Several recent threads have called attention to people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/Beyond-Red-vs-Blue-The-Political-Typology.pdf
but it’s worth yet another mention. Pew Research Center divided Americans into nine clusters statistically based on their political views. There is much insight to be gained by studying this report.
Perhaps the two groups among Pew’s nine which come closest to OP’s query might be New Coalition Democrats and Hard-Pressed Democrats. But neither fits well.
The New Coalition Demos:
The Hard-Pressed Demos
Thus, other posters seem to be correct when they say OP seeks voters who are a rather rare breed.
Like others in this thread I’m having a hard time picturing such a party and how it would work. As another poster said up thread, it sounds like the worst of both worlds to me.
Who would the pro-social services be if they were socially conservative?? I guess I can see the protectionist sentiment as being mainstream, since an appalling number of Americans seem to have protectionist leanings (until they find out what it would cost them, of course). Also…when did anti-immigrant stances come from the left??
I don’t see such a party getting wide traction in the US (or anywhere else). Now, the converse…socially liberal but economically conservative…THAT seems to have reasonable traction, though it’s not a majority or populist stance even then.
First, the map is not the country. Splitting the American voting public up into little segments might be fun and reveal a few interesting things but I’m reluctant to take the project too seriously.
Secondly, political positions are heavily dependent on what parties support what positions. In part, the correlation of social and economic conservativism/liberalism happens precisely because the parties themselves are aligned that way, and people are influenced by their parties. The Michigan voting model (it’s named after the university where it was created) actually supposes that party preference comes before substantive political positions; you identify with whichever party, and that party gives you cues on how to feel about political issues, and then you vote based off of your position on those issues. If no party exists to argue for social conservatism mixed with economic leftishness (“liberalism” isn’t really the right word), people probably just won’t follow that ideology.
We already have this viewpoint in our politics, and it’s a sizable chunk of the Republican coalition. In the midterms, the Republicans ran as defenders of Medicare, and the last time the Republicans were in control of all three branches, they passed one of the largest Medicare expansions ever. They did it, because that’s what Republicans want. I was sort of kidding about the Alaskans, but when you can put someone who defends and expands a completely socialist program on your Presidential ticket, you can’t then turn around and claim to be some market worshipper.
Yes, I think it’s mostly blue-collar unionized workers that would be the target audience of such a movement. (I don’t know if being Catholic has anything to do with it, though.) The OP also mentions African Americans, and I’d agree they’d likely support it in significant numbers. (And AFAICT they tend to be Protestant Christians.)
As a political philosophy it’s not as uncommon or contradictory as people here are making it to be. In Canada we’ve got the NDP, the “socialist”, left-wing party that’s currently the official opposition, which has several distinct bases of support, one of which being unionized workers in industrial or mining towns. These people tend to be conservative, often wary of immigration due to the risk of losing jobs (also why they’re against globalization and free trade), and in favour of greater protection for workers. There is a significant number of switch NDP-Conservative voters, which seems like anathema to urban left-wingers in places like Toronto, but is actually fairly understandable.
This said, I don’t see how a political party based only on such a philosophy could be successful, especially in a country like the US where the political culture is driven by the two-party system, both parties being wide coalitions of interests. Right now the voters such a party would target are likely to be found in the Democratic party, and unless I’m mistaken it is in fact true that African Americans and unionized workers vote by and large for Democrats. I’ll say any question asking whether a new party could get a wide base of support in the US can be safely answered with “no”. I don’t see anything right now that could topple the current two-party system, with Democrats and Republicans being the two major parties.
The Pew study of political typology was debated in a previous thread, and I don’t want to repeat that here, but your comment makes me suspect you misunderstand their report. Geography has nothing to do with it. And they use statistical tools to derive the data’s natural clusters, not any preconceptions.
It’s an expression — in application, you can read “the map is not the country” as “the model is not the reality”. And I get that they were looking for correlations — in fact, I read the report back when it first came up on the SMDB. Fundamentally, though, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to suppose that the political preferences of Americans under the current party system are reflective of what they would be with different party allignments. People will tend to move toward existing party positions, particularly in a badly polarized political system.
From a European perspective it seems like a very good idea. I mean, such a nationalistic party could not possibly be accused of being supporters of racism. We all know that racism is the worst thing in the whole history of mankind; therefore a party with the slightest farfetched allegations of racism has no future. I suggest the party should not have a traditional “one man” leadership, a better option would be a system with two party spokespersons, always one white and one black. (Just like the Green Party in Sweden, but in their case it is a male and a female as a promotion of gendermandering Green Party (Sweden) - Wikipedia )
Isn’t that the neo-conservative republicans? Trying to prevent people from doing what they want in their bedrooms, check. Freely spending borrowed money, check.
Probably not. Pat Buchanan already tried it – his wing of the old Reform Party became the America First Party, which still exists and is pretty much exactly what you’re describing, but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. The more religious-conservative Constitution Party is a much bigger deal – one of the “Big Three” third parties in the U.S. (together with the Libertarians and the Greens).
It’s an impossible combination – politicized social conservatism requires Big Government; Big Government requires either tax-and-spend or borrow-and-spend. QED.
Another point on which the proposed combination collapses. The agenda “give me other people’s money” and “arrest people who offend me” breaks down because there are too many different "me"s for whom the demands are mutually incompatible.
That is why it can’t exist. The kinds of American “nationalists” under discussion here are mostly white and intolerant. (Hint: There would be no Minutemen if the illegal-immigration pressure were coming from Canada.)