Visible through the Rogan Aleph is the obvious untapped majority in the American electorate that favors a political arrangement combining a moderate redistributionist welfare state with moderate social conservatism. This coalition has promised an electoral victory for the past decade and yet neither party has really captured it.
Most Americans want secure work, safe streets, healthcare, dignity, freedom, and a governing class that prioritizes them above itself. People want plenty else besides, of course, that politics cannot provide, like love and meaning—but even a movement organized around the minimum would threaten entrenched interests in both parties. It would undermine the Democrat’s dependency on Silicon Valley’s surveillance economy, elite-driven offshoring, and embrace of corporate consumerism in liberation drag. And it would finish off the well-funded Republican party of fiscal responsibility and austerity politics underwritten by foreign policy and financial globalism. To discredit the possibilities of new political coalitions, old coalitions go on the attack. Liberals denounce Sen. Josh Hawley for the supposedly anti-Semitic implications of his references to cosmopolitanism while ignoring or impugning his antitrust legislation and fight against corporate monopolies. Meanwhile, the new realities of power in America, revolve around a tech-media-Democratic party complex. The Democrats now take for granted the support of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the overwhelming majority of the wealthiest districts in America. The Republicans have drawn in more working-class men of all races despite the president's lapses into nativist rhetoric and the party's continued staffing by pro-business class cadres who stifle critical stimulus payments in a moment of national need. Hostility to the Rogan coalition has less to do with its members’ ideological eccentricities than with the fact that it speaks to large numbers of Americans who want to see their government pursue policies that might terminate the sinecures of countless pundits, D.C. functionaries, campus administrators, defense contractors, and corporate consultants. Conservatives like David Frum and his allies on the left understand that while they can fend off the occasional anti-establishment coups and insurgencies, the gravest threat to their continued power comes from the possibility of a broad new political consensus, triggered by the kind of fundamental technological and economic transformation we are currently living through.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Scott BeauchampWriter - Critic - Poet - Editor Archives
December 2020
Categories |
Proudly powered by Weebly