contours of the new political order
the emerging consensus on the good life, markets, labor, and state capacity that could enable the democratic party's eisenhower moment
early on in the republic when thrasymachus and socrates are yapping about justice, thrasymachus trots out his infamous argument that justice is nothing but the advantage of the stronger. while socrates successfully rebuffs his argument, if you looked just at american political life today, you might be inclined to think that thrasymachus was right.
we’re living through what i hope will be the end of two apparently competing thrasymachian ideologies. on one side are the critical-theoretic left, whose intellectual champions — from marx and marcuse, to foucault and deleuze, to dereck bell and paolo freire — openly proclaimed their belief that claims about justice were nothing more than rationalizations made from, and to protect the power of, history’s oppressors. justifications for the legitimacy of their own ideology were conveniently exempted, presumably because they were supposed to be inarguably obvious emanations from the hearts of the oppressed.
on the other side are the post-truth, authoritarian right who delight in pushing the legal boundaries of their political power to inoculate themselves from procedural challenge. they justify these power grabs publicly by framing threats to traditional institutions and norms as quasi-violent, arational attacks from their opposition. they justify it privately by assuring themselves that if the left side is playing dirty in the institutions that they control — by shaming and canceling anyone who disagrees — then surely the right would be foolish to not also play dirty in the institutions they control.
this, in broad strokes, is the dialectic that richard rorty outlined in his 1998 book achieving our country — which was rediscovered and briefly sold out in 2016 because of its prediction that a right wing populist strongman would rise to political prominence in a cultural backlash to lefty postmodern elites and their identity politics.
i vividly remember sitting in my undergraduate advisor’s office in 2015 when he laid this all out for me. i’d been confessing how i’d taken up philosophy as a second major because of how frustrated i was at the stranglehold that the critical theories held over our campus. a series of high-visibility, anti-liberal student protests occurred between 2013 and 2017, and i remember many painful seminars trying to reason with my friends who had fallen in with the anarchists. “just wait” my advisor said, “this will be over soon, but it’s going to get ugly.”
i say these ideologies are apparently competing because — as rorty correctly identified — they are tightly inter-related. perhaps even two sides of the same coin. they both partake in a grand narrative where grievance is the currency of political capital. while they disagree about who are the aggrieved and why, they agree that politics is about remedying grievances through zero sum power trades (thrasymachian “justice”). and while each understand themselves to be rejecting neoliberalism in ideology, their actual rhetoric of asserting individual feeling over political persuasion is — as the historian gary gerstle has recently argued — actually neoliberal to its core.
orders
gerstle’s term “political order” is gaining traction after the success of his recent book the rise and fall of the neoliberal order. in it, gerstle defines a political order as the consensus views between opposing political parties which outlast individual election cycles and upon which their disagreements are built. political orders outlast presidential terms because they are usually responsive to economic and cultural conditions that persist for decades, not years.
in his telling, two such orders dominated the 20th century in america: the new deal order, and the neoliberal order. the history of the new deal order is familiar, but for gerstle, the neoliberal order was not just a set of beliefs popularized by the right-of-center about the primacy of free markets and fiscal austerity. it was actually just as much about the left-of-center suspicion of government and valorization of the individual that span 60’s counterculture and ralph nadar’s “sue the state” environmentalism.
according to gerstle, cracks in the neoliberal order started with the big trade shocks of the late 90’s and early 2000’s. the north american free trade agreement and china’s entry into the wto gutted confidence in free markets as it hollowed out american manufacturing towns. the great financial crisis and the tepid recovery that followed were the final blow. while the obama presidency may have been the triumph of neoliberalism’s freedom ideal, it was really better seen as the order’s last gasp. after 2016, it was clear that something else was ascendant. perhaps because he had to end his book, or perhaps because it is too speculative, gerstle doesn’t get around to explaining what this new order might be. doing so would not just be an interesting historical exercise though. i am convinced that it is an urgent political one.
the more quickly we can identify our new political order’s shape, the more quickly we can get out of intractable political conflict and back towards forward movement. while political parties will continue to quibble over the details, naming the foundations of emerging agreement will enable disagreements to result in outcomes instead of outcries. there are glimmers here — biden kept trump’s china tariffs after all — but consensus over the broader set of ideas has yet to fully set.
the new deal political order started with fdr but didn’t come into full form until eisenhower became president and affirmed republican party support for new deal policies. the neoliberal order started with reagan but it too didn’t come into full form until clinton became president and affirmed democratic support for neoliberal policies. just so, i predict, the next political order not come into full form until the united states elects a new democratic president (hopefully) in 2028. while trump marks the beginning, the new ideas will not become a political order until democrats find a way to embrace them with a distinctive and compelling brand.
