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The End of the New Deal Era—and the Coming Realignment


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American politics is in crisis because our parties have grown stale. The great debate of the 20th century is over, and the next realignment is coming. Will the Dems and GOP survive?

Frank J. DiStefano

May 27 2019

Nearly everyone understands a dangerous and disruptive force is tearing at American politics. There’s the steady increase of anger and contempt seeping into American life. Red and Blue America eagerly hurl bricks at each other’s skulls. There’s our increasingly fanatical political culture in which we toss away more and more longstanding norms. Yet the most alarming development is that we no longer understand how politics in America works.

For as long as all of us can remember, American politics had always meant the same war between Republicans and Democrats. The Democrats were the party of New Deal liberalism, as they had been since Franklin Roosevelt. The Republicans were the party of conservatism, just as William F. Buckley, Jr., announced it in National Review. When America voted Republican or Democrat, national policy might slip a little in one direction or the other, but we always knew more or less what we were going to get. Now we don’t.

Desperate for answers, political observers have naturally latched onto convenient explanations for this disruption. Some fault unruly personalities and politicians. Others blame technologies like social media. Others fear unfamiliar ideas and movements challenging the consensus. In other words, most of us are looking for some irritant or villain in the hope that, if we can identify and eradicate the nuisance, America might go back to its natural order—meaning the 20th-century political world.

But it won’t. The problem isn’t some technology, movement, or institution we can identify and remove. It’s that an entire stale order is crumbling down. The great debate of the 20th century is over. America is heading toward its next realignment.

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