The Other Realignment

The ongoing drumbeat of (mostly hostile) media commentary on the “New Right” suggests that some kind of realignment may in fact be occurring among Republicans. Despite its limited impact on policy to date, the New Right likely deserves some credit for the increasingly robust efforts of Governor Ron DeSantis and other Republican office­holders against “woke capital,” and it has seen primary victories for a few of its favorite candidates.

But another realignment may also be underway, one whose success or failure has the potential to be at least as consequential. This is the realignment that appears to be emerging within the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

For the first time since the Clinton administration, when neoliberal “New Democrats” seized control of the party, a few centrist liberals seem to be looking for novel narratives and policies to differentiate themselves from progressives. In the 1980s and ’90s, these “third way” efforts focused on economic policies that broke with the “big government” legacies of the New Deal and Great Society. They also included symbolic statements in defense of political and cultural moderation, such as Bill Clinton’s “Sister Souljah moment.” The defining issues for today’s center-left include opposition to “defunding the police” and de­fending “free speech” against “woke” excesses. Economically, centrist Democrats range from rearguard neoliberals to a rising group of “supply‑side progressives,” in opposition to “socialist” welfarism.

What is notable here is not the emergence of a conflict between centrist and progressive wings of the Democratic Party—a long-stand­ing and perhaps permanent feature of partisan politics, especially in a two-party system—but the change in the underlying terms of the de­bate. At least in recent decades, centrists and progressives have typically differentiated themselves along a developmental axis rather than a strictly ideological one. In other words, centrists usually claimed to support the same goals as progressives, but presented themselves as more mature, serious, and realistic in their approach to achieving them. This dynamic was especially visible in the primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders (for example, Clinton’s characterization of Sanders’s proposals as promising America “a pony”), as well as Clinton’s primary campaign against Barack Obama, and Obama’s rela­tionship with the progressive Left. The main thrust of centrist arguments was not that they repudiated progressive commitments, only that they were more practical about how to achieve them.

But more recently—especially in the wake of the “defund the police” movement, an increasingly self-marginalizing woke identitarianism, and rising inflation—this dynamic has begun to shift. On some issues, centrist Democrats have shown a willingness to not merely chide the Left for its lack of policy pragmatism but to openly reject its premises. President Biden explicitly spoke of funding the police in his most recent State of the Union Address. The same issue played a prominent role in Eric Adams’s successful New York mayoral campaign. Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke recently said he was against teaching critical race theory in schools, while several members of the San Fran­cisco school board were recalled earlier this year—demonstrating, as the Atlantic put it, that “‘woke’ racial politics have their limits, even in one of the wokest cities in the country.” San Francisco subsequently recalled Chesa Boudin, its “soft on crime” district attorney. Senator Joe Manchin dominates the media coverage of internal Democratic opposition to expansive spending bills, but larger divides between centrists and pro­gressives have set the tone for the Democratic Congress. Meanwhile, articles warning that woke activists and dogmas have made liberal organizations and campaigns unmanageable now appear with surprising frequency, and new policy paradigms are percolating in niche, and increasingly mainstream, media.

Since “realignment” became a topic of conversation around 2016, it has usually been conceived as either a cross-partisan populist alliance, based on the overlapping themes of the early Trump and Sanders campaigns, or the takeover of either party by its “radical” or “populist” wing. But realignment could also take the form of the Democratic Party establishment recasting its agenda and reshuffling its coalition. This form of realignment remains somewhere between a distant possibility and a complete fantasy, especially as recent Supreme Court decisions have refocused attention on conventionally polarizing issues like abor­tion and gun rights, and as Donald Trump has begun hinting at another presidential campaign. But a centrist liberal realignment is worth explor­ing, both on its own terms and in contrast to any potential Republican realignment.

New Intellectual Foundations

The theoretical underpinnings of a Democratic “new centrism” have received relatively little attention, especially compared to the intellectual currents of the New Right, but a multifaceted and growing body of work supports this nascent movement. The most theoretically ambitious effort to date is the Liberal Patriot blog, led by John Halpin, Ruy Teixeira,¹ Peter Juul, and Brian Katulis, all long-time fixtures of Demo­cratic think tank circles. The Liberal Patriot consistently challenges the tactics, goals, and assumptions of the progressive Left on a range of issues, including economic policy, health care, climate, crime, immigration, and others.

