vox
* Drutman agrees with Lind that the rise of Trump's protectionist populism & Clinton's pro-business centrism will realign the two major parties. He thinks the GOP will become nationalist populist party and the Democrats will become the business-friendly cosmopolitan party, but he says this will take several election cycles and in the mean time everything will be in flux. He predicts more shifting coalitions and more opportunity for dealmaking, and less clear partisanship, which he sees as beneficial.
* Drutman emphasizes that "no political coalition is permanently stable", and cites political scientists Edward G. Carmines and James A. Stimson, whose book "Issue Evolution" looks at how the tension between factions united under the big tents of the major parties inevitably leads to tension and a split when an unresolvable conflict emerges between them. The rise & fall of partisanship is cyclical and is related to the cohesion (or lack thereof) between the various factions in each of the two major political parties.
* Drutman argues that since the last realignment in the 1960s the Republicans became an odd collection of wealthy elites & the white working class, but it was when the GOP business elite decided to attack Social Security & Medicare that their coalition was doomed, with Trump being the white working class reaction.

3) Ed Kilgore in NY Mag
* Kilgore questions whether Trump can start a nationalist populist realigment in the GOP, since this would likely be resisted by the wealthy donor class as well as the ideological elite among the pundits & think tanks.
* He points out that William Rusher, the publisher of National Review, tried to create a nationalist populist party known as the "Producers Party" in the 1970s, aiming to "unite Reagan and Wallace supporters in furious opposition to the political elites of both parties and their alleged underclass clientele."
* Kilgore says that if Trump won the presidency this party alignment would take place, but if he loses the general election "it’s far more likely the right will turn the whole Trump phenomenon into an object lesson about the consequences of irresponsibility and ideological laxity."

4) Response by T. A. Frank in Vanity Fair:
* Frank says that Lind's prediction about party realigment (if correct) would lead to the Democrats rejecting economic progressivism & dovish foreign policy to catering to the wealthy business elites & military contractors that would flee the GOP, with them only having "social justice"/"identity politics" on issues like race & gender to retain their appeal to women & minorities.
* Frank argues that a GOP that realigned toward nationalist populism likely wouldn't be able to attract non-whites, and so the culture war would shift into outright racial conflict.
* Frank argues that Bernie Sander's platform that focuses heavily on economic reforms to help people of all races could be a better option, since it could attract the white working class as well as the poor minorities that are already reliable Democratic voters, and this would avoid racial conflict.

5) Response by Jim Naureckas at FAIR.org:
* Naureckas attacks Lind's claim that the GOP is no longer the party of business elites, arguing that the GOP politicians get much higher ratings from the Chamber of Commerce and that Paul Ryan's budget proposal would eliminate all non-military discretionary spending from the federal budget by 2050.
* Naureckas also attack's Lind's claim that the Democrats have become the party of liberal elite whites, noting that Obama won among low income households and that polls of Democratic voters show they see enacting progressive economic reforms as a top priority.
* Naureckas also disagree with Lind's assertion that Millenials who now back Bernie Sanders will grow out of their attraction to democratic socialism, and cites Pew Research's Drew Desilver who has found that people’s basic political orientations are set fairly early on in life, and there's no longer any assurance that people will become more conservative with age.
* Naureckas argues that Lind personally favors the center-left ideology he calls "liberaltarianism" and "Clintonism" and so his predictions are influenced by motivated reasoning. He bristles at Lind's assertion that progressives will reconcile themselves to Clintonism because Trumpism will be the only alternative, and argues that based on tends among Democratic voters "corralling them up again for a Clintonist future is going to be more difficult than Lind and his colleagues in corporate media want to believe."

6) Response by Jonathan Taplin at Medium.com
* Taplin focuses on the divide within the Democratic Party between idealistic progressives that backed Sanders and pragmatic technocrats that backed Clinton. Taplin says 2 key questions confront the Democrats: the influence of business over government, and whether the US should be the "unpaid policeman of the world".
* Taplin finds not only Hillary but also Bernie lacking in his dealing with these 2 issues, noting that Sanders heavily criticized Wall Street but didn't go after the oligopolies emerging in other industries, and he also faults Sanders for not taking on the miltary-industrial complex and its huge budget. Taplin argues that the Democratic party displays "shrunken ambitions" in terms of social programs because the leaders can't imagine how to pay for them, but that's only because they're not willing to take it out of the defense budget.
* Taplin thinks Democratic leaders may not propose reducing the military's budget because they don't want to be seen as "soft on defense", but Trump's winning the Republican nomination while arguing the US shouldn't be the world's policeman shows that stance isn't even a liability for a Republican candidate, much less a Democrat.
* Taplin argues that Democrats will only find solid electoral success when they combine economic progressivism with a non-interventionist foreign policy. He points out that many Americans thought that's what Obama would deliver, but that he didn't and Clinton likely won't deliver it either, unless some crisis forces her to radically rethink her positions, as the worsening of the Great Depression did with FDR.

