Chapter17

Imagine a world that divides humanity into two classes, Alphas and Betas. No one in this world has more social or political rights than anyone else and every citizen is equal before the law. However, the class to which you're assigned during your education determines your job, your salary, and your opportunities. Alphas do intellectual and managerial work—they're the leaders, the professors, the scientists, and the CEOs. They see their role as their society's guardians, obliged to use their superior educations and opportunities to guide society toward a better future. In return, they believe their hard work, extraordinary ability, and superior skill has earned them a right to a better lifestyle. Betas do hands-on work—manual labor, service jobs, and desk jobs that involve executing orders. Betas receive a modern education sufficient to become good workers, employees, and citizens, although without a detailed understanding of the fields in which they will never work, such as economics, science, history, or foreign policy. Betas live comfortably, although not as well as Alphas. Naturally, they resent the Alphas who give them orders and get things and opportunities Betas don't.

Every two years, this society elects a governing council. Council candidates court one of society's two natural voting blocs, the Alphas or the Betas. Alpha candidates prize efficiency, rational policy, progress, and good government to expand and create new opportunities. Beta candidates care most about fairness, focusing less on expanding opportunities and more on who gets what. As one might expect, elections get nasty. Alphas resent the “backward” Betas, secretly wondering why Betas even get to vote at all since the uninformed policies Betas support will inevitably break complex systems Betas don't understand. Betas think Alphas are soft, decadent, and greedy. For Betas, prosperity doesn't come from Alpha schemes but the fierce work of the Beta hands actually implementing what Alphas order. Betas fear Alpha plans for “good government” and “progress” will, in reality, entrench the wealth and status of Alphas, leaving Betas like them farther behind. Alphas don't understand Beta resentment, since they support policies meant to improve life for everybody. Betas don't understand Alpha priorities. As Betas see it, Alphas treat Betas as insignificant workers too ignorant to govern themselves, while the Alphas act morally superior for their “help.”

To most Americans, this is an ugly society. Americans don't like distinctions of social class. They believe anyone, with a little hard work and luck, should be able to achieve their dreams. Instead of a world where everyone pulls together to design a fair system in which everyone can do well with luck and hard work, this is a world in which some hate others as they fight over scraps. Yet this ugly world that violates our deepest values is much like the one this realignment will create if we fail to prevent it.

HOW TO JUDGE A PARTY SYSTEM

You can't judge a party system based solely on whether one of its parties would govern the way you like. The American system is one of power sharing, checks, and balances. Neither party ever governs alone. No party wins all the time. While one party controls some branches of government, the other party controls others. Even when a party wins control of some branch of government, the other party still exerts influence in the minority. No party ever gets to fully govern the way it would like, and given the fierce backlash that would crash down on its head if it did cram through its agenda during a momentary opportunity, few parties would even try it if they could. The agenda of no single party ever controls what actually happens during a party system, but rather it's the clash between the competing agendas of the parties through an era's great debate that determines how an era ultimately turns out.

The great debate between its parties determines how America relates to the political issues of its era. It determines which issues become highly charged and partisan, and which become uncontroversial and depoliticized. It determines which issues become visible and prioritized, and which get neglected as “boring.” It determines which issues fuse together because the people who care about them get grouped together in the same coalition, and which get arbitrarily separated because their advocates wind up on different teams. How America is divided determines which people find common ground because they're forced to cooperate and which people look for arbitrary reasons to disagree because they support opposing sides. It's how America gets divided into parties and the debate between them that determines how America is governed during a party system, what policies it implements, and what issues it resolves.

During the First Party System, America made national finance and foreign relations into national obsessions because those issues were now partisan under the terms of that era's great debate. During the Second Party System, issues like infrastructure spending, tariff rates, and a national bank became pitched ideological battles over which the nation obsessed, while important issues like slavery got ignored. In the Third Party System, America was divided between North and South, so issues like Reconstruction transfixed the nation. In the Fourth Party System, America was split over competing paths to modernization and reform, so ideas for economic and social reform burst to the front of the nation's consciousness. Today's Fifth Party System turned issues like taxes, regulation, and social welfare programs—policies that directly impact the size and power of the federal government—into highly charged and partisan issues that therefore gripped the nation. As Americans sorted themselves into “liberals” and “conservatives,” they channeled their cultural and political passions through this lens.