As the name of the blog suggests, the authors advocate for “liberal nationalism,” which involves the reaffirmation of a shared American national identity and the repudiation of “woke” discourse and culture war polarization. In terms of policy, the Liberal Patriot often argues for an industrial policy agenda aimed at strengthening manufacturing and other key sectors while remaining skeptical of highly partisan projects like the Green New Deal. The authors oppose neoliberal marketization and call for shoring up the welfare state, but are also critical of progressive approaches like “Medicare for All.” They are harshly critical of “defund the police” and “open borders” movements. In many respects, this liberal nationalism has much in common with certain elements of the nationalist Right, and one could imagine cooperation between the two under certain circumstances.

Contributors to the Liberal Patriot are also highly attuned to polling and have closely analyzed Democrats’ declining support among key constituencies, particularly Hispanic voters. They argue that ultra-pro­gressive cultural messaging and policy preferences are largely to blame.

A second intellectual current behind the new centrism, called “popularism,” focuses primarily on these electoral problems. It was initially popularized by David Shor, a veteran of the Obama campaign. Popularism is the idea that Democrats should focus on the parts of their agenda that poll well and avoid the issues that do not. For example, popularism would suggest that Democrats talk less about defunding the police or Green New Deals and more about federal price negotiation for prescription drugs or capping credit card interest rates.

Much less adversarial toward the Left than the authors of the Liberal Patriot, the proponents of popularism do not explicitly reject progressive goals; typically, they claim to share them. But in practice, because the progressive activist agenda is so unpopular, popularism often func­tions as a repudiation of it, and is often treated that way by the left wing. Popularists have also directly criticized progressive intellectuals and organizations for being out of touch with the concerns of voters.

A third movement that can be classified under the new centrism is “supply-side progressivism.” More policy-oriented than campaign-oriented, supply-side progressives basically argue that, instead of end­lessly subsidizing access to health care, education, housing, and the like, Democrats should pursue policies that would increase the supply of these public goods. To borrow Ezra Klein’s example, supply-side progressivism would combine measures to control the price of prescription drugs with efforts to support new drug development, like additional research funding, or support access to housing by altering zoning rules and increasing the housing stock. It prioritizes public investment in key areas and is generally skeptical of simply increasing transfer payments.

Supply-side progressivism has been percolating among Democratic-leaning economists for some years, but has gained momentum recently as supply chain issues have come to the fore and inflation has raised both economic and political obstacles to welfare expansion. The Biden administration itself occasionally gestures in this direction (though not always to this label) for responses to supply chain problems and inflation.

Indeed, supply-side progressivism seems like an idea whose time has come. Not only are supply-side issues in focus after disruptions from Covid-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but Republicans, who have typically claimed the mantle of supply-side reform, have not thought seriously about these questions for two generations. For them, the “supply-side” agenda has essentially been reduced to tax cuts. Yet this approach fails to account for the changes in business behavior and financial market dynamics that have occurred since the Reagan administration, as shown by the failure of the Trump tax cuts to meaningfully increase business investment. In short, new solutions to supply-side problems were critical even before the pandemic, and the challenge has only grown more urgent since.

Taken together, supply-side progressivism, popularism, and liberal nationalism offer a promising policy agenda, a sensible electoral strategy, and a coherent ideological framework—a solid foundation for a new Democratic center. Whether separately or as a whole, however, these currents have not yet come to dominate Democratic Party policy, messaging, or popular image. As with the Republican Party, any poten­tial realignment faces significant obstacles and opponents, particularly in the near term. But considerable forces also work in its favor, and they may be gaining strength.

Motivating Factors

At this point, the most obvious motivation behind Democrats’ search for new agendas is simply the collapse of the Biden administration’s popularity and its declining electoral prospects. These developments require little elaboration at this point. Republicans are poised to retake the House and possibly the Senate in the 2022 midterms, and seem likely to enjoy an even more favorable position in congressional elections beyond that. The 2024 presidential election appears uncertain, at best.

