Not one major phenomenon is driving US and global politics today. Several powerful and somewhat contradictory currents must be navigated together. I list the following trends in no particular order. The references in square brackets link to previous posts on the same themes.
Costs of neoliberalism: The global market economy harms people in wealthy countries [1]. It also has benefits, and the net impact is debatable. (For instance, US workers are reporting the highest mean levels of job satisfaction yet recorded.) But even if a minority of workers hold insecure, regimented, automated, underpaid, and demeaning jobs, their concerns are real. Meanwhile, AI looms as a potential destroyer of decent livelihoods.
Class inversion: In many countries, right-wing parties draw their main support from less-educated and less affluent constituencies, while the main center-left parties depend on voters of the highest socio-economic status. As a result, right-wing parties cannot compete by offering limited government, but instead promise versions of ethno-nationalism. And left parties provide mostly symbolic policies on social issues while blocking more ambitious economic reforms that would cost their own voters [2, 3, 29, etc.].
Right-wing populist authoritarianism: From the Philippines and India to Hungary and El Salvador and the United States, successful charismatic male politicians disparage outsiders or minority groups and repress dissent, purporting to speak–without inhibitions–on behalf of the authentic “people” of their respective countries. This formula wins elections [4].
Effective state repression: From ca. 1980-2000, authoritarian states–whether left, right, or technocratic–tended to falter when challenged by mass popular movements. One reason was that the authoritarians clung to old-fashioned methods, such as cancelling elections and imprisoning dissidents, which failed in the face of sophisticated nonviolent social movements that borrowed and extended the repertoire of the US Civil Rights Movement. But then authoritarian states innovated, developing more effective methods for control. Meanwhile, social movements mainly reprised the toolkit of the 1960s, with some modifications for digital media. The rate of success of nonviolent social movements fell [28].
Oligarchy: Small numbers of billionaires wield enormous power in the politics and media of many countries. This is a different problem from class struggle or economic inequality. In fact, some of the billionaire oligarchs are at odds with the highest income strata of their own societies. Often (as in the cases of Trump and Musk) they owe much of their fortunes to the public purse. They are literally corrupt [11].
Elite capture: The same institutions and towns or neighborhoods where political opinions are most progressive–and sometimes intolerantly so–are also designed to preserve the economic advantages of their own people. I write this post at Stanford University, which students describe as a “liberal bubble” and which operates at the very heart of global capitalism. Students who may be hyper-liberal also expect to work in tech or finance. They got here (and to institutions like my own) thanks to K12 schools and college admissions that relentlessly favored the most advantaged families; professors who held scarce, tenured jobs; contingent workers who cooked and cleaned for them; and even zoning rules that inflated the value of their families’ homes. From an outsider’s perspective, all of this looks rigged and hypocritical [5, 13, 14].
Regulatory capture: Progressive politicians prefer to require behavior by companies, nonprofits, and public institutions instead of providing services. The costs of regulation do not appear on governments’ balance sheets and can be played down. Unfortunately, regulations rarely produce the intended results because they are implemented by organizations that have interests of their own. From the perspective of an employee or a consumer, a government regulation whose original rationale was to protect the public good often looks like just another self-serving directive handed down by the company’s HR department [21].
Racial backlash: From the 1960s to the 2000s, national Democratic and Republican politicians talked about race in ways that were similar enough that voters who weren’t political specialists couldn’t tell the difference. Indeed, each party was inconsistent enough about racial issues that their real differences were ambiguous. I think the Democrats’ nomination of Barack Obama and then the party’s partial receptiveness to Black Lives Matter alerted voters to the fact that people of color, particularly Black Americans, held real influence in that party but not in the GOP. A significant number of white voters then shifted to the Republicans as a form of racial backlash [6, 7]
Affective polarization: Citizens in the USA and many similar countries are affectively polarized, increasingly using party labels to decide whether other citizens are friends or enemies. In the US, this trend is symmetrical for Democrats and Republicans. Many people also receive news and opinion that is ideologically tilted. We marinate in ideologically convenient clichés and avoid wrestling with tradeoffs and complexities. (This is true of sophisticated liberals as well as other people) [9, 10].
