The Great Realignment
My interview with the IEA's Steve Davies
This week on the Cato Podcast, I hosted my friend and former colleague Steve Davies to discuss his new book, The Great Realignment. As ever with Steve, it was an enlightening conversation and often challenging to my preconceptions. I ended up writing my Times column this week on the book’s thesis and some of its implications. A few taster quotes below the embedded podcast…
On why “national libertarianism” that tries to compromise with nationalists by accepting immigration and trade restrictions is an unstable equilibrium:
As is becoming increasingly apparent to people on the right, they cannot do the things they really want to do, stopping immigration and de-connecting the US economy or other economies from the world economy … without abandoning free markets. … You can't simply stop immigration large scale without having major controls over the domestic labor market. For one thing, you're going to have to spy on and severely punish and regulate employers to stop them employing migrant labor.
On why it’s dangerous to try to freeze the new right out of politics by deeming it “beyond the pale”:
The analogy I make is with the rise of socialism in the late 1930s 20th century, where you had this emergence of an organized working class movement and a lot of the established political elite at the time just refused to talk about and tried to use things like the anti-socialist laws in Germany to suppress it. And all that did was make the movement turn to even more radical forms of socialism, so instead of being Fabians they became communists, and the danger is that if you don't actually engage with these kind of politics, you are going to have something similar happen.
On how the realignment might affect near-term American politics:
I think there’s quite a reasonable possibility that for only the third time in its history, the United States will have four serious presidential candidates at the next election. … We could well see a very divisive primary season in both the Republican and Democratic parties[, and] then what you’ll have is a knockdown drag-out fight, see which ones come out on top. And I think on the Republican side, the right side, it will be the populists [over the conservatives], I’m afraid, because they’ve got the votes on that side. On the other side it’s up for grabs really, but I suspect the liberals will ultimately come out on top [over the progressives], but it’s a close call there.
On where libertarians should consider themselves in this political world where the big divide is nationalism vs. cosmopolitanism:
I think if you are a radical liberal you have to realize, in the world we are now in, or at least moving into but I think we’re in…you’re on the left… In many ways what has happened is that we are reverting back to the kind of politics we had in the 19th century, where the real division was between conservatives on the one side, liberals and radicals on the other.
Discuss.