DOES NOBODY REALLY WANT TO EXPAND A COALITION?

A recent M. B. Dougherty column addressing political realignment captures an odd element of what's going on.  "Some thinkers, however, foresee in the realignment a hope to settle scores with their rivals, see their ideas come to fruition, and kick out all the useless people from the movement once and for all."  The major parties seem to be at a similar place.  Republicans accuse Democrats of pushing for that Capitol invasion commission as a way of shaming Trump voters into staying home, and of using open borders to import loyal Democrats who get to vote even before they become citizens.  Democrats accuse Republicans of objecting to immigration and requiring voter identification as a way of suppressing the vote.  That neither major party seems interested in, oh, recruiting refugees from Venezuela or Cuba as potential Republicans, or considering workers whose jobs were outsourced as potential Democrats, or of rethinking local policies in light of recent interstate migrations suggests a lack of thought on the part of people who fancy themselves thought leaders.  Shoring up the existing bases can only get you so far.

It's a given in American politics that partisans become born-again believers in federalism when their faction is out of power in Washington, D.C., only to lose faith in decentralization the next time they win control of Congress and the presidency. Bossing folks around is, after all, a lot more fun than being bossed around. So, it's refreshing to see in this deeply divided country at least tentative steps towards bipartisan agreement that not every issue should be settled by dictates issued from the nation's capital. As encouraging as it is, though, this grudging acceptance of live-and-let-live doesn't go far enough.

What was I just telling you about an aggregation problem the larger the polity becomes?

Onetime herald of that permanent Democrat majority Ruy Teixeira comes to grips precisely with an aggregation problem.

The fact of the matter is that Democrats’ approach in the American Rescue Plan and their general economic approach is centrist in the sense that it corresponds to the center of gravity of American public opinion.

This cannot be said of a wide variety of cultural issues that have come to the fore in Democratic party circles and have vigorous advocates within those circles and more broadly in Democratic-adjacent nonprofits, media and academic institutions. These cannot be said to be centrist in any sense of the term and are typically embraced by only a small percentage of voters overall and are not generally majoritarian even within the Democratic party itself.

That metrofexual coastal block, though, can get very noisy when they don't get their way, even if the macroeconomic stimulus efforts of the current government are a larger slice of the political salami than they'd get with the Trumpian populists holding a majority.  Aggregation problems within aggregation problems.

This new middle-class rebellion isn't rejecting everything that progressives stand for; the Left's critique of neo-liberal excess is resonating, as is the need for improved access to health care. But the current focus on "systemic racism," coupled with a newfound and heavily enforced cultural conformism and the obsessive focus on a never-ending litany of impending "climate emergences" are less likely to pass muster with most of the middle class, no matter how popular they are with the media, academics, and others in the progressive corner.

And this new middle-class rebellion is being bolstered by a wide-ranging intellectual rebellion by traditional liberals against the Left's dogmatism and intolerance. Indeed, what we're about to see has the potential to reprise the great shift among old liberals that had them embracing Reagan in reaction to the Left's excesses of that generation.

There are disaffected voters to be picked up, if only seekers after elective office would reach down.

The progressive case also increasingly suffers from its own manifest failures in urban bastions like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago, which have been losing residents and attracting far fewer immigrants while suffering among the poorest job recoveries since the onset of the pandemic. Meanwhile, there's a clear acceleration of growth in less dense, lower cost "boomtowns" like Nashville, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Austin, Nashville, Columbus and Des Moines.

Democrats who wish to remain in power will need to address critical challenges like a steady rise in urban crime and massive homelessness; citing systemic racism won't clean the streets of New York, San Francisco and central Los Angeles from drug addicts, the mentally ill and the destitute.

Politicians in places losing residents might gain from changing their approach, in order that fewer people leave. In the places gaining residents, politicians might also benefit by changing their approach, in order to expand their coalitions.