Loneliness: Americans have become much less likely to participate in self-governing voluntary associations. Yet such participation supports other forms of political engagement and correlates with tolerant and democratic values. The opposite of social capital is loneliness, which has reached epidemic proportions. Among the organizations that have shrunk are unions, which declined to their lowest level (one in ten workers) during Joe Biden’s friendly administration. Another category is religion. For many Americans today, being Christian is an identity label rather than a demanding, collective practice that teaches self-sacrifice and common action [12, 15].
COVID hangover: Several of the previously mentioned trends, notably loneliness and racial backlash, rose rapidly during and since the global pandemic. Although I sympathize with leaders who had to make decisions about matters like masks and vaccine mandates, I believe that these issues became polarized by party and social class; and liberal elites far overstated the case for restrictions. For example, as I noted during the pandemic, the scientific evidence for masks was weak, yet wearing a mask became politically correct. (Not to mention the genuine coverup of the Wuhan lab leak.) Since those who favored pandemic restrictions also tend to want more regulation in general, they helped to discredit government [16, 17].
Legislative incapacity: So far in this century, Congress has yet to pass any landmark legislation. Perhaps the strongest candidate for that label would be the massive spending bills that Joe Biden signed, but even those were mainly time-limited budgetary changes rather than new institutions. The federal government still addresses carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act of 1970 and social media under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. No Child Left Behind was a set of amendments (and a short-lived new title) for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Obamacare was likewise a set of tweaks on the Social Security Amendments of 1965. Congress appears incapable of passing major new laws, liberal or conservative [18, 19].
Executive aggrandizement: As the legislature has waned, the presidency and the executive branch have waxed. But the presidency is much more dangerous because it is the branch with guns, files, prison cells, and a charismatic leader. According to Juan Linz, constitutionally powerful presidents are almost guaranteed to become dictators unless a party-system creates effective checks, which has ceased to be the case in the United States [20].
The attention economy: The public sphere runs on advertising. Outrage draws attention and thereby drives profits. Not only do these incentives worsen affective partisanship and loneliness among citizens, but they reward politicians who can attract attention on cable news or social media instead of developing legislation [22, 23].
Climate change: The earth’s climate is warming in ways that are already harming, frightening, and dislocating people. Yet the public’s explicit support for addressing this problem is so weak that Democrats hid their own climate legislation under the misleading title of the “Inflation Reduction Act,” and even the Sierra Club’s president avoided climate in favor of abortion when he endorsed Kamala Harris. It is probably correct that Democrats would poll better if they were less identified with climate reform, but the issue needs more, not less, attention [24, 25].
Anxiety about American “exceptionalism”: For all MAGA’s rhetoric about the unique excellence of the United States, the same movement also paints a picture of decline and weakness in the face of overseas rivals. It is easy to psychoanalyze this combination of emotions as a neurosis. But I would not overlook that fact that the United States spent most of this century so far fighting two wars and essentially lost both. In other words, the neurosis results from trauma. The trauma could be described as self-inflicted, but it was inflicted by US political elites on everyone else [26, 27].
These 16 trends do not share one root cause. (Some would point to capitalism, but I do not find that analysis useful [28].) However, all of these trends relate to the same larger problem: the degradation of democracy. Each phenomenon reflects and/or worsens the declining power of regular people to discuss, learn, and control their environment in large numbers.
Solutions:
Better political leadership would help.
An authentic conservative movement could play a valuable role in countering populism, executive aggrandizement, regulatory capture, and some other items on this list. (Genuine conservatism is deeply antithetical to Trumpian populism).
I would favor significant changes to our constitution and can imagine that we will see serious efforts to curtail the presidency and the Supreme Court and to restructure elections after Trump’s term.
Voluntary groups with mostly middle-class members can address loneliness, anxiety, and perhaps even racial backlash if they were bigger and more influential.
But nothing is as important as building powerful parties, unions, and other organizations that are accountable to diverse working-class members. Such organizations can counter all the trends on my list above.
Right now, much attention is focused on the Democratic Party, because its favorability has reached an all-time low for either party, even while it represents the official opposition to a catastrophic president. I would welcome new Democratic leaders and policies, but deeper reform must be structural: shifting resources to active local party committees, especially in working-class districts, and making candidates accountable to them. Meanwhile, we also need associations that stand somewhat apart from any party.