to accelerate that process — what david brooks recently described as the need for democrats to “lead the tectonic shifts that are required” to remake their party image — i want to start mapping the territory where new political alignments will emerge. this is something gerstle avoids, and as far as i know, has yet to be attempted even by the democrats and their political commentariat who are still wringing their hands over the 2024 election. while american compass may be claiming the mantel of new orthodoxy at their five year anniversary, voices on the new right are not going to help translate the agenda into democrats’ political language. democrats will need to do that for themselves, but first, they need a clear sense of the terrain.
contours
notwithstanding the wisdom of those who avoid predictions, these are the axes where i believe the new consensus will emerge, roughly ordered by importance — beginning with views on the good life and family:
flourishing — political worldviews are founded on people’s visions of human nature and the good life. when i hear these visions publicly articulated, i’ve noticed a strange pattern emerge over the past ~5 years. where the educated used to feel naively gauche making such claims, there’s been a noticeable shift to the point where people actually use the word “flourishing” in public. discussions tend to emphasize: health, friendships, safety, good work, community, and purpose. to me, this suggests two things: first, conditions must be pretty bad for there to be this much agreement on how off-the-mark human life has become. second, that this marks a strong departure from the neoliberal era’s visions of the good life which rejected anything that went beyond individual freedom and neutrality.
family and community — strengthening these will be a central desideratum of the new political order, enabled by abundant housing and centrally constitutive of the vision for flourishing. while each party will have their preferred solutions, the emerging consensus is that revitalization of communities must happen through sustainable family formation — and that this won’t happen unless we create stable and consistent work. fulfilling obligations to others will be understood as a necessary condition for the good life.
(3 H’s) housing, healthcare, and (higher) ed — the foundations for family and individual welfare, and the largest expense categories for most americans. policy focus on reform that roots out private capture and artificial supply constraints (zoning reform, admission/accredidation limits, degree requirements etc.). probably one of the more significant areas of bipartisan consensus — especially housing.
on labor and trade:
work — both parties will become even more pro-labor than they are today, scaling up anti-trust and broadening their targets to include labor market monopsonies. the goals will be to make it easier to work, create more things to work on, and better prepare the workforce to take on those tasks through educational pathways that de-emphasize college for the majority of americans.
immigration — neoliberalism’s fall is partially marked by the closing of the border. just as the new political order will be characterized by significant and lasting restrictions on the free flow of goods, so too will be it be characterized by restrictions on the free flow of people. this will be paired with mechanisms to prevent downward wage pressure from workers who are already in the country illegally (like continued deportations and mandatory e-verify for employers).
protectionism — this one is a gimme. even if a democrat wins in 2028 china tariffs will certainly stay and i give global tariffs 50/50 odds of staying. end of permanent normal trade relations with china, blah blah blah. the narrative around them and their scope may shift, but there’s no going back to a world in which the working class tolerates the neoliberal era’s free trade agreements.
on class and american identity
identity politics — critical theory will no longer dominate political action on the left, and so will lose its reactionary force on the right. the unraveling is already underway, but will have to be completed by democrats who recognize that it has impaired their ability to govern effectively. this will actually be a relatively easy transition once democrats schooled in critical theory realize that it’s not the only game in town — that their egalitarian impulses can actually be more effectively realized without abandoning political liberalism. universities will start putting pressure on social studies departments to diversify their curricula and explicitly correct for the bias towards marxism on their syllabi. rawls will become as much of a household name as foucault and freire.
class politics — class will come back into focus as the center of political social action, but targeted through liberal egalitarianism (hi rawls!). both parties will alienate powerful internal factions as a result. the left will alienate some cultural elites who insist on their anti-liberal project even after being introduced to a non-straw-man alternative; the right will alienate their ride or die free traders.
patriotism and cosmopolitanism — the unmoored, cosmopolitan celebrated in the neoliberal era will come to seem culturally uninteresting: quaint, sad, self-centered and out of touch. the culturally interesting figures will be those devoted to celebrating, uplifting, and protecting their nation.
consumption and production — the producer archetype will overtake the consumer archetype in our narratives of progress. instead of lauding quarterly consumptive activity, reporters will celebrate productivity gains, export growth, and physical world innovation.
on state capacity and market power
institutional capture — there’s now broad recognition that this is a problem. from the doge right, to the abundance left, to the state capacity libertarians we’ve got an overwhelming desire to uproot a stagnant kludgocracy. on the left there’s a tendency to view the problem as solely one of corporate capture, but it is equally a problem of their own making — of elite cultural and economic capture that has created ludicrous permitting and procurement processes that have stymied progress in the very places they govern. like all luxury beliefs, these ideas look good on paper but end up hurting the worst-off in their jurisdictions when put into practice. progressive nimby’s sitting in $2.7m single family neighborhoods in coastal metros might earnestly believe that the problem is just the 1%, or the 0.1%, but the problem of institutional capture is actually the 20% “brahmin” class of mostly upper-middle-class democrats who direct the day-to-day operations in technology, media, civil service, the arts, higher ed, finance, etc. this will be a painful reckoning for them, but it will be necessary if they want to win national elections again.