The Biden administration not only faces low approval ratings, but appears rudderless and confused. During the 2020 campaign, Biden opportunistically alternated between promising moderation and a “re­turn to normalcy,” on the one hand, and visions of a “transfor­mational” presidency, on the other. In office, he has delivered neither. The most ambitious parts of his agenda were defeated by the Democratic Congress, yet his administration remains highly polarizing. Presiding over significant economic deterioration, Democrats and their media allies have tried to generate enthusiasm around issues like voting rights, student loan forgiveness, Ukraine, the January 6 hearings, gun control, and abortion, all without much success. This combination of progressive signaling and little in the way of results (though the Manchin reconciliation deal, pending as of this writing, may offer some policy wins) seems to be alienating both moderates and progressives, and Biden’s ratings continue to slide. Earlier, seemingly forgotten executive orders, like the one canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline, also revealed an administration more focused on checking off progressive wish list items than on policy substance or efforts to win over moderates. It is easy to assign blame for these failures to Biden personally, especially amid growing rumblings about the president’s age, even from typically sympathetic quarters, but it’s not clear that any other politician could navigate these issues or manage the Democratic coalition more effectively. Possible successors, at this point, appear even less popular than Biden.

Democrats’ electoral struggles may be the least of their concerns, however. Even if the Republicans retake Congress and the White House, they have explicitly renounced any positive policy agenda, and internal divisions will make it difficult for them to offer one. Yet many challenges facing the country require constructive solutions. From a purely electoral perspective, Democrats need only wait for the next Republican disappointment to reclaim the majority. But other problems facing the center-left coalition go much deeper. Outside of electoral politics, two sources of left-liberal power may be drying up.

The first is corporate political activism. For several years, major corporations, particularly in the tech sector, have used their economic power to advance left-liberal political goals. They have threatened to boycott states that pass conservative legislation on, say, transgender issues and have censored right-wing figures, including a sitting president, on social media platforms. At the same time, major asset managers and large corporations have narrowly tailored ESG investment guidelines to conform to left-wing priorities, like phasing out fossil fuels and enforcing management “diversity.”

Until recently, conservative deference to “market principles” and business interests has prevented Republicans from using political power against the corporate sector. But that is slowly changing. Florida gover­nor Ron DeSantis’s move to terminate Disney’s special development district (and accompanying tax and permitting privileges), in response to the company’s public advocacy against state legislation, is highly signifi­cant, even if it is eventually blocked by the courts. At the very least, CEOs will now have a ready excuse to resist the demands of their “woke” employees. And with more and more high-profile corporations relocating their headquarters to Republican states, this trend may strengthen. Since the neoliberal turn, economic power has concentrated in major liberal “superstar cities.” More recently, however, Democratic metropoles are in noticeable decline relative to more conservative regions, and their rampant inequality, homelessness, and deteriorating public infrastructure symbolize the failures of progressive governance.

Rising interest rates, slowing growth, and intensifying antitrust scrutiny may also diminish corporations’ willingness to take controversial political stands. A struggling Netflix, for example, recently told employees to find work elsewhere if they objected to its content, before cutting staff and some planned productions for business reasons. More­over, a number of Republican state officials have threatened to boycott asset managers whose environmental commitments include divestment from fossil fuels. Republican challenges to corporate political activism still suffer from fundamental contradictions—mostly arising from the false pretense of market or political “neutrality”²—but “woke capital” seems likely to face more emboldened, organized opposition, among other constraints, going forward.

Meanwhile, progressive cultural cachet is eroding. Left-liberals have dominated cultural institutions, from Hollywood to academia, for generations, all while maintaining the liberatory, anti-establishment conceits of 1960s “adversary culture.” The result, in the words of James McElroy, is that both high art and popular entertainment revolve around “permanent, oligarch-approved rebellion” and “revolution or transgression against already toppled hierarchies.” They are also almost invariably stifling, humorless, and boring. Conservatism is not cool, but progressivism is increasingly “cringe.” The enthusiasms of the Obama era or the Bernie campaigns have become embarrassing, never mind innumerable protest art projects attacking Middle America, religion, or the patriarchy.

The political significance of all this is difficult to evaluate. There is still no right-wing artistic or literary movement producing work that could vie for cultural dominance—nor even one that is clearly definable. Yet to the extent that any “transgressive” cultural vanguard exists, it tends to engage in some more or less ironic flirtation with the “radical” Right and feature some more or less open mockery of progressive dogmas, even if it does not explicitly identify as right-wing.³ Perhaps the strongest indication that a cultural shift may be underway is that liberals themselves have taken notice. In a New York Times column entitled “The Awful Advent of Reactionary Chic,” Michelle Goldberg lamented that “backlash politics could somehow become fashionable,” and noted the rising “cultural energy in the opposition to the progressive norms and taboos that are derisively called ‘wokeness.’” “The one thing the left could count on in recent years is its cultural capital,” Goldberg added, “What happens if that is squandered?”

