Reviewing the Realignment

Evolve or bust? Plus a link round-up

Yet now there’s some pessimism about the whole project of such a “realignment.” One of the more prominent popularizers of “realignment” themes, Tucker Carlson has lost his cable-news perch. (We’ll see what his next chapter brings.)

In a much-shared Spectator World piece, Ben Domenech argues that the “New Right” has hit a dead end:

From the beginning, the forces of realignment have assumed too much about the inevitability of their project. The arrival of the Trumpian moment in 2016 appeared to be a golden opportunity for dissatisfied conservatives: if you disliked old-guard, big-business Republicanism, Tea Party fiscal policy or the hawkish GOP foreign-policy establishment, you hoped the post-Trump GOP could become the vehicle for… well, whatever it was you’d always wanted. Instead of championing military spending and confrontation with Russia and China, the GOP would turn dovish. Instead of being the party of the Chamber of Commerce and Right to Work, it would become the party of more powerful unions; instead of touting supply-side economic policy that sought to cut back on entitlements and lower taxes, it would consider joining with the left to fund bigger social programs with taxes on the wealthy.

Domenech’s piece jumps off from an essay by American Affairs deputy editor Gladden Pappin, who has recently been appointed president of the Hungarian Institute of Foreign Affairs. In the aftermath of a disappointing 2022 midterm for Republicans, Pappin penned a “Requiem for the Realignment,” lamenting the continued persistence of traditional Republican tropes about the market, fiscal issues, and civic affairs.

As both Domenech and Pappin indicate in their pieces, the landscape of “realignment” discussions is full of (sometimes competing) factions—including nationalists, populists, Claremonsters, integralists, and postliberals of various stripes. The distinctions between those various groups are often glossed over in mass-media reporting on the political right, but Pappin’s and Domenech’s pieces offer a more granular view of some of the camps involved here.

I thought it might be useful to step back and think about the overall trajectory of the idea of a political realignment. Both Pappin and Domenech are getting at something in writing that, despite considerable dis-Trumption, the Republican Party has not radically changed since 2015. There have been some shifts, but there’s also been significant continuity.

Here, I’d like to explore one possible way of thinking about a “realignment” that involves a rebalancing of interests within a political coalition. Broader structural forces are transforming American life and will incentive political changes. Whether the Republican Party can rise to the project of reform, of course, an open question.

Coalitional—Not Ideological

In considering the idea of a “realignment,” we should remember that American politics is often more coalitional than ideological. The two dominant political parties—Republican and Democratic—are so big that there is always a diversity of tendencies and subfactions within each party. And that’s especially true of coalitions once they become dominant; the very size that allows for dominance also entails considerable diversity and even tensions. The New Deal coalition included segregationists and critics of segregation. It relied upon swaths of rural America and big-city wards.

Or consider the Republican Party of the Reagan years. You had movement conservatives, more centrist (or even left-leaning) establishment figures, neoconservatives, Cold War realists, business interests, social conservatives, libertarians, fiscal hawks, and others all represented in the GOP coalition of office-holders and influencers. In a lot of ways, that diversity helped the Republican Party be vital and responsive. (In some respects, the GOP became more ideologically disciplined during the George W. Bush years—with less impressive results.)

A “realignment” in this coalitional sense would not be about one ideology eliminating all others. It instead would be about a shuffling of coalitional priorities, stakeholders, and themes.

Realigning Policy

And there does seem to have been some rebalancing within the GOP’s policy program. Issues that were barely on the radar for many key stakeholders now generate a lot of attention on the Hill and elsewhere. Many of these issues turn on questions of sovereignty, expanding economic pathways (especially for non-college workers), reforming tech, and rebuilding industrial infrastructure.

For instance, policymakers in statehouses and DC have shown dramatically new interest in imposing regulations on technology companies, often in the name of national security and public welfare. This is a sea-change from the laissez-faire approach to tech that dominated in the 2000s (and libertarians are among the leading opponents of such changes). In Utah, big bipartisan majorities recently passed a set of laws restricting minors’ access to social media. There’s also growing appetite for this at the federal level. Recently, a bipartisan team of senators—Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Katie Britt (R-Ala.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii)—proposed legislation banning those under 13 from social media and requiring minors between 13 and 17 to have parental permission to use such platforms. This bill would also restrict the use of algorithm-driven content for American minors. And then there are the numerous bills that would restrict or ban TikTok. Without getting into a debate about the merits of these various proposals, I’ll just say that the policy field for tech regulation has changed dramatically over the past ten years.