industrial policy — another gimme. the lessons we learned in the 80’s when toyota tried to enter the market are the lessons learned across singapore, taiwan, denmark, the netherlands, and several other advanced economies that have followed the industrial policy playbook. chief among them is china. the world has learned that the skills acquired making low-value electronics can, with enough state sponsorship and domestic work ethic, transform turned into the skills required to make the world’s best electrical vehicles, batteries, solar panels, phones, and more. the united states can do that too, at a much broader scale than chips. both parties will prioritize economic activity that increases productive capacity even if that means relatively poorer performance on the pure financials. this is the pivot to from an economy biased towards “takers” to one that intentionally beefs up “makers.”
anti-trust — gone is the faith that an unfettered private sector and aggregate gdp gains will generate a rising tide that lifts all boats. intervention to break up dominant corporations is broadly popular across the political spectrum and will likely enjoy continued popularity among both parties. the theory will broaden to tackle monopsony cases, and there will finally be settled paradigms for investigating harmful power consolidation in consumer markets where the products are free / ad-supported.
deficits — this is my least confident prediction, but i suspect there will be no meaningful attempt to reduce our sovereign debt load. bond vigilantes won’t revolt — they’ll just keep gobbling up the treasuries so that institutional investors can hoard the trillion+ in annual interest and pump that back into mag 7 stocks. the majority of americans outside the financial markets will reject this scheme, and pressure congress to reform how the federal government funds spending in excess of tax revenues. instead of issuing iou’s with longterm durations to cover the gap, congress will authorize treasury to do it with short term iou’s (dollars) instead. critics will scream about runaway inflation, but it won’t materialize. if anything, asset price inflation will fall as we turn off the spigot of cash to institutional investors who have fewer and fewer places to productively park it.
coherence
unifying these areas of emerging consensus is a vision of the state which channels the efficient market to achieve its political and social goals. those social goals will be anchored on the conviction that human beings are essentially social and embodied such that we assume political flourishing will require healthy bodies and healthy communities. value and narrative will shift from a disembodied, individualistic, market-driven political economy that celebrates ideas to one that emphasizes craft, communion, execution, the physical world, and collective achievement. for this reason, i suggest that we call it the embodiment era.
where the new deal era tied up markets and poured federal money into social problems instead and the neoliberal era tried to solve social problems by placing limits on state power to free the power of the individual, the embodiment era will diverge from both. the state’s big interventions in the market will be to protect workers, fund projects, trim procedural encumbrances, and revitalize communities.
but those political changes will be downstream of the cultural change needed to truly usher in the embodiment era. we will — eventually — move from the thrasymachian politics of grievance towards a new democratic vision of renewal. but atonement has to come first. without publicly reckoning with the excesses of the neoliberal era, the shift won’t be credible. republicans have a head start here, but the work won’t actually begin until democrats catch up.
these predictions aren’t unassailable. democrats may not be able to form the coalitions necessary to oust their recalcitrant brahmins. “abundance” might fall flat or be outcompeted by anti-corporate populism. liberal egalitarians may not be able to convince progressives who were schooled in identity politics that liberalism is a more viable pathway for their activism. republicans too might abandon the american compass agenda after vance and trump leave office. they might just remake the kludgocracy rather than drain it. their haphazard trade policies might undermine any chance at industrial renewal and cripple efforts to build up state capacity. people rightly avoid making big predictions because there are a million ways to be wrong and only one way to be right.
but we can count on the fact that ossified class, status, and cultural dynamics are here for the foreseeable future. these dynamics brought an end to the neoliberal era and show no signs of imminent breakup. assuming that these things will be given, the task is to change our relationship to them. for those who objectively benefit most from these dynamics — the brahmin democrats in the top quintile — this will require an uncomfortable move: acknowledging class privilege and the alienation it has caused. the job, as rawls has urged, is to adopt “maximin” policies that maximize the benefit to the worst off. to favor “predistribution” as much as possible before “redistribution.”
this is where things will get tough. democrats do not want to apologize for their institutional capture. our self-righteousness runs deep — at least as deep as the countervailing resentment from those we’ve alienated. “i’m sorry you’re mad” gestures won’t cut it. if democrats don’t fire up the intellectual and cultural engines of renewal now, then come 2027 it will be too late. paying operatives $20m to learn how to talk to young men is definitely not giving “we got this” vibes.
in a series of future posts i’ll try to lay out what they need to do across four areas. first, they’ll need a rhetorical playbook to teach the progressive base how to address social issues through liberal egalitarianism rather than critical-theoretic marxism; second, they’ll need a much more ambitious labor policy (with proposals like mandatory e-verify that may upset some in their base); third, they’ll need to develop a new kind of class consciousness and associated aesthetics; fourth, they’ll need to embrace something like the abundance agenda to start building again.
follow along and drop me your ideas!