The Center Can Hold: A Thought Experiment

Liberals, it seems, recognize that they have significant problems, and they also possess nascent policy and intellectual frameworks to address them. In some ways, the prospects for a Democratic realignment might even appear more promising than those for a Republican one. On the right, the proponents of realignment seek to replace their party’s “estab­lishment,” and they are opposed to varying degrees by significant conservative donors, politicians, and institutions. Centrist Democrats, by contrast, are the establishment. Not only do they have ample access to donors and funding for their own causes, but they could likely divert resources away from unpopular progressive organizations, many of which rely upon liberal largesse.

Whereas Republican elites typically take a skeptical or even contemptuous view of their “grass roots,” liberal donors in recent years have fetishized “activism.”⁴ For example, Sam Adler-Bell, in a New York Magazine piece, highlighted

an April 20 Medium post from Arabella Advisors, a consulting firm founded by Clinton White House alum Eric Kessler, which advises rich liberals about their political giving. It reads in part: “Movements matter . . . Donors must be willing to embrace direct‑action tactics such as hunger strikes or civil disobedience that bring litigation and reputational risks. They must relax their insistence on measurable outcomes.” It concludes with great fanfare: “The dangers we confront will bring a reckoning, one that will be painful but will also create opportunities to imagine and build a more equitable and resilient society.”

But several articles blaming activists for paralyzing left-liberal organizations have appeared in both liberal and progressive media over the last few months, suggesting that this trend may be changing, or at least could change. I have personally heard more than one prominent liberal complain about the outsized importance of activist groups within the Democratic coalition in recent years. Beyond ideological and elec­toral considerations, the preponderance of activists tends to be a massive drag on productivity. In addition to the organizational issues recently catalogued in the Intercept, anyone who has participated in activist-dominated conferences knows that the enumeration of pronouns, “land acknowledgements,” and other ritual invocations that must take place at any progressive gathering can waste a considerable amount of time. Furthermore, discussions are always in danger of being hijacked by identitarian moral blackmail. Almost any policy idea can be effectively filibustered simply by claiming that it ignores this or that identity group. And even though such posturing has done nothing to improve outcomes for the purported beneficiaries, or in some cases has been shown to be counterproductive, liberal centrists almost invariably lack the self-confidence to resist it.

Should liberals find the resolve to act, however—whether because of strengthened ideological convictions or the simple fear of losing power—these dynamics could shift surprisingly quickly. The upper echelons of most progressive foundations, university administrations, and similar institutions are staffed by pragmatic operators who are flexible in their ideology and moderate in their temperament and tactics. There is no iron law that requires them to continue funding counterproductive woke activism instead of serious policy efforts around, say, supply-side progressivism, and the same holds for the typical Democratic oligarch. Jeff Bezos,⁵ who has shown a willingness to attack the Biden administration on social media, owns the Washington Post. Likewise, the controlling shareholders of the New York Times are not nearly as radical as its junior staffers. Should the new center gain self-consciousness and motivation, one could imagine new editorial lines being handed down, controversial media personalities reassigned, and politically and intellec­tually questionable efforts like the “1619 Project” replaced with more liberal nationalist fare. Perhaps some extreme left-wing professors could be removed from teaching roles, as some right-wing professors have been, and left-wing websites dropped from Amazon Web Services. Grantmaking priorities could shift, along with a rollback of symbolic “diversity, equity, and inclusion” rituals across left-of-center institutions.

What would be the impact of an energized center asserting itself to realign progressive institutions? There would doubtless be some wailing and gnashing of teeth, along with opportunistic allegations of sexual harassment and a few vandalized statues, but little more than that. Pro­gressive strength resides in the college-educated professional class, yet this is also its weakness. Most of its activists are risk-averse careerists who followed elite patronage and social cues in adopting progressivism, and they would do the same if asked to abandon it. In the previously cited article, Adler-Bell quotes Daniel Schlozman’s mordant description of this astroturfed activism: “If you’re your average foundation-funded NGO, you now want to say, ‘I am a social movement, not just a foundation-funded NGO.’ . . . [But] it turns out it’s all money from Ford and Open Society. And they’re not doing much of anything except talking to each other.” In the face of an energized centrist establishment asserting its power, most of these activists would either follow the money or fade way. A “movement” that cannot win a San Francisco recall election has no meaningful popular base or policy accomplishments to fall back on.