A similar point applies to industrial policy and supply-chain issues. We’re a long way from the “potato chips, computer chips—what’s the difference?” era. The CHIPS Act as well as the Inflation Reduction Act both contained significant industrial-policy components (though the Biden administration may undercut some of the industrial incentives in the latter bill). CHIPS along with the infrastructure bill passed with filibuster-proof bipartisan majorities. And the biggest objection of some key Republican critics of CHIPS (such as Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley) was not opposition to industrial policy tout court but the belief that the bill did not go far enough to counter the industrial strategy of the People’s Republic of China.

Or take education. In the 2000s, the bipartisan consensus for education reform focused on a college-centric model driven by high-stakes standardized testing. No Child Left Behind and the Race to the Top initiatives embodied this approach. The education reform bill of 2015 began to unwind this model, and things have further changed since then. For instance, there is growing interest in scaling up vocational education. American Compass—headed by Oren Cass, the domestic policy director for the Romney 2012 campaign—has published a number of white papers on how to diversify pathways in the U.S. education system. And this kind of advocacy is starting to be translated into policy efforts, as Tom Cotton’s American Workforce Act demonstrates.

And the list goes on. On immigration, the expansion of guest-worker programs no longer enjoys a quasi-consensus among elected Republicans (which is not to say that there is not still some support for such expansion among Republicans). Elected Republicans have begun to think much more critically about the administrative state and structures of bureaucratic power both inside and outside the government. There is at least rhetorically some new concern about concentrated corporate power. Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio have laid out ambitious new plans for family subsidies, and pro-family policy can also be seen on the state and local levels (for instance, Ron DeSantis has exempted many important products for young children from the Florida sales tax.)

Whether Republicans would prioritize those policies if they won in 2024 is an open question. And all these policies are not yet integrated into a cohesive agenda. But, by the same token, policy paradigms in the United States are often not the result of imposing some abstract, ideological blueprint. Instead, they evolve as the result of real-time negotiations among stakeholders. So some looseness of program might be expected.

Mottled Coalitions

You might notice that the policies above could appeal to a variety of political viewpoints. For instance, expanding school choice might speak to both religiously conservative and libertarian perspectives. Renewing industrial supply chains—especially for strategic and defense technologies—could appeal to proponents of both a domestic “common good” approach and “national greatness” ambitions.

The coalition of stakeholders pushing these policies is also diverse. A cluster of (mostly younger) Republican senators have sent more overt pro-realignment signals—Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, and J.D. Vance are among the most prominent in this category. However, the movers and shakers for some of the policies listed above are not confined to this group. While a critic of Donald Trump, Mitt Romney anticipated many “realignment” policy themes in 2012 (from immigration to trade with the PRC), and he has taken a leading role in negotiations over infrastructure, semiconductors, and family policy.

With decades in Congress, Susan Collins has long been thought of as an establishment moderate. But she also backed infrastructure and CHIPS and was an instrumental figure for the CARES Act, which helped support businesses and families during the pandemic. Oh, she also racks up big margins in Maine’s blue-collar communities (the kind of places a “realigned” GOP would have to do well in). Susan Collins might not have a laser-eyed avatar on Twitter, but her kind of politics could still have a significant place in a “realigned” GOP (perhaps more than in a Republican Party dominated by ideas of fiscal austerity).

This suggests that a “realigned” GOP might have considerable coalitional diversity. And the broader project of a realignment might have bipartisan aspects. Michael Lind hit upon this point recently in Compact in arguing that the path past the neoliberal paradigm to a political realignment runs through both parties:

A logical strategy for the populists or communitarians in both parties follows from this. The strategy would have two parts: strengthening anti-neoliberal factions in both parties, and increasing opportunities for cross-party collaboration.

(Sidenote: Lind argues that finding this path involves checking the centralization of power in Congress, especially the House. Tellingly, the Senate—still governed by the filibuster and regular order—has been a hub of proto-realignment dealmaking. Nuking the filibuster and tightening partisan control of the Senate might imperil that project of collaborative innovation.)

