Realignment for real, part 1

As I flagged last week, I want to talk about a political realignment that I think is under way in at least some quarters of the western democracies, of which conflicting attitudes to the war in Ukraine is one aspect. This will be a multi-part series, and I’m still organising my thoughts, so today I’m just going to cover a bit of the background.

It’s a while since we’ve talked here about realignment, but a few years ago it was a common topic, especially in relation to the United Kingdom and the politics of Brexit. There were two (sometimes conflicting, sometimes complementary) strands to the idea.

One was the thought that economic issues were losing their salience in marking the difference between parties and being replaced by something like a nationalist vs cosmopolitan spectrum (John Quiggin and Stephen Davies offered different versions of this). The other was the thought that parties of the right were losing their attachment to anything like the free market, and that some of that ground was instead being taken by parties of the left (Michael Lind argued this, although it also comes up in Davies’s work).

There’s an element of tension here – if economics is losing importance as an organising principle, then you wouldn’t expect parties to have consistent views on it either way. But the two thoughts can also work together: if they’re primarily organised around something different, then that gives the parties scope to experiment with different economic positions.

And if you think there’s a natural fit, on the one hand, between pro-immigration, pro-diversity policies and free trade and free enterprise, and, on the other hand, between immigration restrictions, “sovereignty” concerns and protectionism and economic nationalism, then you’ll find it natural that the two things should happen together.

My view, which I’ve alluded to a few times (see here and here for examples), is that this is basically true, but that it isn’t the novelty people seem to think. It’s actually something that’s been in progress for the last thirty years, but some party rhetoric has only recently started to catch up. The driving force was the collapse of the Soviet empire, which discredited traditional socialism and took much of the point out of the economic policy debate.

In its place, something like the traditional liberal vs conservative debate returned to the forefront. Parties of the right embraced more of their traditional authoritarianism (encouraged by the need to win support from competitors on the far right), and parties of the left recovered some of their half-forgotten liberalism. And some parties, such as Australia’s Liberal Party, found that the new dividing line ran through the middle of their ranks.

Of course, the world didn’t stand still for three decades. Two things in particular are worth noting. First, starting with the global financial crisis of 2008, something like traditional socialism became a bit more respectable; the shift was mostly rhetorical, but it meant that at least some members of centre-left parties could position themselves as hostile to capitalism in a way that would have been improbable a decade earlier.

Secondly, coinciding with the rise of Donald Trump in 2015-16, some leaders of what had been centre-right parties started to take positions that were openly hostile to democracy and constitutional government. A certain scepticism about democracy had always been present on the right, but the willingness to throw it overboard entirely was new. Some of the same parties also moved towards the embrace of Russian president Vladimir Putin – although this was a factor on the left as well.

So a new decade opened with the 6 January insurrection in the United States, followed a year later by the invasion of Ukraine. And since then, it seems to me, the 30-year realignment that many pundits were only just coming to terms with, has in turn started to become obsolete. It may be just a passing anomaly, but it may also be something deep whose implications we will have to live with for many years to come.

Next week I’ll try to draw out the implications of this, starting with the United States.