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

Stumbled upon this message board thread from August 2016 back in 2019, thought the discussion of electoral trends, coalition shifts, and partisan realignment was interesting. The thread is no longer visible to the public so I saved it as a PDF.

I probably read many of these articles and blog posts during the 2016 election cycle- definitely the original Michael Lind and Jonathan Haidt pieces that were responded to at least. Sharing here for fellow Leipists to nerd out over how much of this has actually come to pass over the last 7-8 years.

Jonathan's Haidt's "When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism"
* Haidt endorses Lind's prescience of identifying Clintonism & Trumpism as emerging political ideologies, and links Clintonism with globalism and Trumpism with nationalism. Haidt points out that these ideologies are emerging not just in the US but in Europe as well, so they can't be purely explained in terms of things that are unique to the US.
* Chapter One of Haidt's essay looks at the World Values Survey (WVS) and says that it shows that as nations industrialize & grow wealthier, they shift first from "traditional values" toward "secular values", and then from "survival values" toward "emancipative values." Haidt says that the era of globalization has created an ethic of "cosmopolitanism" among urban elites, leading them to view nationalism as tantamount to racism.
* Chapter Two of Haidt's essay argues that not all nationalism is motivated by racism, and that a more natural & healthy form of nationalism is connected to high social capital and all its benefits: lower crime rates, lower transaction costs for businesses, higher levels of prosperity, and a propensity toward generosity. Haidt also points out that prior to the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis, many on the European right had been protesting immigration because of the poor assimilation of existing immigrant populations, occasional riots, and the threat of terrorism. When the globalist-thinking urban elites insisted that Europeans welcome the Syrian refugees and called them racist if they refused, this pushed them over the edge.
* Chapter Three of Haidt's essay argues that "racism" is often actually a culture clash over differences in moral values between groups rather than hatred based on skin color. Drawing on Karen Stenner's book, "The Authoritarian Dynamic", Haidt argues that "normative threat" and rapid change posed by multiculturalism triggers some people who might normally be described as "status quo conservatives" to become authoritarian or create alliances with authoritarians to stop the perceived threat.
* Chapter Four of Haidt's essay argues that politicians can avoid triggering an authoritarian nativist backlash if they limit immigration to a modest level, especially from cultures that are very different from the host country, and enact programs to help immigrants to assimilate to the national culture.

1) Response by Amitai Etzioni in TNI:
* Etzioni argues that Haidt is probably right that immigration has triggered nationalist backlash, but also points out that the rise in nationalism can be seen in countries with low immigration. He points to 2 other factors: "the march of individual rights" (specifically rights for women, racial minorities & gays) and "growing community deficit".
* Etzioni argues that a tolerant form of "responsive communitarianism" can provide a solution, allowing people to create communities that reinforce their norms & values but in ways that don't create discrimination or persecution of those from other cultures & communities. He suggests these type of solutions could be found for conflict over trans people in public restrooms and gay wedding cakes, or tensions between ethnic enclaves.

2) Response by Robert W. Merry in TNI:
* Merry endorses Haidt's thesis that Trump's rise is fueld by the conflict between globalists & nationalists, and he explains how the 2 groups differ on 4 major issues: Immigration (open vs. closed borders), Foreign Policy, (interventionism vs. non-interventionism), Trade (free trade vs. protectionism), and Culture (political correctness vs. cultural heritage).

3) Response by The Economist Editorial Staff:
* The Economist sees the conflict between globalism & nationalism as open vs closed societies, and argues that nationalist populism growing on both the left & right is a political phenomenon that is happening across the developed world. The two main forces they see at work are economic dislocation and demographic change.
* They cite a study by McKinsey Global Institute that shows 65-70% of households in rich countries saw their real incomes from wages and capital decline or stagnate between 2005 and 2014, compared with less than 2% in 1993-2005, although some of this has been alleviated by transfer payments.
* The Economist notes that reports on national averages hide the fact that globalization & free trade has effected even adjacent towns within the same country differently, making tech-savvy business communities prosperous while older industrial-based communities decline. Its in these declining communities where anti-immigration & anti-free trade sentiment arises.
* In terms of demographic change, in 33 of the 35 OECD nations, too few babies are born to maintain a stable population, and as the native-born age and their numbers shrink, immigrants from poorer places are brought in to fill mostly low-wage service jobs. Sometimes immigrants settle in specific areas and this happens rapidly enough that the culture changes in just a few years, leading to nationalists being alarmed about what looks like a foreign invasion.
* The US has done a better job assimilating immigrants than most of Europe, and that's reflected in lower rates of anti-immigrant sentiment in the US, despite the rise of Trump. Asked whether having an increasing number of people of different races in their country made it a better place to live, only 10% of Greeks and 18% of Italians agreed, and even in the most cosmopolitan European countries, Sweden and Britain, only 36% and 33% agreed. In America, by contrast, a hefty 58% thought diversity improved their country, and only 7% thought it made it worse.
* The Economist agrees with Haidt that nationalism does not equal racism, and that claiming that it does and pushing political correctness and focusing on "microaggressions" is liable to trigger a pushback from the political right.
* The Economist concludes that nativism is probably a passing phase for developed nations, saying that "although the drawbridge-uppers have all the momentum, time is not on their side. Young voters, who tend to be better educated than their elders, have more open attitudes. A poll in Britain found that 73% of voters aged 18-24 wanted to remain in the EU; only 40% of those over 65 did. Millennials nearly everywhere are more open than their parents on everything from trade and immigration to personal and moral behaviour."