Changing the composition of political coalitions changes the fault lines around which we organize everything. New alliances change the narratives and assumptions we take for granted. They make possible ideas that were formerly impossible given the cold hard political realities, while other ideas that were formerly possible now become impossible because of new party power dynamics. They change the issues we talk most about, since parties focus on issues over which everyone inside their tent agrees. They change the issues we neglect, since parties neglect issues about which members disagree. Where we draw the fault lines dividing America into its two great political coalitions impacts what we talk about, what we value, and even how we see ourselves throughout a historical era. How America's next political coalitions divide society will set the terms for our next great national debate. That debate will control how we talk about our problems, where we place our focus, which issues become polarized, and which issues we devalue and ignore. Those divisions will frame every political issue, as well as the obsessions of our culture, for decades. As we grapple with the problems of information-age America, the clash between our two political coalitions—whatever they turn out to be—will determine how we view those problems and how we go about discovering solutions.

Looking at each problem in isolation, it may seem America is suddenly beset with a swarm of completely unrelated issues. However, most of the looming problems frequently worrying us are in fact related tremors from just three large disruptions now shaking the world.

THE ISSUES OF THE FUTURE

America faces three powerful disruptions currently shaking its foundations that any new party system will have to somehow address. The first of these disruptions is the decline of the industrial era and America's transition toward a global information-based economy. The industrial era was a dream for America. The nation had available to it every ingredient necessary for industrial success—vast natural resources, a large population, and a political culture well suited to fostering large-scale industrial production. America found itself a respected global superpower and virtually the only modern industrial economy left standing after the devastation of the Second World War. With the right tools and limited competition, America became the economic engine of the world, inventing, designing, growing, and manufacturing for everybody around the globe. For decades, almost anyone in America from any background could, if they were willing to work hard and follow the rules, find a lifetime of stable work supporting a comfortable lifestyle with minimal risk. That produced a large and prosperous middle class that was, by world historical standards, extraordinarily rich. As it rose to unrivaled prosperity and global power, America constructed new institutions to govern this novel world. America over the twentieth century constructed a complex web of institutions to govern a country of urban industrial producers. America created regulatory agencies—a new concept not part of the nation's original constitutional design. It created executive organs like national security councils and domestic policy councils, while vastly expanding the scope of old ones like the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Reserve System. It created Social Security, Medicare, social welfare programs, business regulation, labor rules, antidiscrimination laws, environmental rules, a new tax code, and more.

All the while, Americans reorganized their lives around the assumptions of the wage-earning and urban industrial world. They moved to the suburbs and bought cars to commute to industrial jobs in the cities. They set up 401Ks and insurance policies to protect them from the day they could no longer earn a wage. They had fewer children. Every institution of American society—in government, in private industry, and in the culture—was designed to help citizens thrive within America the industrial superpower. Society promised that, if you worked hard and played by the rules as it defined them, you might not get rich, and your life might have setbacks, but you would be okay. For most citizens, the system delivered on its promise of a life with a limited risk of ever confronting catastrophe, if not a good chance for a suburban house with two cars in the garage and a sufficient college fund left over. These assumptions, around which our entire society was built, remains for most Americans the baseline of what life in America is supposed to be like. However, this portrait of America no longer exists, except in our minds.

In the new information-age economy, firms no longer refine processes to cheaply mass produce good-enough results. They analyze the flood of data around us to quickly serve smaller groups exactly what they want. This new economic order is more dynamic and disruptive. Incumbent giants crumble, while new firms pop up from nowhere to become new giants. Firms of any size, located anywhere, can compete on nearly equal terms with the largest firms of the largest nations. The working and middle class is under increasing pressure in this new economy. Two college-educated workers today can often barely support a contemporary middle-class lifestyle, when not so long ago one high-school educated worker could thrive. Industrial-era stability is gone.