And there does seem to be some possibility for bipartisan collaboration. Many key initiatives on reforming tech, rebuilding supply chains, and so forth have bipartisan support. Long active in Democratic politics, the policy wonk Matt Stoller has been a major voice for tackling corporate concentration and has connections in some offices on the Republican side of the Hill. Democrats ranging from Ro Khanna to Joe Manchin to Amy Klobuchar have proposed “realignment”-friendly policies. Connecticut’s Chris Murphy has recently mounted a major effort to claim the “nationalist” label for Democrats.

The Structure of the Realignment

This bipartisan shift may speak to bigger structural changes in the United States and the globe. I think it might be too deterministic to say that some “realignment” has to happen because the world has changed so much, but it’s not crazy to believe that these sweeping global shifts will create a major incentive for reform (at least if a political party wants to be viable).

The United States is simply in a much different place than it was in 2001, when the high neoliberal period consolidated. Back then, the U.S. had enjoyed decades of robust growth and was still flush from Cold War victory. The Baby Boomer generation was years away from retirement. The U.S. was far and away the biggest economy in the world. According to IMF numbers, its economy (when adjusted for purchasing power parity) was over 20% of the global economy (and even greater in absolute terms). The PRC was only about 7% of the global economy—less than France and Germany combined. By 2022, the U.S had shrunk to about 16% of the global economy by PPP standards, and the PRC was over 18%. Whether or not the PRC’s numbers are completely accurate, the fact remains that there has been a major global rebalancing over the past two decades.

And that’s just one indicator of deeper changes for the United States. Decades of setbacks in foreign affairs have compounded an underlying sense of political frustration. Annual economic growth after 2001 has been far less than in the second half of the twentieth century. The Baby Boomers have begun to retire, and the trust funds of the major entitlement programs could soon be nearing exhaustion—forcing some fiscal reckoning (to raise taxes to pay for these programs, to cut other spending, to borrow growing amounts of money, or to reform the spending trajectory for those programs).

The Internet has transformed social and economic structures. David Bowie was right: It is an alien lifeform.

The growth and influence of technology companies have dramatically changed the horizon of politics.

The coronavirus crisis helped prompt leaders across the globe to consider the benefits of a paradigm of resilience and the importance of more robust supply chains, especially for key medical goods. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has driven home how much industrial capacity matters for securing the “liberal international order”—as well as the geopolitical stakes of energy policy. Ongoing tectonic shifts in geopolitics will inevitably influence domestic political coalitions.

The Politics of the Realignment

As part of those bigger shifts, the structures of Democrats’ and Republicans’ political coalitions have changed. The Yale political-science PhD student Sam Zacher has documented how Democrats have increasingly become the party of the affluent. Here are two charts from a study by Zacher showing how the Democratic Party has increasingly become a “U-shaped” party, racking up its biggest margins among high- and low-income households.

High-income households voted overwhelmingly for Republican presidential candidates in the 1980s. Now, they increasingly lean in the Democratic direction. In 1980, households in the top 5 percent of incomes were the most Republican of all income cohorts and favored Republicans by 50 points; by 2020, that income bracket favored Democrats by about 15 points. That shift was accelerated by Donald Trump, but it long predates Trump (and probably has a lot to do with the Clintonian pivot to neoliberalism).

And bigger structural changes in the U.S. suggest that Republicans will have a hard time running up the score among wealthy households to the extent that they used to. There’s no road back to the political coalition of the 1980s. Instead, a more likely path for Republican success would be to build on the party’s strength with the economic middle while also shoring up support from low-income households and avoiding losing too many high-income households.

The 2016 presidential election has been the only one that Republicans have won since 2004, and it’s also the election in which they came closest to winning the popular vote during this period. In Zacher’s graph above, the economic shape of that election suggests one path for building a GOP majority coalition. In 2016, Republicans did worse among the top 20 percent of voters than they did in 2012, but they did much better among the bottom 80 percent of voters. Notice in particular how the GOP went from losing voters in the bottom 20 percent of household by over 25 points in 2012 to just under 10 points in 2016. It actually won voters in the middle quintile (40 to 60 percent) outright.

A combination of pro-safety-net, pro-growth, and pro-worker policies could build on that coalitional structure to win over more working-class and middle-class voters. Moreover, a Republican presidential nominee who was less alienating to may upper-income suburbanites than Donald Trump might also be able to improve GOP margins among wealthy voters, too.