On the other hand, a Democratic Party freed from woke baggage—particularly on crime, open borders, gender, education, and the accu­satory moralism around “diversity”—would stand a much stronger chance of reclaiming working-class voters who have defected to the Republicans in recent years, without any real risk of losing constituencies to their left. The GOP has done nothing to incorporate its new voters into a permanent constituency, and still remains trapped in some unpopular Reagan-era paradigms. A “liberal nationalist” defense of state intervention to protect against the vicissitudes of late neoliberalism, combined with updated supply-side policies, could find broad support. As Ezra Klein has pointed out, “What’s funny to me is that [the things right-wing populists want] seem to resemble what the current Democratic Party is,” which is vaguely true at the level of political economy and with respect to certain factions of the Democratic Party. Moreover, as right-wing culture wars increasingly turn inward, non-woke Demo­crats⁶ may be able to position themselves as moderates on cultural issues, at least in some areas.

Of course, the thought experiment outlined above has little to no prospect of becoming reality in the foreseeable future. Even if the center‑left can be said to face relatively few financial and electoral obstacles, it is severely inhibited by a lack of policy ambition and ideological motivation. If anything, prominent Democrats seem more focused on funding “Trumpist” candidates in Republican primaries—in the (often misguided) hope of setting up easy opponents—than address­ing their own shortcomings. As with the internal divides of the Republi­can Party, tracing the obstacles to realignment is often more illuminating than analyzing its protagonists.

A Lack of Policy Ambition

In terms of policy, popularism and supply-side progressivism consti­tute a promising foundation for a realignment. But in their current form, they are not sufficiently ambitious.

Popularism is based on—and is perhaps little more than—the commonsense notion of highlighting policies that are popular and avoiding ones that are not. It is, in other words, a style of campaigning, not an agenda. As a result, popularists have been reluctant to break from unpopular progressive ideas, even as they are accused by their opponents of doing so. Nor have they been willing to openly advocate for moderation on its own substantive merits, rather than merely as a means to win elections.

In a sharply polarized society, however, simply avoiding unpopular issues is often insufficient. It is necessary to publicly criticize them—that is what made the “Sister Souljah” moment notable, after all. As critics of popularism have pointed out, simply downplaying the issue of critical race theory (CRT) in schools did not work for centrist Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race. And any competent Republican strategist knows, at this point, to simply ask Democratic candidates what the definition of a woman is, and force them to choose between alienating their progressive base or public opinion.

For different reasons, supply-side progressivism in its present form is also insufficiently radical. It is too often conceived of and presented as an alternative means of delivering on conventional welfarist promises, for instance on housing or health care, rather than a new economic paradigm aimed at improving growth and productivity, strengthening supply chains, and bolstering industrial and state capacity.

Targeted measures to outflank, say, nimbyism⁷ or poor health care incentives may appear more likely to attract a broad coalition. But whatever the merits of such proposals, or the larger views of their proponents, a narrow version of supply-side progressivism faces both policy challenges and political risks. On the one hand, in order to be effective, supply-side reforms need to alter the incentives for capital allocation across the economy, as they did in the neoliberal revolution, not merely in a few opportunity zones. On the other, limiting the focus to conventional welfarist aims, or attempts to smuggle in (too many) “Green New Deal” programs under a different guise, will provoke conventional partisan resistance while generating little offsetting enthu­siasm. Counterintuitively perhaps, reforms that are in some ways more structurally ambitious and aim primarily at strengthening the underlying economy probably have a greater chance to attract moderates and even the Right.

Supply-side progressives might also benefit from closer collaboration with the revived antitrust movement, which could be the Biden admin­istration’s most important legacy, and which includes a good portion of the relatively few thinkers capable of analyzing the actual behavior of firms and financial markets. In a highly concentrated economy suffering from a lack of competitive investment, antitrust policy can at least occasionally be essential supply-side policy as well.

At the same time, supply-side progressives, and Democratic centrists generally, have shown little ability to marshal corporate lobbies in sup­port of their broader agenda, unlike the Democratic Leadership Council of the Clinton era. Bipartisan supply-side measures like the usica/competes Act, for example, which originated as an attempt to counter industrial and technological competition from China, languished for months. In the closing days of the recent legislative session, the more ambitious proposals in the bill were stripped out, leaving only a narrow version that offered subsidies to semiconductor incumbents to build fabs in the United States. Then, at the eleventh hour, Democrats, at the behest of the Semiconductor Industry Association, inserted a loophole into the bill that would allow firms receiving subsidies to more easily continue investing in China, undermining a major premise of the legislation. They also killed a previously agreed-upon amendment in­tended to prevent research funding from benefiting foreign adversaries. Congressional Democrats showed little interest in opposing these dubi­ous revisions, much less in assembling industry lobbies into a larger coalition to push for a more ambitious agenda. In light of this bad prece­dent, robust supply-side policy may be more difficult going for­ward.

