#Analysis. Now let us examine your little pet theory…
Puritans, sadly, are all but extinct these days in the capital “P” sense and while soft puritanism does exist in Evangelical Christianity, it also exists in the moral righteousness of progressive movements. Also by what criteria are you labeling evangelicals “pre-modern”?
Now this is even more ridiculous. How are you distinguishing between “modern” and “post-modern” Democrats? About the only thing that Obama and Sanders have in common that Hillary Clinton doesn’t (excluding being male) is that the former two opposed the Iraq War while the latter voted for it which seems like an odd criteria. In other respects, Obama and Clinton as social liberals have far more in common then either does with the left-social democrat Bernie Sanders and indeed on some socioeconomic issues Clinton may very well be to the left of the current President.
Where have you been for the last 8 years? In an era of rising income inequality, mass un- and underemployment, declining conditions for the working and lower-middle classes, disastrous austerity policies, erosion of community, renewed assaults on the welfare state, and signs of Russian-style demographic catastrophe for large portions of working-class America the politics of the left and right have never been more relevant and certainly much more so then these pseudoscientific musings.
Again, how are you defining this?
The United States has a fairly high rate of those who’ve completed a tertiary education degree-it is roughly in the same range as the Scandinavian states, Netherlands, Australia, and New Zealand and outpaces the Germans by a healthy margin.
As opposed to your “post-modern” utopia of the Netherlands where a party that makes your average Republican look like Bill Maher is in charge of the Dutch Bible Belt?
Pluralism has been a defining element of American society for decades and quite frankly something that the US has done a better job at compared to Europe-for the most obvious examples note that anti-Semitism is far less prevalent here compared to Europe and there is no serious proposal to ban hijabs from school. And naturally in an era of atomistic individualism and erosion of community, people are going to be upset-the only question who the ire will be directed at and what the solution is.
Postmodernism is the death of the left. Funny you should cite those particular examples-even as the US has national gay marriage, there are quite a few European states (including Germany and Italy) that has yet implement gay marriage which is quite remarkable considering America’s greater size and religosity. Meanwhile, of course the US has one of the permissive abortion laws in the world compared to much of Europe which has far more strict restrictions on (for example) at what stage of pregnancy an abortion may be performed. Finally, as we are seeing in the electoral successes of right-wing populist parties (UKIP, FN, PVV, Swedish Democrats, DPP etc.), the Europeans aren’t particularly taking well to multiculturalism-partially because some see is as undermining other liberal values such as rights for women and homosexuals.
Neither. Whenever progressive movements have achieved success-be it the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, civil rights for racial minorities, fighting fascist and communist totalitarianism, or the great expansion of social welfare and labour rights under the New Deal liberals of America and the social democrats of Europe, they have won by clearly defining the battle as one of “us vs. them” and of right and wrong not through the useless sophristries of the relativist morality of postmodernism.
The last thing America needs is it to resemble Israeli politics where it is more likely that some tech company executive who sneers at Christianity because he happened to come across Dawkins and Nietschze in high school is more likely to be a Democrat than a Southern Baptist nurse in a Mississippi hospital or a conservative Roman Catholic fireman in Cleveland, Ohio. Of course that lovely little touch at the end where you hope the great unwashed reactionary masses kindly die off or at least read some Sam Harris to enlighten themselves nicely shows everything wrong with the modern left in the developed world.
Now for something at least approaching the actual answer:
The reality is that what is called “centrism” in the United States really refers to only one brand of centrism, namely the centrism of the upper and upper-middle classes of the Republic and promoted by such periodicals as Wall Street Journal and the Economist and such politicians as Bloomberg and Chafee. This variety of centrism which, at least in my view, had its peak popularity in the Bush years before going into a well-deserved comatose state never had mass popularity because it represented such narrow class interests and anyhow was an utterly bland ideology incapable of rousing one’s spirits (which of course is the same reason mainline Protestantism is hemmorraging members). The ideology of this brand of centrism was essentially “moderate heroism” that generally urged the “golden mean” on everything regardless of the merits of both sides although given its backers, it tended to arrive at neoliberal positions on socioeconomic issues and permissive positions on cultural ones. Yet somehow, most of the American electorate was unenthusiastic about the prospect of a centrist commonwealth where gay marriage would be legal and assault weapons would be banned in exchange for brutal austerity policies in the middle of a recession and privatized Social Security and Medicare (see Simpson-Bowles).
Yet, there is another brand of centrism-a form of centrism which is popular, social, and national that also exists and unlike the above-mentioned Episcopalianism of political ideologies, may be gathering force. This form of centrism is identified here and is based on the very common-sensical observation that someone who say opposes raising the retirement age for Social Security need not be favourable to permissive abortion laws. Thus here you arrive at centrism not by pedantically looking for the middle ground on every issue but rather combining right-wing positions on cultural issues with left-wing ones on socioeconomic ones or vice versa (or even mixing and matching positions within those two broad groupings such as opposing both gun control and marijuana bans). For the working- and lower-middle classes of America (especially its white component), one begins to arrive at the semblance of a coherent ideology albeit one that is rarely given voice to due to the lack of representation in the cultural elite-an ideology that may be called populist and combines strong support for most of the New Deal/Great Society welfare state with opposition to means-tested benefits that they perceive as benefiting only the “wrong”/lumpenproles and cultural conservatism exacerbated by the perception that the liberal cultural elites of America are ignoring and even persecuting them. These are the sons and daughters of those who supported George Wallace in 1968 and they can be won over by either party depending on which issues are emphasized. Of the major party candidates, Jim Webb may have been their strongest champion although he suffered from a certain obscurity and the fact that he himself seems to have mistook his native popular centrism with elite centrism leading him to flirt with #NoLabels and assorted cretins. Instead, we now have Donald Trump leading the Republican primaries by rallying these voters to his banner with his combination of uncompromising rhetoric, unapologetic persona, nativist policies, and defense of Social Security and Medicare while Bernie Sanders who as Vermont’s Congressman and Senator voted against several gun control measures and immigration reform (because it included guest worker provisions) tries to win them over from the left going so far as to speak at Liberty University much to the sulking and crying of the weakling weepers of the SJW/Tumblrista left.
This brand of centrism will not go away as long as the erosion of community in small-town and rural America continues and the ambitions of a generation are frustrated. The only question is whether it’ll be channelled towards a right-wing nativist party as in Europe or if the Democrats have enough sense and guts to win them back to build a New New Deal coalition.