These changes to our society's structure are also changing how we live—in marriage, child rearing, healthcare, education, and leisure expectations. Social media is changing how people communicate, and even changing the nature of relationships. We're weaving new technologies like smart phones, tablets, and virtual home assistants into the way we live, even into the most private areas of our lives. Richer Americans are moving back into the urban core, while the suburbs are getting poorer. Car ownership is in decline among younger Americans. Childrearing has become more supervised. People are more concerned about what they eat. Social tolerance has become a core value, and formerly marginalized groups are entering the mainstream. These are just the first rumblings of the unpredictable changes that will inevitably come as the global information economy takes further hold. We're only at the beginning of the transition, a moment somewhat like when the people of the late nineteenth century watched railroads and factories springing up around their family farms.

The shift from the industrial to the postindustrial economy is as significant and disruptive as was the shift from an agricultural economy to an industrial, and ultimately no one yet knows how this massive shift will pan out. For some, it will provide new opportunities. Great fortunes will be made. For others, it will be a traumatic disruption from which they may never fully recover. Moreover, with the economic model and the temporary conditions that produced mass prosperity gone, America—while still a rich country—may not be as comparatively rich in the postindustrial age as it was during the industrial. It's possible this new economy may not continue to support the mass prosperity we've come to believe is “normal,” with a comfortable middle-class suburban existence in reach of most Americans. For many Americans, the path to success in the new economy also may be less stable and more uncertain. Instead of finding a job with a stable firm and climbing its ladder, Americans are now encouraged to embrace risk, actively manage their careers, switch jobs often, and court disruption. No one expects to stay at one firm for thirty years, nor does anyone expect employers to reward such loyalty. In today's economy, it's understood that some people work hard and do good work but still get downsized. Labor markets are global. Smart people with internet connections from poor nations often can do a comparable job for less. In this new economic world, no one really knows what the rules to a stable and prosperous life will turn out to be. The only thing we know for certain is that the industrial-era economic and social model appears to be dead and new rules are in the making. The increase in economic inequality and the decline of the American middle class may not be temporary artifacts from recent events. They may be the start of a permanent adjustment toward a more historical version of what's “normal.”

The first big challenge for the parties of America's next party system will be to usher the nation through this profound transformation. Systems that worked in the industrial world won't all continue to work in the very different postindustrial world. Significant economic transformations and technological transformations always bring cultural transformations, so as people work differently, and as the world works differently, people will live differently. In this new era, people will move to different places, buy different sorts of houses, and structure different sorts of families to support the new ways in which they earn their living. As new technologies embed themselves in our lives, they inevitably alter power dynamics—changing how people relate to each other, how they relate to institutions, and how they relate to government. Industrialization strengthened the state, giving it better tools to manage the economy and society while also increasing its scope and responsibilities. Postindustrial-era technology will have similar effects, whether through self-driving cars, powerful artificial intelligences, social media, automated drones, or technologies we still can't imagine. Just as people did during the industrial transition of the late nineteenth century, many Americans who worked hard and played by the old rules will increasingly find those rules no longer work. Our parties will have to manage the nation's transition to this new era, ensuring people understand the new rules and that playing by them works again. That will mean rethinking every national institution built around the assumptions of industrial-age life. Every program, law, regulation, and agency built around dead assumptions will have to be overhauled or replaced with new ones custom built to create success in the new reality of American economic, social, and cultural life.

A second challenge relates to the first, what some in the liberal-democratic West might call “the rise of the rest of the world.” At the end of the Second World War, the world was organized around two great ideological alliances. America led the liberal-democratic nations of “the West” as they faced off against the communist bloc of the Warsaw Pact and “the East.” The rest of the planet, from India to Asia, Africa, and Latin America, became pawns of those two great power blocs. As the strongest nation and the leader of the richer alliance, America became a military and economic superpower, with nations around the world, who believed American strength contributed to their safety and success, tacitly working to support it. Nations across the globe that once depended on American strength for their own security and prosperity no longer do. America remains the most powerful nation on the earth, but its economy no longer dominates the way it did during the postwar boom when every other industrial nation was either devastated by war, locked behind an Iron Curtain, or relegated to the status of postcolonial “third world.” Countries like India, China, and Brazil, with immense resources in both raw materials and human capital, once pawns in a great power struggle, are now global leaders. American allies across the liberal-democratic West remain allies, but independent ones aware of where their values and American interests conflict. Many nations have even come to resent America and would like to see its influence and power weaken. Russia and China have become true rivals seeking to challenge America economically, militarily, and geostrategically, and they will exert power in the following decades with unknown intent. Older ideas like nationalism and religion have risen again to the top of the international agenda. Technology has enabled radical groups, multinational corporations, and popular movements to play roles that once only nation states could play. The world is more unpredictable than it was and less accepting of American power.

