Essayist Charles Dudley Warner once observed that “Politics makes strange bedfellows.” True in the 19th century.
True now.
Warner drew upon Shakespeare’s "The Tempest" in conjoining politics with strange bedfellows. It’ s an awkward relationship driven by misery, yet useful to overcome the mutual misery.
Rival intra-party factions unite against a perceived common enemy … and to overcome greater miseries. Could the good guys in both parties make an interparty strange bedfellows coalition?
They already have. Just … quietly.
Julius Krein, writing in The New York Times on July 23 ("Republican Populists Are Responding to Something Real") provides a trenchant account of the strange bedfellows’ coalitions developing inside both the Republican and Democratic parties.
He inventories the trees persuasively. Now let’s look at the forest.
The metanarrative defining the Cold War and its following era? The war between the Marxist “class warfare” warriors raging against the bourgeoisie, and us, the champions of those who aspire to join the middle class and achieve the American dream of economic security and middle-class affluence.
The old Communist crusade to establish a "dictatorship of the proletariat?" Over.
Both parties (at least rhetorically) have turned both pro-worker and pro-middle-class. Goodbye class warfare!
Self-avowed “democratic capitalist” Joe Biden in 2020 vanquished his party’s self-avowed “democratic socialists.” Kamala Harris apparently largely shares Biden’s sentiments.
Disputes about the best ways to work our way to middle-class affluence and economic security are, and will ever be, nontrivial. Ferocious even.
Yet the consensus about the end of class warfare is a consequential political revolution. Game changer.
American policy leans toward equitable prosperity. Let’s take a closer look at the factions. Krein:
"Since 2016, pundits and politicians have divided the Republican Party into pro-Trump and anti-Trump, or populist and establishment, factions. These factions are said to have fundamentally different constituencies (the party’s working-class base versus major donors, corporate lobbies and establishment institutions) that pursue fundamentally different ends (MAGA nationalism versus global neoliberalism). The trajectory of the Trump 2024 campaign, however, suggests it may be time to retire, or at least revise, this framing.
"G.O.P. factional quarrels still occur, but the combatants no longer contest the party’s first principles or ultimate aims. …
Instead, factional battles are largely confined to disputes over the means to achieve Trumpian goals. Additionally, the lines between factions are blurring. Senator [J.D.] Vance is enthusiastically supported by the party’s economic nationalists, but he is also a favorite of Silicon Valley donors, including Elon Musk, a group otherwise known for libertarian and socially liberal instincts.
"Both Democratic factions, each with its own respectable and sometimes overlapping donor base, typically claim to share the same worldview and primarily debate the means to realizing it. Centrists as well as progressives, for example, claim they want to reduce housing costs for low earners, but centrists tend to argue that environmental permitting reform and relaxing zoning restrictions are better policy tools than rent control and subsidization.
"The G.O.P. increasingly replicates these dynamics."
The ethos of Marxism was to promote class warfare. Marx condemned the middle-class, “the bourgeoisie,” as the exploiter of the working class.
All means, fair and foul, were to be used to overthrow the bourgeois-dominant order.
No more.
Presidents Trump and Biden both present themselves as champions of working-class efforts to enter, not destroy, the (preferably upper) middle class. So too does Vice President Harris.
Democratic Socialist icon Bernie Sanders endorsed Biden. Then Harris. The old "Hammer and Sickle" gets lowered over America’s Kremlin for the last time.
Becoming affluent has become what political scientists call a valence issue, “An issue most voters will agree with, such as economic prosperity or caring for the elderly.”
Almost lost in the melodrama of the presidential election year demolition derby, and with all due cynicism about the sincerity of politicians, America has reached a rough consensus: the role of the government is to help us voters achieve equitable prosperity.
That’s Big!
The GOP prioritizes prosperity. The Dems, equity.
These values are complementary, not contradictory. Both received due weight in a lost economic school of post-War Germany, “ordoliberalism,” “the social market economy.”
“To the Ordoliberals there was nothing inconsistent about a commitment to competitive markets combined with a system of subsidies and transfer payments to take care of the less fortunate and less able.”
Hayek agreed.
Republicans and Democrats likely won’t listen to and adopt the best aspects of each other’s agenda. Yet, consider this wry observation: “[Y]ou can depend on Americans to do the right thing when they have exhausted every other possibility.”
We’ve exhausted every other possibility. So, there’s hope.
Underneath the trash talk of the 2024 election America has stumbled into a post-Cold-War consensus: the goal of equitable prosperity. The how to, to be determined.
Capitalism — whether democratic or republican — won. Socialism lost.
Both parties now agree.
Farewell, class warfare.
On to equitable prosperity.
Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of the 200,000+ follower "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $104T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.
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