4) Response by David Brooks in NYT:
* Brooks basically agrees with Haidt's analysis of the globalism vs nationalism clash, and adds that this is also a clash between it's also a conflict between "moral universalists" and "moral particularists" who differ in their views on in-group/out-group distinctions and whether or not we should have different moral obligations to people not in our in-group.
* Brooks laments: "The tragedy of this election is that America already solved this problem. Unlike France and China, we were founded as a universalist nation [and] America was founded to take in people from around the globe and unite them around something new. Unfortunately, the forces of multiculturalism destroyed that commitment to cultural union [and] that has led to Trump, who has upended universalistic American nationalism and replaced it with European blood and soil nationalism... The way out of this debate is not to go nationalist or globalist. It’s to return to American nationalism... which combines an inclusive definition of who is Our Own with a fervent commitment to assimilate and Take Care of them."

5) Response by Stephen Messenger atThe Independent Whig:
* Messenger agrees the Jonathan Haidt, David Brooks & other pundits have identified aspects of the growing conflict in our society but argues their analysis is only partial, comparable to the old parable of the blind men describing the elephant. He argues that the "elephant" they’re struggling to describe is the dynamic that exists between the two predominant psychological profiles - what Thomas Sowell calls the "constrained and unconstrained visions" in A Conflict of Visions and what Haidt calls the "all-foundation and one-foundation moral matrices" in The Righteous Mind.
* Messenger relates the dichotomies Sowell & Haidt have delineated to the conflicting concepts of "Gemeinschaft" (traditional, grass-roots community) and "Gesellschaft" (modern, top-down managed society) noted by 19th century Europeans thinkers like Tönnies, Durkheim, and Weber. When the elites pushing their enlightened vision ("Gesellschaft") become predominant, this undermines the social glue of society ("Gemeinschaft") resulting in chaos & anomie. Messenger sees these conflicts as cyclical and occurring at longer intervals throughout history, for example, in the rise & fall of Rome and the French Revolution.
* Messenger sees the root cause of Brexit and the rise of Trump as a populist backlash motivated by the triggering of the common people's "Liberty foundation" (borrowing from Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory), rather than authoritarianism or nationalism.

6) Response by Christopher Chantril:
* Chantril argues that Brexit and Trump are not due to the urban elite's globalism triggering authoritarian tendencies in the common people, but rather the authoritarian tendencies of the globalists becoming manifest.
* Chantril argues that the cultural shifts Haidt mentions in the World Values Survey - traditionalism shifting to secularism, then survival shifting to emancipation - are wrong. Instead, Chantril proposes that as nations industrialize people start to move away from "subordinate values" based on patronage & hierarchy to "responsible values" championed by the Axial Age religions, which promote civic values like reciprocal altruism. Then as urban populations grow wealthier and a service sector develops, the elites start to move from "responsible values" to "creative values". The creative class elites adopt a paternalistic view that motivates them to tax the middle class that still has "responsible values" in order to emancipate the lower class that still has "subordinate values" and this usually does not work. Chantril argues that middle class anti-elitism is the result of the creative class elites trying to speed up the cultural evolution of values.
* Chantril also argues that middle class anti-elitism is motivated by the fact that elites often cannot be held accountable for their errors in governance, and cites the economic crisis of 2008 as an example. Whether one blames Wall Street or the federal government for the housing bubble & the financial crisis, it's still the globalist elites who are to blame.
* Chantril points out that globalization has been great for elites and the world's poor, who have both seen their incomes rise dramatically in the past few decades, but that the middle class of the developed world has suffered from decreased job security & wage stagnation.
* Chantril concludes that a populist backlash against the machinations of the global elites is not authoritarianism but rather a justified form of anti-authoritarianism.