Every aspect of the global leadership America has come to take for granted—its currency as the world currency, its language as the world language, its movies and music as world entertainment, and its priorities becoming world priorities—is now open to challenge. There's no reason to think America will abandon its position as the most powerful nation in the world anytime soon. At the same time, powerful nations and non-state actors hope to knock her off her pedestal economically and as a global power. Some in America are eager to see America's role in the world retract, whether due to its cost or from a sense of morality. America's power and global influence, however, contributed to America's relative wealth during the twentieth century. It opened markets to America's products; provided a comparative advantage to American firms; spread English as an international language; enshrined the dollar as a global currency; allowed America to construct and police international agreements and norms designed to benefit America; and spread American culture, providing markets for American cultural exports. America's relative decline in global status, whether by geostrategic change or the design of its competitors, could bring about a corresponding decline in its wealth and prosperity—and a decline in its citizens' standard of living with it, bringing the American middle class closer to the living standards of a “normal” country without the superpower privileges Americans didn't even know they were enjoying.

A third problem relates to the first two—the legacy of the current institutions in place. Almost every government institution, program, and regulatory scheme in America was created specifically for the modern industrial economy at a time when American government was relatively small. Before the New Deal, America didn't have a large regulatory apparatus, didn't have much in the way of administrative agencies, and didn't have large and expensive programs like Social Security and Medicare to administer. The New Deal's architects only had to design institutions to usher America into a new economic age. As we seek to design new policies and programs today, we're no longer essentially working from scratch. The government programs and institutions America has created since the New Deal are now deeply embedded into society. People depend on them, building their lives around the expectation that they exist. We therefore have to design any new policies and institutions necessary for success during the next age while still burdened with the costs and needs of the existing ones.

Everyone in America knows that the government for decades has spent far more than it raises in taxes. The specific numbers jump about from year to year based on tax receipts and interest rates, but for decades the government programs and services Americans demand have simply cost far more than Americans are able or willing to pay in taxes, so year after year the government borrows the difference and adds it to the national debt. Our national debt is currently, at the time of this writing, a little over $21 trillion.1 (A trillion dollars is a lot of money, even for the United States government. A million seconds is 12 days. A trillion seconds is 31,709 years.) In fiscal year 2017, America spent about $4 trillion and only took in $3.4 trillion in revenue, leaving a deficit of about $665 billion.² In fiscal year 2018, it's estimated that the deficit will be about $833 billion.³ While politicians like to pretend we can someday balance this budget by simply cutting out “waste, fraud, and abuse,” we can't—and not because there's no waste or abuse in government. Roughly 45 percent of our national budget is just Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—politically untouchable. Roughly 15 percent is defense. Somewhere around 6 percent is the interest payments on our existing debt. Just to stop borrowing more we would have to cut about half or more of everything else the government does—the courts, the FBI, the FDA, the EPA, the CIA, and the rest—which is far more than any amount of inefficiency and waste we'll ever find. No one in Washington really talks about paying down the debt America already has because realistically it can't ever generate the surplus necessary to pay down $21 trillion with $3.3 trillion in revenue and trillions in non-negotiable costs. The problem is utterly unsolvable mathematically without reforms so dramatic they will devastate people and the economy, which nobody wants. Not all economists believe America's national debt is a problem so long as the government can always afford its interest payments. Others find America's deficits and debt of grave concern, since if the interest on borrowing were to suddenly and sufficiently spike because people across the world stopped wanting to buy American government securities, or due to American political instability, or for some other reason, the American government and economy would tumble into a severe crisis.4 Regardless of which you believe, the situation unquestionably makes our transition into the next age far more difficult. America must somehow reform its institutions to adapt to the era ahead, while it already can't really afford the government it already has at a tax rate it's willing to pay.

