Why right vs. left may be relics of the past

[BainsBane]

I've been struck in recent years by what I see as reactionary views championed as leftist. What constitutes left vs. right is increasingly contested. Some insist the Democratic Party has moved to the right since the 1990s (not in the 1990s but since). I have even seen some who claim to be on the left insist that Trump champions progressive causes. I have to wonder if disagreements about what constitutes Democratic values or left vs. right point to fundamental changes in politics and ideology.

An NPR interview with French academic Yascha Mounk offers some insights.

SHAPIRO: You write in Slate today that the battles of the future will not be fought between leftists and rightists or liberals and conservatives. Rather, you say they will pit the advocates of an open society against the partisans of a closed society and nationalists. Explain what that re-alignment looks like.

MOUNK: You know, whether you're a Democrat or you're a Republican, whether you in France are for the Parti Socialiste or the UMP or Les Republicains would have been decided by your stance on straightforward economic issues. If you want a slightly bigger welfare state, a little bit more redistribution, then you're on the center-left. If you want, you know, more free enterprise and a smaller welfare state, lower taxes, then you're on the center-right.

Now I think there's really coming to be this quite fundamental clash which is nicely encapsulated by Emmanuel Macron on the one side and Marine Le Pen on the other side, between people who believe that globalization is an opportunity but we need international cooperation in order to solve problems like climate change, that we should be open to the world. And people say no, the most important thing is the nation, and that stands in competition with international organizations. It has to close itself off against the world in order to have real power. It has to embrace an ethnic, cultural majority against others. And so this is what you're seeing now.

I'm a little torn about this because if a main political cleavage is between essentially defenders of liberal democracy in the current world order and ones who really want to dismantle it radically, then eventually they will sometimes win elections, and we will get real moments of turmoil like we're seeing now in the United States.
http://www.npr.org/2017/04/24/525441567/french-presidential-election-serves-as-test-of-liberal-democracy

Mounk sees that political shift as extending beyond French politics. It is demonstrated in Brexit, in differences between Trump on one hand and Obama and Hillary Clinton on the other.

I think we may be seeing elements of that divide within the Democratic party, which may explain how what constitutes right or left is now so contested. Those terms may simply not be relevant to what we are currently experiencing. Perhaps we are witnessing conflicts within the party over nationalism vs. liberal globalism? Could the recent calls for understanding of and alliances with Republican voters that some consider to be the working class be part of that phenomenon? Could we be seeing an implicit understanding that left vs. right matters less than opposition to globalism?

The antipathy toward global economic relations is overt, unapologetic. Yet can a nationalist populist impulse succeed without the corresponding nativism that has undergrid its electoral successes in France, the UK, and with Trump in the US? While we don't see the racism and explicit nativism in the current Democratic party that is evident in the National Front and the movement around Trump, we do see a hierarchy of priorities. The horrifying immigration enforcement by the Trump administration has received limited attention in comparison to some other issues. I'm sure that those who think of themselves as on the other side of the party from me could come up with a host of examples of globalist tendencies they find concerning--TPP, etc. The argument following the election that Clinton lost because of inadequate opposition to TPP may also be part of the political see change that Mounk identified.

Perhaps the Democratic party will never resolve the dispute about left vs. right because the current political fissures relate to something different: nationalism vs. globalism, and closed vs. open societies?

[JustAnotherGen]

1. Great piece BB

I'm focused on this (at the link):

So I agree. I think it is these factors. All through the history of democratic stability, you've seen this very rapid increase in living standards from one generation to the next, and that's no longer the case. Nearly every democracy in the world has been founded as a mono-ethnic, monocultural country with a clear racial hierarchy even insofar as people from outside the nation were tolerated there all.

And now you see slowly countries coming to grapple with the idea of what it means to live alongside people of different religions, different ethnicities, different cultural customs. And that's a really difficult and tough process that a lot of countries are rebelling against.

That includes America. The bold is America. The italicized is America. One caveat - one marginalized group has been here since the Colonial era.

We are silently screaming "What about me?" I see it in my two early 20s college educated nephews. By every metric of our society - the two young men who voted Clinton should not be following around Evan McMullin. One is a "bankster" and the other is finishing up his solar panel training and HVAC certification this summer before heading back for his Senior Year of college. He wants to start a green energy business.

I ask them - asked them hard on Easter Sunday . . . Older Nephew: They have a chip on their shoulder directed at me because of the color of my skin much more than my job.

The "They" are people some segments of the Left want to court.

Maybe we are simply flipping in America? Truman's and Johnson's actions caused major flips - maybe it's happening again?

[BainsBane]

2. The they are the new prize

While voters like your nephew are thrown away. It looks like an effort to reconfigure the party along the lines Mounk describes.

[BainsBane]

3. and I do think we are seeing a realignment

I've thought that for a while now. Mounk's piece helps me make sense of it.