I think he’s right in forecasting the end of social conservatism. See the Pew Political Typology 2011, particularly the “Staunch Conservative” grouping:
Now, these are not “The oldest of the groups” because people grow more conservative as they age – they don’t. They are the oldest because they are of generations who grew up in and were shaped by a different America that will never again exist. When they die off they will not be replaced in commensurate numbers – their children and grandchildren might be conservative, but not conservative the way they are.
But that does not end the debate over America’s long-term political future, it begins it. Lind again:
The above excerpts are from a short essay Lind posted in Salon summarizing [url=]a longer one in The Breakthrough.
One thing Lind seems to be overlooking – if the cities of the future will have an “hourglass” class structure, which he also predicts – then the suburban Populiberals also will have an urban base, in the urban working/service class.
BrainGlutton Abortion, for one, is a social issue that isn’t going anywhere. Popular opinion about abortion has stayed more or less the same for a couple of decades, in spite of the country becoming less religious. There are demographic reasons to think that the country might become more pro-life in future: partly because abortion opinion is largely heritable and abortion opponents tend to have more children. I don’t see the abortion debate going anywhere. I suspect there’s going to be more racial division in the near future rather than less, as well.
The increasing secularization of America is also a self limiting trend- if you extrapolate out current trends, we will stabilize at around 40% nonreligious (conpared to 20% today) which is still much more religious than most of Western Europe outside Ireland and Poland.
I suspect that everything will change but everything will stay the same. Europe used to have extremes of political views- from the near fascist right to the near communist left, all of which had a chance to move into national government from decade to decade. What we tend to have now is a massive centrist agglomeration with different shades of moderation, and extreme groups usually excluded from main stream Government. I suspect that the Tea Party Republicans will fall into this category of powerless protest voters as they decline. The US has little real left-of-center activity in national politics- the Democratic Party is just another Conservative Party in International terms. I see a return to the sixties and before where there is a choice between two centrist parties of differing hues. Going back to read republican policy statements (especially Eisenhower) is an education in political centrism!
I am not sure how we can predict future religious affiliation. In the UK we have gone from nearly full church attendance to less than 10% in a century!
I think this is an important point. What are important social issues of today may not be the important social issues of tomorrow. The entire debate will have moved on. This doesnt necessarily mean the end of social conservatism, but possibly end of social conservatism as we know it. Just as im sure social liberalism will also move on. What are controversial social issues in twenty years may be entirely different to the controversies today. There will always be social conservative and liberal voting blocks.
I do still believe that social conservatives are missing a trick by not more closely aligning with right leaning social libertarians. The ideology of which would be as follows - f*ck who you like, smoke what you like, abort what you like; just dont ask me to pay for the consequences of your lifestyle choices. I think this alignment may come in the future.
Yeah, but, a century ago, Brits went to church just because that’s what Brits do, it does not mean they believed. From The Lion and the Unicorn, by George Orwell (1941):
No one would have written that about the American people in 1941, we were extremely religious – and specifically Protestant Christian (but never more specifically than that) – from the beginning; but now it is coming true of us.
That would be what Lind calls the Liberaltarian alignment, and that base would be strengthened if, as you predict, social conservatism survives in a different form.
The Ukraine thread reminds me that Lind is also ignoring the dove/hawk axis – but, then, that tends to cut across other ideological axes and always has. How else could the GOP encompass both hawks and libertarians? The MIC is the single biggest and most expensive element of biggummint. And how else could it have been liberal Dems who got us into 'Nam?
Not sure why he needs to invent a new word for socially liberal, economically conservative people. That’s just plain old libertarian.
‘Liberaltarians’ were always a contradiction. The notion that you can be a libertarian who also supports heavy state involvement in social affairs (mandating ‘social justice’, distributing income, subsidizing birth control, etc) is fundamentally contradictory.
There are two ways to be socially liberal: One is to support a wide range of state interventions designed to drive society in a direction considered more ‘just’ by opinion makers and enforcers, and the other is to just leave people the hell alone and let them form their own associations as they see fit.
The latter is the kind social liberalism libertarians believe in. The former is wholly incompatible with any concept of libertarianism. If Lind doesn’t make a distinction between the two, it’s either because he doesn’t understand libertarianism or he’s obscuring the differences in order to make the argument he’s making.
It’s always a mistake to simply extrapolate current trends into the future and assume that’s the way things will work out. Philosophies wax and wane. Society adapts to the conditions around it. Sometimes that adaptation is away from conservatism, sometimes not. The U.S. of the 1920’s was in many ways more socially liberal than the U.S. of the 1950’s. The U.S. of the 1960’s and 1970’s was far more liberal than the U.S. of the 1980’s and 1990’s.
As for Hispanics joining the new socially liberal majority - The Hispanic population, like the Black community, is quite socially conservative. Hispanics vote for Democrats because of their economic and immigration policies, and Blacks vote Democrat for economic and racial reasons. But both demographic groups oppose gay marriage. Hispanics are split down the middle on whether abortion should be legal.