America is moving into a new era with staggering legacy costs from legacy institutions. To build anything new, the next era's architects have to work around their predecessors' efforts, a government that already consumes every available resource. Nor is it simply the cost. It's impossible to build anything fresh without taking into account all the laws, programs, and regulations that already exist and on which people have invested expectations. It's difficult, and frequently impossible, to change such powerful, vast, and entrenched programs and institutions without severely disrupting the expectations and plans of innocent people who now depend on them. Unlike the world Roosevelt's brain trust faced, reformers today can't build or create anything from scratch thinking solely about the needs of the moment. Before we can adapt our institutions for tomorrow, we first have to wrestle with the web of what we already created to address the world of yesterday.

When you evaluate potential political parties for tomorrow, you have to do it in the context of these three issues—the end of the industrial economy, the rise of the rest of the world, and the legacy costs of our existing institutions. You have to consider how those parties would manage a nation with battered middle and working classes confronting significant disruption in their expectations, the need to navigate great social and economic change, vast difficulties matching fiscal reality to priorities, and new competitors rising all around with deep interests in reversing America's dominance. These same three challenges will play out over countless other issues—employment and the economy, aging national infrastructure, increasing environmental concerns and the threat of climate change, clashes of interest with other global powers, threats of terrorism, policy affecting immigration, and an often-inadequate education system, among many more. America can no doubt succeed in navigating this daunting situation, but if it bungles the task it could also damage the country, plunging Americans into difficult times.

THE NEW COALITIONS WE DON'T WANT

Disruptive realignments are, of course, unpredictable. When the seals of society fall off, no one can say for sure what will rush through. Yet standing on the cold eve of a realignment, we have a pretty good idea—if nothing else intervenes—what's likely to happen next. We can't yet know, of course, how exactly the next realignment will arrive. No one ever knows until just before it happens. The next realignment might come after a punishing election, or a third-party campaign, or the walkout of factions from one of our existing parties. It might come through a disruptive leader, or an external shock, or an unanticipated economic crash that plunges America into agony and takes the old parties down. Or it could be something else. The specifics of the collapse, however, don't much matter. Whatever course of events sees the old party system crumble, we already have a fair idea of where that path inevitably will lead. If we simply look at what people are doing and where their interests lie, we can fairly deduce—if no one intervenes to alter the course—what, in the wake of the next party collapse, will likely follow next.

When America's parties finally break, their constituent factions, the principles and ideas they draw on, the people who vote for them, and the interest groups that support them, will all continue to exist. America may no longer be a country of conservatives and liberals working through our familiar Republican and Democratic Parties, but it will still be a nation of Americans who care about the same issues as before. America will still have Northerners, Southerners, urban dwellers, suburbanites, and rural communities. It will still have citizens who identify as different races, ethnicities, and religions. It will still be a nation of office workers, farmers, factory workers, service workers, computer programmers, and professionals. Most important, it will still be a country with populists, progressives, liberty conservatives, and virtue conservatives. The fall of a political party doesn't destroy its political principles or permanently silence the people who believe them. The only things that change when parties break are America's political alliances. The people who work together on each side of the political divide will no longer work together as allies and the ideologies that bound them will dissolve.

When faced with the problems of 1932, America's coalitions grouped together people who shared common interests, concerns, and perspectives. New Deal liberalism offered working-class populists—mainly working people, often rural, many Southern, who traditionally supported Democrats—material benefits to protect them from ruin along with the dignity and power they craved against prevailing Republican elites. It offered progressives—mainly educated, cosmopolitan, middle or upper-class professionals, often urban, many from the Northeast, who traditionally supported Republicans—a framework to employ the expertise and social science they valued to design better national institutions to combat the crisis. The coalition of ideological conservatism also made great sense in the middle of the twentieth century. Liberty conservatives were worried about the New Deal's increase in the power of the American state. Virtue conservatives worried the New Deal would erode the culture and character necessary for the republic to thrive. Sharing a common interest, their alliance was practical and sensible. Yet given the issues and demographic situation today, these coalitions no longer make sense in the same way.

