Is a “political realignment” happening under our own eyes?
The idea of a fundamental change in the way people divide politically has been around at least since Donald Trump won the Presidential race and the Brexit referendum in England. People tend to believe that the new fault line will be between “anywheres” and “somewheres”, to borrow the terms used by David Goodhart: that is, between those who, broadly speaking, support globalisation and those who oppose it. The first do embrace a certain view of the open society, the latter do not.
On what such a realignment may imply, I recommend to listen to IEA’s Steve Davies (for example, here). What seems most relevant, at least to me, is that cultural issues seem to be more prominent over economic ones. Instead of coalescing around questions of taxation and redistribution, people may increasingly get more likely to do so around ideas of how their society should look like: if immigrants are to be allowed in or not, if gay people should be allowed to get married or not, et cetera. The American Left has been a forerunner of this phenomenon, with its growing reliance on identity policy, which in Europe is going by and large to the benefit of right-wing parties that are (so far, successfully) rebranding nationalism in a new guise for our times.
It is not clear, of course, that such a realignment is truly an *international* phenomenon. Political cultures vary sharply in different countries, and so do the electoral system, that may either facilitate or obstruct the process. It seems to me that the process may be easier with a pure proportional representation system and more difficult with first past the post electoral systems.
French economist Jean Pisani-Ferry thinks the next European elections (June 2019) are a grand opportunity for such realignment to take place – and yet he fears it may not happen.
The European Parliament elections would be a great opportunity because EU countries elect their MEPs in different ways, but they all use some form of proportional representation. On top of that, voters tend to perceive European elections as the equivalent of some sort of gigantic opinion poll, as they perceive the vote as not affecting their own national government. So, it may well be that European elections allow for bold experimentation.
Pisani Ferry holds that “both [Hungary premier] Orbán and [French President] Macron seem to think that the European Parliament election in 2019 will bring about a political realignment”: on one side those who accept globalisation and (and a relatively freer movement of persons) and those who do not. I’m not completely sure this is a fair representation, as Macron looks to me as a leader investing a great deal in French nationalism, but let’s go along with this.
For Pisani Ferry, “European politics has long been structured along a left-right divide” but
In more than a handful of countries, however, this divide no longer characterizes the political scene. In Poland, Hungary, and most of Central Europe, the key confrontation is between illiberal nationalists and pro-European liberals. In France, the choice in 2017 was not between left and right, but between Macron, the champion of openness (whose campaign I advised), and Marine Le Pen, his exact opposite. And in Italy, both center-right and center-left forces have been marginalized by two new anti-system parties with roots in the far right and the far left.
Indeed, today’s most divisive issues – economic openness, Europe, and immigration – do not pit the center left and the center right against each other. … For next year’s European Parliament election to bring greater clarity on the issues that matter for Europe, new camps would need to be formed. Despite cracks on both sides, this is unlikely to happen.
Pisani Ferry’s piece is interesting and thoughtful. My modest caveat however is that left and right have very rarely been associated with clear political philosophies. That may have happened in a few key moments in recent history, say Thatcher vs Kinnock or Carter vs Reagan, but for the most part, people are bound together in their allegiances even though their beliefs overlap up to a point.
I find the scenario of a realignment around cultural issues potentially terrifying. It seems to me that advocates of a closed society have an advantage in forging an alliance with advocates of a closed economy: they tend to be highly ideological and, thus, committed. On the other hand, with the exception of libertarians, the preference for a freer economy is a rather “weak”, cold blooded, reasoned choice that people understand to be intertwined with a bunch of trade offs (I’m in a favour of a relatively freer economy insofar as my local grocery doesn’t get overwhelmed by Amazon’s competition, et cetera). I’m not so sure, once again: with the exception of libertarians, how easy is it for people that care about civil rights to forge an alliance with those who want a freer economy? Some of the latter are genuinely conservative people, some of the first think that part of their own civil rights advocacy entail redistribution-as-retribution (affirmative actions and the likes).
The old political allegiances were confused and incoherent for a reason: it is very difficult to develop coherent ones.
READER COMMENTS
Shane L
Sep 17 2018 at 12:35pm
Well here in Ireland I see little sign of realignment. Rather it looks like there is a remarkable shift back towards the situation prior to 2008.
The largest party Fine Gael (centre-right, but increasingly socially liberal) is scoring well in the latest polls. The far-left continues to be fractured among multiple small parties, and seems to have missed whatever opportunity the economic crisis offered and is again subsiding. There is no popular anti-EU movement, or anti-immigration movement.
Brexit’s unpopularity in Ireland, where it poses a serious concern about the border with Northern Ireland and is associated with unpopular right-conservative British movements like UKIP and DUP, may be leading the far-left to shift towards more EU-friendly rhetoric. It’s hard to remember, but just a few years ago it was the far-left who were the strongest Irish critics of EU institutions.
The sitting president is a strong favourite to be re-elected. The EU is wildly popular here. Social conservatism seems to be continuing to decline as younger people are strongly aligned with liberalism. What left-wing economic aspirations exist seem to be somewhat satisfied by the moderate centre-right government. There is a lot of concern about homelessness, but generally it seems that panic is receding and faith is shifting back towards the centre ground of moderate centrists, with their celebration of economic openness, participation in international institutions, and a controlled immigration policy that continues to admit migrants.
