Frank DiStefano has the best take in American politics.
William Jennings Bryan’s politics are our politics … foreign policy restraint, cultural conservatism and nationalism and economic fairness for the American worker. This is what “journalists” and “extremism experts” alarmingly call “the rise of far right domestic extremism.”
New Deal liberalism was built on a populist-progressive coalition. Mainstream conservatism (Frank Meyer’s fusionism) was built on a libertarian-conservative coalition. We’re not really having this debate anymore though. We don’t even have the same coalitions in 2021. And yet, there still hasn’t been any adjustment by either political party or Donald Trump and Joe Biden to this new reality.
The populists have been steadily alienated by progressives over social issues and have gone over to the Right. The libertarians have been alienated by conservatives and have gone over to the Left. The actual coalitions are a progressive-libertarian coalition on the Left and a populist-conservative coalition on the Right. The glue that holds the Left together is social liberalism and the glue that holds the Right together is social conservatism. The two parties are deeply divided mainly by education over cultural issues like antiracism, cosmopolitanism, modernism and political correctness or wokeness.
The fire and energy that animates both sides is clearly over racial, cultural and identity issues. At the same time, there is much more agreement on economic issues because the populists and libertarians have switched sides. The Democrats are the party of virtue signaling PMCs now. Joe Biden wants to use big government and social planning to advance a cultural libertarian agenda … a New Deal based on things like, say, “trans women” in women’s sports, Abolish ICE or Defund the Police.
Does New Deal conservatism sound ridiculous? The Republicans currently want to use big government to do things like, say, deport illegal aliens and secure the border, break up and regulate Big Tech monopolies, ban gender reassignment surgery, knock down the politically correct universities, end abortion, impose tariffs on China and rebuild the shattered social and economic fabric of the country.
Note: The black host is living in a DC fantasy bubble. How on earth is Joe Biden calming things down? No, Joe’s administration is dumping nitroglycerin on all the issues that led to Trump.
It’s almost funny how clueless and out of touch almost all of these people are. There has always been a disconnect between DC and the rest of the country, but now they are just living in another world. I say “almost funny” because having the administrative state of the most powerful empire in history living in a delusional fantasy world completely out of touch with the real world is extremely dangerous. So it’s funny more in a black comedy way.
And of course it makes sense that progressives would believe all of this stupid stuff about Biden healing the country with unpopular executive orders, since they refused to take any lessons from the 2016 election. They never even showed any interest in understanding why Trump won. They just used it to confirm and reinforce all of their existing biases, so they concluded Trump won because flyover rednecks are stupid uneducated low information racists who got duped by Putin.