Were America's parties to break, leaving each faction at play in America's current party system—populists, progressives, liberty conservatives, and virtue conservatives—free to form new alliances, it would be more logical today for virtue conservatives to form a political alliance with populists. Populists and virtue conservatives thrive within the same communities—mainly rural, suburban, and “Red State” America. Both are suspicious of elites—the financiers, professionals, Hollywood celebrities, academics, C-suite occupants, and meritocrats eager to move America into new global economy and leaving many working Americans behind. Most important, they each worry about the same postindustrial changes, economic and cultural, that disproportionately harm people like them. Populist resentment at elites and virtue conservative notions of protecting culture increasingly lead to the same place. While yesterday's populists had no reason to trust cautious and elitist Burkean virtue conservatives worried about maintaining stability, today's virtue conservatives are more likely to be revivalists following the virtue of national reform who don't see America's elites as guardians of the traditional order but threats to it leading the nation into decline. It makes sense today for virtue conservatives and populists to unite around their shared anger at elites over disruptive information-age economic and social change and a desire to restore traditional American virtue to preserve the republic.

It's also more logical today for liberty conservatives to forge an alliance with progressives. Demographically, liberty conservatives increasingly come from similar cultural backgrounds as progressives—highly educated suburban and urban professionals from the upper-middle class and economic elite who are “economically conservative and socially moderate.” They live in similar communities, share common backgrounds and cultural tastes, and are similarly positioned to take advantage of the opportunities this emerging world provides. Most important, liberty conservatives and progressives share a common approach to the disruption of the postindustrial era—they embrace it. During the New Deal era, liberty conservatives and progressives were natural enemies. Progressives wanted to tame and control the industrial economy to help the working class, while liberty conservatives saw such elite-driven social planning as a dangerous infringement on liberty. Today's progressives, however, are less interested in governing through top-down planning and regulation and more comfortable with market-based approaches that manage incentives and conflict less with liberty. It makes sense today for liberty conservatives and progressives to unite around their mutual belief that, with modernization, rational policy, and good-government efficiency, America can continue to prosper in the emerging globalized world.

These new alliances would provide the foundation for two new political coalitions, each with its own new ideology. A coalition of virtue conservatives and populists would rally under a banner of reversing the nation's rush toward the global postindustrial world. Its ideology would be dedicated to preserving the nation's virtues for the benefit of ordinary Americans. It would cherish the values of traditional America—patriotism, hard work, Judeo-Christian values, and traditional cultural conservatism—and fight against the power of both economic and cultural “elites” pushing changes harmful to the “people.” It would celebrate the virtue of ordinary working people. It would denigrate “out-of-touch elites” living in rich communities as dangerous “others” more loyal to the global elite than working America. It would launch populist attacks against college professors, ivy league schools, and residents of upscale neighborhoods in “creative class” cities, but also against CEOs, hedge fund managers, and venture capitalists benefiting from the changing economy while “the people” do worse.

A coalition of progressives and liberty conservatives would unite under the banner of advancing human progress. It would draw on the progressive impulse to employ planning and expertise to create the conditions necessary for national progress. It would seek to help working people but not to empower them. It would hope instead to improve them through education and cultural change to nudge them into becoming more like the professional and upper classes. It wouldn't worry about the power of “the corporations” or “the rich” so long as some of the excess could be redistributed to those in need and general conditions improved. It wouldn't view the world through the lens of nationalism but multinationalism, hoping to integrate the American economy into global opportunities while viewing it as a moral duty to assist non-Americans in need equally to Americans. It would be a party that was technocratic and meritocratic looking something like “Third Way” neoliberalism, something like moderate libertarianism, and something like the ethos of Silicon Valley. It wouldn't worry about elites but seek to harness expertise and elite power for the benefit of the human race at large.

America's leaders have in fact been reaching out toward these new coalitions for some time. Republican Party leaders have long reached toward this sort of populist-virtue fusion. Republican pollsters and consultants regularly propose the party concentrate on an agenda offering more to working Americans—now a significant part of the party's base—and throw off its image as the party of the rich. Populist-leaning Republicans often demand the Republican Party divorce Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce, while business Republican groups openly gripe about the party's populist direction. Fusing virtue conservatism with populism is at the heart of the war against the Republican “establishment.” It's the idea behind Republicans courting “Sam's Club voters.” It's the coalition behind much of culture-war conservativism that has long imported populist themes into the Republican Party while marginalizing liberty-conservative “moderates.” It's the coalition lurking behind Donald Trump's populist Republican pledge to “Make America Great Again.” Democrats have similarly reached toward a technocratic liberalism seeking not to empower poor and working people but to instead improve them. For years, Democratic party leaders have embraced business-friendly “neoliberal” progressivism that fuses liberty with progressivism divorced from traditional Democratic populism. Wealthy national elites that in a prior era would have been natural business-class Republicans—Silicon Valley moguls, Wall Street bankers, and powerful CEOS—have drifted toward the Democrats. Democrats increasingly include not just the nation's cultural elites but also its economic elites, supporting policies that advance and support the integration of the multinational economy. At the same time, it's been years since Democrats truly sought to actually empower and represent traditional Democratic populists.