I suspect that perceptions of anti-EU nationalism are overstated a bit. This Eurobarometer poll from 2015 suggests a very slight increase in the proportion of respondents who feel they are an EU citizen between 2010 and 2015, for example:
http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/archives/eb/eb83/eb83_citizen_en.pdf
Weir
Sep 18 2018 at 5:12am
From this week’s Economist: “A recent study found that in 1999-2013 the most prestigious universities in the US admitted more students from the top 1 per cent of households by income than from the bottom 50 per cent. In 1980-2015 university fees in the US rose 17 times as fast as median incomes. The 50 biggest urban areas contain 7 per cent of the world’s people and produce 40 per cent of its output. But planning restrictions shut many out, especially the young.”
It’s not as if we’re in a hurry to open up Tribeca or the Mission District or Islington. People who live in Hampstead are deeply committed to opening up Hungary and Poland. But opening up Hampstead? Opening up the Ivy League?
Unpaid internships are open to kids with generous parents. A job at Google is open to anyone who can master the intricacies of intersectionality and microaggressions. These are class markers. We call it social justice. But in practice it’s a dialect of class markers. These are the most up-to-the-minute, recherche class hurdles.
Google allows its employees to think about a highly specific understanding of evolution. Sergey Brin thinks that people voted against Hillary Clinton out of boredom. Not the prospect of another four to eight years of “secular stagnation.” Nothing to do with the Little Sisters of the Poor or Masterpiece Cakeshop or whether Republicans will be allowed to sit down in restaurants. Just boredom.
David Goodhart, on the other hand, tried to think outside the bubble he was born into. He didn’t write another simplistic morality play about us and them. What he might have done even better was to show how the “somewheres” and the “anywheres” are alike. Because we’re just as attached to our own neighbourhoods as they are to their local counties and countries, to their little platoons, their religion, their guns. We believe in opening up the world’s borders. What we don’t believe in is opening up our kids’ high schools. Or our professions. Or our universities. (What’s the opposite of diversity? University. Because nothing so effectively entrenches the class divide than the universities.)
And now, as of January, the Metropolitan Museum of Art charges an admission fee to non-New Yorkers. Because it had been too open, and too crowded. The queues were too long. Come to think of it, aren’t our favourite ski resorts a little too open now? They are tourists. We are world travellers. They are the crowds getting in our way at the Sistine Chapel. We are connoisseurs of Renaissance art.
Mark
Sep 19 2018 at 9:59pm
I think elite circles have made progress to reducing protectionism. Tenure for professors is mostly dead. Tech companies will hire you based on your ability to do publicly accessible online coding test, which is as meritocratic a process as I can think of. Many elite professions like tech, medicine, and quantitative finance are chock full of immigrants. Legacies are a problem, but they only make up a small percentage of Ivy League students and many similar caliber universities like CalTech do not have legacies and admit solely on merit.
While there is further to go (such as reducing zoning laws), all of this stuff is pretty small bore compared to the impact of restrictions on trade and immigration. If 87% of Harvard graduates were legacies and the median Harvard graduate earned 10 times as much as the median American (similar to the disparities between Americans and non-Americans), then we can talk moral equivalency.
Weir
Sep 20 2018 at 7:55am
There was a poll this week that said two-thirds of Brits want free trade between the US and UK. And more than half of Brits voted to leave the EU. So it is, first of all, false to say that more than half of Britain is opposed to globalisation. The numbers don’t add up.
So maybe a closer reading of David Goodhart’s book and a scan of this week’s Economist and a brief glance at that poll would suggest that there’s something counterproductive in telling more than half of Britain that they are opposed to globalisation. Apart from it being untrue, it’s counterproductive too.
If most people support the regulation of food and drink, and we describe them as being against food and against drink, would we keep saying it? No matter if they think we’re nuts? If most people believe that banks should be regulated, would we call them anti-banking? We say that more than half of Britain is opposed to having an open society. Because we have convinced ourselves that the open society is incompatible with British parliament? Since when? Since the early 90s?
We can tell ourselves that a vote to leave the EU is a vote for Little England. But it isn’t true. We can flatter ourselves and say that we’re open and they’re closed, that we have values and what they have is just the negation of our values. We can say that they don’t have any positive beliefs, only an irrational hatred of our values. But maybe our values are closely bound up with our ability to pay for real estate? Or to buy ourselves a quick commute? Or to purchase a shorter queue at the hospital? We’re attached to the things we care about, just like they’re attached to the weird and inexplicable things that they think are important. Like elections.
The Irish voted against the EU in 2008 and were made to vote again. The Dutch voted against the EU in 2005. So did the French. Does nobody believe in justice and hope? Are people everywhere so hateful and wicked as to reject all that is good and sweet in the world? Why vote against something so noble and pure?
If we could admit any equivalency at all between ourselves (the rulers) and the people we despise (the ruled) then maybe we could persuade them to agree with us willingly and peaceably, like equals. Because insulting them more and more loudly hasn’t worked too well. What if we switched to Plan B, and tried to win elections instead of mounting an end-run around them? What if we faced up to the fact that our values are connected, one way or another, to our ability to pay for a child’s education? What if we tried to be less moralistic and hypocritical and self-flattering?
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