- Joined
- May 16, 2019
It makes sense if you think of the American left and right as super-sets, not homogeneous teams. The left was liberals+progressives, the right was social conservatives+fiscal conservatives+foreign policy hawks (the Reagan coalition). Both sides had their fringes (radfems, commies, libertarians, white supremacists), but those were the major coalitions.
Starting sometime between Bush II and Obama, the liberals ran out of things to liberalize**. So the left's agenda began to get set by the progressives. Progressives have always been impractical utopians, but usually their schemes fail then get repealed (Prohibition, euthanasia), or get tempered by their alliance with another group (liberals, unions), or get flat out rejected by the right.
This time, the right was also undergoing its own internal ideological wars: hawks vs isolationists, "compassionate conservatives" vs libertarians, fiscal conservatives vs the universe. You could actually see all these factions, on stage, during the 2015-16 primary debates. So the Progressives had no one to check them but the liberals, who hold the institutional power after The Long March but lack the ideological drive to fight back. That lets the major faction of Progressives to ally with the minor factions (radfems, communists, and now LGBTQ+) to subvert the liberal power structures, in the party and in the culture.
Put another way, it was a perfect storm of ideological weakness across the entire political spectrum. Progressives used it to seize influence in places liberals had already secured. Then Trump won 2016 because he had no ideology; he was raw populism and personality, putting together an ad hoc coalition of habitual GOP voters plus fringe voters from all sides. That didn't solve the right's ideological wars, and it didn't bolster the liberals. It just metastasized the weakness in all factions involved.
(**the one liberalizing project left in America is ending the drug war, which already had fringe support on the right. But that's not enough to keep an ideological movement going.)
Starting sometime between Bush II and Obama, the liberals ran out of things to liberalize**. So the left's agenda began to get set by the progressives. Progressives have always been impractical utopians, but usually their schemes fail then get repealed (Prohibition, euthanasia), or get tempered by their alliance with another group (liberals, unions), or get flat out rejected by the right.
This time, the right was also undergoing its own internal ideological wars: hawks vs isolationists, "compassionate conservatives" vs libertarians, fiscal conservatives vs the universe. You could actually see all these factions, on stage, during the 2015-16 primary debates. So the Progressives had no one to check them but the liberals, who hold the institutional power after The Long March but lack the ideological drive to fight back. That lets the major faction of Progressives to ally with the minor factions (radfems, communists, and now LGBTQ+) to subvert the liberal power structures, in the party and in the culture.
Put another way, it was a perfect storm of ideological weakness across the entire political spectrum. Progressives used it to seize influence in places liberals had already secured. Then Trump won 2016 because he had no ideology; he was raw populism and personality, putting together an ad hoc coalition of habitual GOP voters plus fringe voters from all sides. That didn't solve the right's ideological wars, and it didn't bolster the liberals. It just metastasized the weakness in all factions involved.
(**the one liberalizing project left in America is ending the drug war, which already had fringe support on the right. But that's not enough to keep an ideological movement going.)
One last note, somewhat on topic:
The American right has been radically transformed as well, but few are recognizing it yet. I would say there are now two major factions: "movement conservatives", or generic mainstream conservatives, the New Right crowd that Buckley formed in the 1960's; and the Reactionary Right, people who are best defined as opposition to the sudden societal shift we're seeing out of the left.
The Reactionary Right isn't connected by strong ideological positions like abortion, tax policy, etc; they are literally counter-revolutionaries, in the proper Marxist sense of the term. They want a rolling back of the Progressive agenda, in part or in whole, depending on where they started out. There's agreement on the old "classical liberal" constructs--the need for freedom of speech, Enlightenment style rationality, and Western civilization generally. Other than that, it's just reactions to the left's excesses.
Some factions were always reactionary--the white supremacists-turned-nationalists, the preppers, the Moral Majority remnants from the 80s-90s. Some are the first casualties of the revolution eating its own--the TERFs, the Intellectual Dark Web types, the comedians who can't do comedy any more. The tricky part is, none of them are reliable votes for the political right; candidates are bundles of policy positions, not directional totems... except for one.
The Reactionary Right isn't connected by strong ideological positions like abortion, tax policy, etc; they are literally counter-revolutionaries, in the proper Marxist sense of the term. They want a rolling back of the Progressive agenda, in part or in whole, depending on where they started out. There's agreement on the old "classical liberal" constructs--the need for freedom of speech, Enlightenment style rationality, and Western civilization generally. Other than that, it's just reactions to the left's excesses.
Some factions were always reactionary--the white supremacists-turned-nationalists, the preppers, the Moral Majority remnants from the 80s-90s. Some are the first casualties of the revolution eating its own--the TERFs, the Intellectual Dark Web types, the comedians who can't do comedy any more. The tricky part is, none of them are reliable votes for the political right; candidates are bundles of policy positions, not directional totems... except for one.
Trump himself is reactionary. I'd say most of the Kiwis in this thread are, too. And as the riots and insanity continue, they'll keep drawing allies from random factions, major or minor, who react whenever their personal limit is reached.