The Limitations of Liberalism

Further inhibiting any centrist realignment are the limitations of liberal ideology itself. If centrist Democrats are to overcome the significant political obstacles in their path—and address major policy failures—they will need to internalize, or at least appreciate, fundamental critiques of the liberal economic and political order from opponents to their right and left.

First, centrist liberals have, by and large, failed to confront the structural problems facing the U.S. and major Western economies. Perhaps because they are, more than anyone else, responsible for the creation and maintenance of the current system, they have preferred to avoid systemic criticisms of it. Or perhaps the abstract modes of eco­nomic analysis associated with (neo)liberalism simply cannot contemplate certain essential issues. A world in which investment hurdle rates diverge from the cost of capital or financial returns diverge from profits and overall growth is utterly incomprehensible to neoliberal economics. But that is the empirical reality we live in. Conventional economics also fundamentally misapprehends intellectual property rights, the Asian development model, and other foundational issues. Hence centrist liberal policy agendas have focused on minor tweaks to the tax code and welfare system or stale retreads from previous eras, like endlessly subsidizing education, all of which are intellectually and politically inadequate.

Perhaps policy change can only occur incrementally, and centrists continue to dominate technocratic wonkery,⁸ but even technocratic governance will be incompetent if the underlying intellectual framework ignores reality. Instead of shoring up the failing neoliberal order, centrist liberals must come to see their task as building a new national development paradigm appropriate to a period of deglobaliza­tion, which is now upon us.⁹ Although it is often presumed that a commitment to neoliberalism is what defines liberal centrism, this characterization is somewhat mislead­ing. It is not an ideological adherence to neoliberal theory but rather a commitment to private wealth generation. Yet neoliberalism’s wealth-generating capacity seems to be fading anyway, and other models of political economy may therefore become more promising.

At the same time, liberals have a critical lesson to learn from the more radical Right: namely, that not everyone aspires to be a (professional-class urban) liberal. Since the “end of history,” especially, liberals have come to assume that anyone who does not already embrace their values, institutions, and policies must be prevented from doing so either by some external force or by an irredeemable sin. The possibility that anyone could consciously oppose liberalism on the basis of reasonable interests or equally respectable value systems is something that liberals simply cannot admit or perhaps even imagine.

Initially, this blinkered view mainly applied to foreign populations. Liberals assumed that the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and else­where enthusiastically desired Western-style “liberal democracy,” which supposedly would flourish as soon as these societies were liberated from evil totalitarian “regimes.” In spite of the foreign policy disasters that proceeded from this mode of thinking, however, the same logic has more recently been turned inward on domestic constituencies.¹⁰ Today, anyone who votes in a way that liberals disapprove of is seen to be a hapless victim of “disinformation” or an inveterate racist—that is, someone who ought to be disqualified from participating in the political process until after liberal intervention.

This perhaps ironic inability to “tolerate” (to use the classical terminology) or “empathize with” (in contemporary parlance) differing worldviews is a crippling political liability. It not only precludes ordi­nary compromise and coalition building, but causes centrist liberals to dramatically miscalculate in their campaigns against political opponents—whether right-wing populist movements or liberals’ new enemies on the woke left. Against the latter challenge, liberals have failed to exploit any of their financial or institutional advantages. Instead, their main response has been to recapitulate nineteenth-century arguments in favor of free speech or other liberal “norms,” as well as conservative bromides about postmodernism from forty years ago. This might be an effective strategy if indeed all ideas and social norms were voluntarily chosen, as liberalism assumes, in a competitive marketplace of ideas. But it cannot account for or address any of the material or institutional factors, such as growing professional-class precarity in an unbalanced service econo­my, or the peculiar structure of contemporary universities and workplaces, that motivate the adoption of a particular species of radicalism among the college educated (much less the disaffection of the declining middle and working classes). Even more ambitious “anti-woke” efforts like founding new universities—which do nothing to fun­damentally alter elite creden­tialing systems and repeat similar conservative failures of recent dec­ades—seem likely to accomplish little more than demonstrating centrist liberals’ incapacity for structural thinking.

