Understanding Today’s Politics

I’ve run across a couple of interesting ideas about today’s politics in my readings this morning. From an article at n + 1 by Aziz Rana from earlier this year, were the fringe factions within the two major political parties subordinated during the Cold War and have re-emerged now that the Cold War is over?

THE 2016 ELECTION WAS THE LAST ELECTION of the cold war. The conflict that molded generations of American elites has ceased to function as the framing paradigm of American politics. Even decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, an account of the cold war—and of cold war victory—contained disagreement in Washington and formed a consensus that linked the center-left to the center-right. This consensus, based on a set of judgments that coalesced in the aftermath of World War II, concerned everything from the genius of America’s domestic institutions to the indispensability of its global role. These judgments gave coherence to the country’s national identity—allowing both Barack Obama and Bill Kristol to wax poetic about America’s special destiny as a global hegemon—and legitimacy to its economic policy. But with the 2016 election, the cold-war paradigm finally shattered.

Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, the establishment candidates, found that the value of their political inheritance had collapsed; in a sense, they were the last scions of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump marked the return of the repressed: the reemergence of two varieties of popular politics that were common until the 1940s but were eventually crushed under the pressure of the long cold war. Socialism was no longer anathema, as memories of the Soviet Union faded, but neither was white nationalism in all its terror and intensity. For good and for bad, a door had been unlocked. Today, the country is more ideologically open than it has been since the 1940s.

Much of the ensuing political science commentary has been a lament over the destruction of norms. As noted by Jedediah Purdy in Dissent:

A political science fixated on norms fits easily with a political ethics based on virtue, and the crisis-of-democracy literature really, really wants us to be better, more grateful citizens. Mounk, for instance, calls for a version of “renewing civic faith” that strikes just the right balance of political trust and doubt, a prudent tonic of “inclusive nationalism” that is neither too cosmopolitan nor too particular. He is free with “we” and “our.” So are they all.

It was another habit of the long 1990s to assume that because the political problems of ideological contest had been solved, what remained was a matter for either experts or ethicists. It isn’t surprising that, when expertise seems to be losing its authority, the diagnosis falls back on ethics—the demonstrably odious character of the president, but also the norms of American political culture, and, at bottom, the attitudes of its citizens.

but our problem today is not an unvirtuous citizenry but virtueless leaders. People are willing to forgive venal leaders, e.g. Bill Clinton, when everything seems to be moving in the right direction. Both accepting Bill Clinton and his subsequent impeachment by the House were violations of important political norms. That’s a jinn not easy to stuff back into the bottle.