I think you could easily form an opposite hypothesis to Lind’s: If progressive policies fail and the country becomes economically conservative, that could split Hispanics out of the Democratic coalition and could actually make Republicans more socially conservative and force Democrats to backpedal on social issues to try to reclaim the Hispanic vote.
Also note that a powerful force for social conservativism (of a different kind, maybe) is the growing size of Islamic populations in Western countries. Islam is not a socially liberal religion.
You know, every time the political winds shift from one party to the other, people come out of the woodwork to declare that the current trend represents some kind of permanent sea-change. How many times have we heard the phrase “The new <insert political party> permanent majority.”?
He is describing something different, I think, from LP ideological-libertarian. The latter is so extreme as to be different in kind rather than degree. The Liberaltarians he predicts/describes probably would never demand an end to Social Security or Medicare or the Federal Reserve or public education. Nor to federal income tax, though they might favor a flat-tax system.
This of a people who in the 19th Century donated large sums of money, with no significant public controversy, to send Protestant missionaries to Africa and Asia.
But Muslims in the West will be politically impotent as a socially conservative force unless allied with conservative Christians – who do sometimes ally with conservative Jews, but I really cannot see them allying with Muslims ever.
Yes - and I’d argue that one of the reasons social issues rose to prominence after the fall of the Soviet Union was that until then the Democrats had too many hawks that sided with Republicans on security matters, and that forced many compromises on social policy. It made the congress more bipartisan because the important issue of the day spanned party lines.
Today, I would say that both parties are fracturing over defense issues. The Democrats still have plenty of interventionists in their mix (including Obama, John Kerry, the Clintons, and many other movers and shakers). Plenty of Democrats voted for the Iraq war, and in the Clinton administration Democratic majorities supported many interventions - as they have under Obama. But there’s a growing faction of civil libertarians and non-interventionists becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the foreign policy of Democratic leaders.
In the meantime, the Republicans are becoming more isolationist. Partly because they were stung by Iraq and turned against Bush, partly because they oppose Obama’s interventions on more partisan grounds, partly because of a rise of Pat Buchanan-style populism, and partly because of the growing influence of the libertarian wing of the party.
But security issues can turn on a time. Look at the shift to the right on foreign policy that occurred immediately after 9/11. Putin’s adventurism in the Ukraine has woken up a few people. A society tends to become more hawkish when it is threatened. The peace movement was largely a product of a Pax Americana - it’s easy to be for ‘peace’ when you can’t see any threats to yourself. It’s a bit harder after you’ve been attacked. There weren’t a lot of peace marches in London during the blitz, and no one had a problem with launching mass incendiary bombing raids on German cities.
Lind’s right that the coalitions are shifting, and this will probably have a major impact on American politics in the future. But I don’t think we have the ability to extrapolate and draw conclusions as to what those coalitions will look like.
The party which is currently known as the Republicans will certainly come to an end within a generation or so. Unless we make major changes to our electoral system, the US will remain a two-party system. On any issue which remains relevant and which has two sides (which will include at least the hawk/dove axis, the have/have not axis, and the abortion issue), those two parties will adopt opposing positions. All of this, I say with certainty.
Beyond that, I don’t know, and don’t think anyone can. It is possible that the parties of the future will go by different names, but it is also possible that they will continue to be called “Republicans” and “Democrats”. It remains to be seen how the various issues that remain relevant will align with each other: We might, for instance, see the same party opposing the military and abortion while the other party supports both. And I have no idea what new issues will arise which will polarize the nation, though I’m confident there will be some.
It’s not a very sophisticated estimate, but you can do a back-of-the envelope estimate based on fertility rates and interconversion rates.
Religious people have more children than secular ones* (evangelicals have about 2.5 per women, secular people about 1.5), and people raised ‘secular’ are somewhat more likely to convert to a religion as adults, than people raised religious are to lose their religion. (The Pew Forum refers to this as secularists having a lower ‘retention rate’ than religious people as a whole, and also lower than most individual religions). Those two are factors that tend to decrease the relative proportion of secularists. On the flip side, there is a much larger number of religious people right now, in America. So even if only 33% of raised-religious people convert to secularism as adults, as compared to 50% of people raised secular, that still produces a net outflow of people from religion into secularism.
Assuming birth rates and interconversion rates stay the same, the religious and secular populations should reach equilibrium at around 60:40. IIRC, relatively soon, within a couple generations or so. Anyone with the time and access to the data is welcome to make a better estimate, as I said this is purely back-of-the-envelope.
*Religiosity is also somewhat heritable, IIRC the heritability is around 0.5.
Putin’s adventurism in the Ukraine is a ‘threat’ to no one except some Western Ukrainian ‘democracy’ activists who would rather stage dramatic protests than get around to planting their wheat crop. He may enjoy the concept of a Greater Russia, but he isn’t going to risk a war with the western powers, and that means he isn’t going anywhere near Latvia, let alone countries further to the west.