Michael Lind this afternoon in a post on Salon:
When party systems collapse in American history, the new party system tends to emerge from within the dominant party. The defeat of the Confederates meant that the politics of the Gilded Age would be fought between the business and farmer wings of the hegemonic Republican Party. During the New Deal era the intra-party disputes between liberals and Democratic conservatives foreshadowed the disputes between parties in the Reagan era.
If this pattern holds, then in the next generation the “right” is likely to be closer to the neoliberal wing of today’s Democrats than to today’s ultra-libertarian economic conservatives, whose views about entitlements and regulation will marginalize them by 2020 or 2030. If the post-Reagan Republicans adopt something like the centrist New Democrat neoliberalism of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, then the Democrats may respond by becoming a much more consistently progressive, pro-government and New Deal-ish party on economic issues.
I wrote this earlier in the comments section for the Obama Speech post:
Another idea for realignment might be for the sensible business types in the GOP to break off from the GOP extremists and join with the Neoliberal or corporate Dems to form a new party. It would really be the old Republican Party, but it will have to call itself something else. The "Money Party" probably won't work. It will embrace free market libertarian ideas, and will leave the extreme cultural conservatives to form their own fringe party.
The Democrats would then re-embrace its original tradition of populism — progressive on economic issues, and moderate on social issues. Its nucleus will be traditional labor, ethnic Catholics/Hispanics, African Americans, Main Street progressives, and maybe in time even southern working class whites. And then a fringe party (it's nucleus the current Greens?) can form further to the left and it can push the populist Democrats to deal with bigger issues that are not exactly "kitchen table"–environment, gay rights, surveillance state, aggressive foreign policy, criminalization of everything, etc. over time. Just thinking out loud here, but this would bring a better balance to our politics that it currently does not have.
I think demographic changes will clear force party realignments, whether or not Lind or my scenario has any basis in reality. I think that cultural conservatism will always have its deadenders–as Lind says in his article–
No doubt some Reaganite conservatives will continue to fight the old battles, like the Japanese soldiers who hid on Pacific islands for decades, fighting a war that had long before been lost. But as a formula for achieving a governing majority in the United States, Reaganism is finished.
Whether this kind of change will have much of an impact on Obama's second term is doubtful, but I think in the long run, he's right. But one might also ask whether it will make that much of a difference if this new, secular, non-nostalgic culturally left politics will have the political awareness and the will to take on Big Money.
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