Liberals, from Hobbes and Locke to Hayek and Rawls, have dis­played a unique genius for foundation myths and universalizing abstrac­tions, as well as a special talent for obscuring the application of power and the assignment of responsibility. But the liberal tradition offers few resources for making sense of multilayered social phenomena that complicate distinctions between the voluntary and involuntary (e.g., concepts of “base and superstructure”).

If there is to be a centrist liberal realignment, its champions will have to overcome these limitations of the liberal perspective in order to offer something to those who do not already share their premises. Liberalism, after all, was originally presented as a political system that could secure practical needs like peace and material prosperity without requiring universal assent in matters of religious faith or metaphysical principle. To be sure, that original self-conception was always something of a noble lie, but it was once compelling in a way that it no longer is. Rather than merely insist upon the moral superiority of their values, today’s liberals must demonstrate that their institutions and policies can provide practical benefits to those who do not necessarily share their underlying worldview.

Stalled Realignments

At this point, it might seem that the further one proceeds with this thought experiment of centrist liberal realignment, the more dismal its prospects appear. In addition to obstacles involving fundamental matters of personnel, policy, and ideology, the recent intensification of decades-old culture wars and the possibility of another Trump presidential cam­paign militate against any reshuffling of the left-liberal alliance. On the other hand, hardly anyone would have predicted a few years ago that San Francisco would recall its school board and district attorney for being too woke. The obvious deficiencies of contemporary progressivism and the ongoing “Brazilianization” of the postindustrial West will continue to fuel efforts toward a larger political realignment, on the left as well as on the right.

This exercise also reveals the key differences between right and left versions of realignment that will shape American politics for the foresee­able future, even if no realignment is actually completed. These issues revolve around fundamental questions of constituency and legit­imacy.

In the modern era, the Right has essentially lacked the ideological basis and intellectual confidence to put forward a positive agenda. Instead, it obfuscates its substantive goals behind various indirect mech­anisms—the “market” (as imagined in classical theory), the separation of powers, federalism,¹¹ narrowly defined constitutionalism, and so forth—in order to borrow legitimacy from liberal proceduralism.¹² Even now, its most enthusiastic campaigns are entirely negative: end CRT, dis­mantle the administrative state, eliminate ESG, and the like. It does not, by and large, promote its own comprehensive, substantive vision, much less detailed plans, for what education should look like, how the modern executive should function, how capital should be allocated, or how actually existing markets should be structured. Indeed, much of right-wing “populism” could be characterized as an attempt to offer an ideological and political basis for the Right to act directly and positively on behalf of its constituencies and the nation as a whole.

Progressives face a different problem. Unlike the Right, they are capable of acting aggressively to advance a positive agenda, even if the locus of that activism has shifted toward NGOs or major corporations and away from formal government institutions or mass organizations. The problem is that this activism has grown increasingly disconnected from—and overtly hostile to—the sources and instruments of actual political power, including the American electorate and the American state.

Academic discussions of legitimacy tend to focus on what legitimates an elite in the eyes of the people. Yet equally or perhaps even more important is what legitimates an elite in its own eyes—what gives it the confidence to act as an elite, to lead and even to coerce the people toward some higher aim. Political crises erupt when an elite’s internally legitimating ideology contradicts or undermines that elite’s popular and performance legitimacy.

Centrist liberals recognize that such a crisis is now underway, and they also recognize that the conservative retreat to a purely negative and indirect approach to governing is inadequate. Yet it is unclear whether they possess the resources to escape a postimperial, post-Christian, and post-material prison of their own making. Unlike previous generations, who were able to define and act on behalf of a bounded political community, today’s liberals seem unable to acknowledge sources of legiti­macy outside the liberal abstractions of the individual and the universal. Without a recognizable political community on which to ground claims of performance legitimacy, however, liberalism appears merely as one competing value system among others, rather than as a means of transcending cultural conflict. Without a credi­ble vision of a shared past or a shared future, centrism is reduced to the self-serving manipulation of the moralism of the Left and the indirection of the Right, in defense of an illegitimate status quo. As long as that is the case, America will remain trapped between a self-confident—but also self‑marginalizing—faction of elites, on the one hand, and competing factions who refuse the responsibilities of government, on the other.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VI, Number 3 (Fall 2022): 177–95.

Notes