All this suggests that Republicans have a significant political incentive to “realign” in favor of some blue-collar politics. (And keep in mind that this is an expansive sense of “blue collar”—not only workers in heavy industry or the trades but also the modern retail and service-economy spaces.) The communities sending Republicans to Congress are somewhat different than the communities of decades ago, which will necessitate a shift in policies and political messaging.

To Be Determined

None of this means that Republicans necessarily will rise to the political moment. At the end of 2019, Boris Johnson led the Tories to a romping political victory that broke open Labour’s “Red Wall.” Yet the Conservatives have struggled since then to understand their new coalition and update their policy platform. Polls now give Labour a tremendous lead heading into the 2024 parliamentary elections. (Hey, 2024—that rings a bell…) Failed realignments are a thing.

Nevertheless, it’s possible to imagine a kind of realignment that has some continuities with the Republican Party of the past but that also addresses new challenges. This realigned GOP might not reduce economics to tax policies and cutting regulations. It might seek to reform international commitments in light of major geopolitical changes. Industrial policy and subsidies for working families might play a more important role.

And I do stress the role of continuity here. There are many affinities between this project of “realignment” and some longstanding themes in conservative and Republican politics. Warning that the market needs to be supplemented by ethical norms, “two cheers for capitalism” could be the motto of both Irving Kristol and some contemporary “populists.” The Cold War was perhaps the animating cause of movement conservatism during the second half of the twentieth century, and one of the precepts of conservative Cold Warriors was not to let the market decide. Economic exchange with the Soviet Union was limited as a matter of principle. Tremendous sums were invested in building out the U.S. military, and Ronald Reagan poured billions into research and the development of new technologies.

Continuities cut another way. Based in part on its political ancestors (the Federalists and Whigs), the Republican Party seems to have a powerful structural tendency to favor an economics of growth. Moreover, working-class voters themselves seem attracted by an economic vision of optimism and uplift. Expanding the GOP coalition in that direction would seem to demand some kind of politics of popular prosperity.

And—despite the wishes of some proponents of more radical political change—some kind of folk-libertarian sentiment represents a powerful strain in American politics and the Republican Party in particular. This frontier-inspired tradition of freedom remains skeptical of central control—whether from the government or large corporations. The failures of the bureaucratic class during the pandemic has turbo-charged this skepticism.

It’s possible to build upon these preexisting continuities and address major challenges. That folk libertarianism, for instance, could be leveraged to help champion local responsiveness and check corporate concentration. Many Republicans in DC are deeply interested in maintaining the network of alliances and agreements that is sometimes called the “liberal [or rules-based] international order.” But maintaining that order might require substantial policy reform, including the renewal of defense and industrial infrastructures. As I mentioned before, a politics of broad-based growth could appeal to voters across the income spectrum.

A final point: Implicit in many discussions of the “realignment” are other controversies about freedom and the “liberal.” I’d briefly suggest that responding to contemporary challenges might require not the abandonment of freedom or longstanding American traditions but an understanding of their deeper resources. American life has long shown a synthesis of traditions of solidarity and liberty—simultaneously embracing the effusions of the market and statecraft to attend to the general welfare. A “realignment” might not be the overthrowing of the American regime but instead a set of strategic reforms in order to strengthen its foundations and renew its promise.

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Whew! In case you’re interested, some more “realignment”-related links:

Heritage report on “Free Enterprise and the Common Good”

Business Insider report on that Heritage report

Yuval Levin on the ethics of Adam Smith

Ryan Bourne raises doubts about industrial policy

Phillip Blonde on nationalism and ideals

Russ Greene on “a liberalism worth saving”

American Compass on R&D consortia

Tanner Greer on the “new right”

Sam Adler-Bell on “new right” up-and-comers

Michael Cuenco and Blake Smith on shift from emancipation to self-mastery

Me on Michael Walzer’s appeal to “liberal” as an adjective

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By the way, I’ve recently joined CenterClip as a contributor. It’s an interesting new media platform for the delivery of short (1-5 minute) audio op-eds and has a curated set of contributors from across the political spectrum. It even has an app. So you can check it out if you’re interested.

Thanks for reading!