Since the Earth first formed, its magnetic field has re-polarized several times. The North Pole has become the South Pole and vice versa. Sometimes these transitions have taken as long as ten thousand years; some have taken place in less than a hundred. All of these transitions, by the standard of geologic time, have taken place in the blink of God’s eye. Suddenly, south is north and all the molecules start realigning based on the new magnetic field structuring the matter and energy of the earth’s systems.
I want to suggest that, since the emergence of what is called the Second Party System, this is essentially how American politics functions, that it does, in human time, what the earth does in geological time: re-polarizes. US politics and its coalitions are highly dynamic, as dynamic as any in the world. But, especially since the introduction of the Primary System in the 1920s, this political dynamism has been coupled with a bipolar system. And even before the 1920s, for the previous century and a half, the emergence of a new party always led to the collapse of an old one.
This combination of a locked-in two-party dynamic with a highly dynamic politics constantly making and unmaking big, unwieldy coalitions means that, unless legally restructured from the bottom up, the United States is fated to undergo a series of magnetic reversals. And it is my view that we are at the crescendo of such a reversal today.
Furthermore, the way that news media have changed throughout the Anglosphere white settler states, the repercussions of this realignment, globally, are even greater than during the Cold War.
For those less acquainted with US history than I, let me take a moment to describe some other re-polarizations. Beginning in 1932 and culminating in 1960, the Democratic Party went from being the party of white supremacy, backed by the Solid South, running on a national platform of segregation and the maintenance of Jim Crow disenfranchisement laws to becoming the party of black America, steadily losing white majority segregationist states from 1944 until 1980 when not a single state in Dixie backed them.
Intimately related to this process, the Republican Party began actively courting southern segregationists in 1960, running against the Civil Rights Act in the 1964 election under Barry Goldwater, with the assistance of floor-crossing segregationist senator Strom Thurmond, and adopting Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” in 1968, to actively solicit the votes of white supremacists.
In the 1970s, under the leadership of Gerald Ford, the Republican Party became, explicitly the party of neoliberalism, moving its progressive wing, which had long favoured greater state regulation of business, since the Teddy Roosevelt presidency, to the periphery. Free marketers eclipsed old school right-progressives and politicians changed their stripes accordingly, with long-time progressives like George H W Bush becoming evangelists of neoliberalism.
From 1932 until 1992, the Democrats had been the party of the New Deal, the Welfare State, having previously been the party of deregulation in the nineteenth century. But in 1992, they shouldered past the Republicans on their right and from 1994-2000 enacted an aggressive program of deregulation, free trade and social program cuts. Having previously been the party of Catholics, Blacks, Latinos and the white working class, the four most socially conservative groups in the country, the post-Clinton Democrats coupled their newfound love of free markets with a muscular social liberalism, focusing on aggressive secularization and hot button social issues like gay marriage.
Consequently, Republicans became aggressive in playing to Catholics and the white working class (even in the early twenty-first century, they feared actively recruiting racialized constituencies while trying to keep the last of the segregationist southerners on board.) First, they focused exclusively on social issues, abortion, gay marriage, the coerced secularization of private business, etc.
But with the ascent of Donald Trump, advised by Steve Bannon, this appeal to working class Americans of all stripes broadened. And, for the first time since the Clinton Administration ratified it, Americans were given the chance to vote against NAFTA in 2016, a hated agreement that had ravaged so many industrial towns, tearing the fabric out of communities and leaving industrial town after industrial town looking like a Bruce Springsteen song.
This brought more dividends than even imagined, for the GOP, in the form of working class voters of all racial backgrounds. Despite the largely cosmetic changes to NAFTA, working class voters continue to pour into the Republican Party.
Of course, everyone who has a progressive between 1992 and the present knows the Democrats’ counter-move: to vigorously, assiduously recruit upper-income, educated white suburbanites who have traditionally voted Republican but are disgusted not so much by the party’s policies but by its adoption of the most boorish, proletarian cultural affectations. Correcting the spelling of working class people and sneering at their belief that they could do research or form political opinions on their own became a staple of the party that had once propounded its core doctrine as the common sense and decency of the working class.
This is starting to generate its own set of problems for the GOP: in primarily white regions of the country, they are now at a disadvantage in special elections and other low-turnout contests, because the voter suppression laws could not name a colour and could only suppress people’s votes based on class. So, because Democrats are now richer and better-educated than Republicans in growing swaths of the country, the very laws Republicans enacted in the twentieth century to suppress Democratic voting is now suppressing their own vote, as they grow increasingly dependent on the white working class.
And, how long before, mere lip service to respecting working class people turns into policies that could materially benefit them at the expense of the Mitch McConnells of the world?
Curiously, possibly because of its incredibly incompetent and maladroit style from top to bottom, the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign actually told us poignant and ironic story about this, a powerful piece of American history when they aggressively popularized video footage of Jackie Robinson and his cadre showing up at the 1964 Republican convention to denounce the nomination of Goldwater and the recruitment of Thurmond.
Robinson, one of the most important media surrogates for liberal, respectable black Americans, was an American icon, the much-beloved baseball player, the first black person to play on a major league team. Throughout the 1950s, he had been an active member of the GOP, “the party of Lincoln,” when American blacks were leaning Democratic but split between the main parties. He exerted an important influence on the Eisenhower regime in its reaction to Brown v. Board of Education and in the passage of the first national Civil Rights Act in 1957.
Robinson passionately expressed his absolute incredulity that the party that had freed the slaves would back an avowed segregationist for senate and an opponent of the Civil Rights Act for the presidency.
The Clinton campaign showed us this video as part of their sheepdog operation of snapping up that last handful of GOP-voting white, upper middle class, educated suburban liberals in the outskirts of Detroit, Philadelphia and Raleigh, an operation that was, even then, producing diminishing returns.
Looking back, in hindsight, as a reluctant Clinton supporter at the time, I now see how the video actually illustrates the opposite of what she hoped it would. Rather than focusing on equivalencies they wished us to draw between Goldwater and Trump, I am focusing on Robinson, a man living in the past, a man unable to accept the realignment he had been living through since 1932. To him, the Republican Party was not a dynamic, ever-changing force but something of a fixed essence that transcended the ravages of time.
The problem was not that the Republicans had changed but that Robinson had not. He was at the wrong convention. He should have been down the road at the Democratic convention, shepherding the floor vote on the Voting Rights Act and defusing the conflict between the two Mississippi convention delegations.
Unfortunately, since the Jon Stewart-ization of progressive news in the Anglosphere, this distinctively American polarity is now culturally if not politically enveloping society in the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. The political obsessions of Canadian progressives are those Stephen Colbert, John Oliver and Trevor Noah tell them to have. They are worried about militarized police forces, abortion laws, gun control and host of other issues, where the US and Canada are in very different situations with respect to our problems, our laws and the possible solutions. Unconcerned about the Trudeau government’s massive expansion of guest worker programs, they whitter on about needing to support illegal immigrants to the US. Unconcerned about the fake college shakedown we are running on the children of the global middle class, indebting families for generations, they are focused on American student loan forgiveness.
For this reason, the American realignment has come to Canada, not because of structural features of Canada but because of the cultural politics of the post-political Anglosphere.
You see, Canadian progressives, you are actually Jackie Robinson, people living in a nostalgic past to justify membership in parties that have long since abandoned the working class.