While the liberty and virtue coalition currently appears quite certain, some evidence, however, suggests the progressive and liberty coalition could also go in a slightly different direction. Over the last few years, momentum has built in parts of America behind a movement with a conception of equality often called equity or social justice—whose supporters are sometimes derided as “Social Justice Warriors. It holds the chief sin of modern America is the privilege it unfairly grants certain groups at others' expense—women, racial minorities, immigrants, sexual minorities, and others. This zealous and egalitarian movement believes it has a duty to overturn the current hierarchies of power in American society, either to abolish or to reverse them. Presently, this movement is mainly considered a modern adaptation of the moral progressivism that has played an important role in American politics for decades. It's not yet clear, however, whether this truly is the case, or whether this equity movement—with its new moral claims, emphasis on identity, and even hints of economic socialism—isn't perhaps a new movement introducing novel principles and ideas into America's politics. Nor is it even clear whether the movement's adherents know themselves, or whether the movement might in fact consist of two separate ideological factions, progressivism and equity, working on a common project but with beliefs grounded in different ideals.

While it's too early to know for sure what the equity movement will mean, and therefore which partners it might seek out in the next era, if it turns out it represents new principles, America's second coalition would likely be different. The strong egalitarian ethic of the equity movement would naturally interest it in radical projects to alter what it believes are unfair structures of power, making liberty—unwilling to tolerate the more intrusive state interventions necessary to create such cultural transformation—an unwilling partner. Equity's moral worldview would make true populists impossible partners as well. It would thus likely find itself in an alliance with progressivism—leaving liberty conservatives without a dedicated party and forced to join one of the other parties around secondary principles in which they believed. While an equity and progressivism party would follow a different ideology and propose different solutions than a liberty-progressive party, it would nevertheless look demographically similar. It would still attract the middle and upper classes and the meritocracy. It would still believe in technocracy, embracing the global economic and cultural change of postindustrialism and seeking to integrate America into the multinational world. It would still seek to uplift and benefit not just Americans but also the poor and struggling across the world. Despite the sometimes harsh rhetoric equity and progressivism both sometimes direct at the wealthy and corporations, it would also most naturally draw a distinction between the immoral wealth of the few, of the corporations and billionaires, and the moral and earned wealth of the meritocracy—exactly as prosperous turn-of-the-century progressives who railed at the trusts and John Rockefeller also once did. It would, in other words, still be a party with a vision to benefit all society but mainly appealing to cultural and economic elites. While ideologically different than a liberty and progressivism party—one focused more on systems of power and identity—it would ultimately attract the same types of people and have a similar perspective on the problems we currently face.

Shuffling America's ideological factions in this way, into a virtue-populism coalition and either a liberty-progressivism or progressivism-equity one, would lead to some unfamiliar combinations that unsettle expectations. An alliance between virtue and populism, for example, would mean virtue conservatives who classically opposed “big government” supporting economic populism. There's no reason, however, why the sorts of virtue conservatives who support a strong government protecting cultural values and warning against the government touching their Medicare couldn't be convinced to support an economic agenda that benefited virtuous working people at the expense of immoral elites. An alliance between virtue and populism might put Southern evangelicals into an alliance with factions like organized labor and poor urban minorities. Given historical anger and hard feelings, that at first seems unlikely—except the same could be said of African Americans joining the Party of Dixie in 1928. America has a long history of uniting political coalitions with histories of distrust when their interests later aligned. An alliance of liberty conservatives and progressives would put western don't-tread-on-me libertarians inside the same party as social reformers seeking to harness government. One can, however, pursue progressive goals like a safe and fair society, clean environment, and social tolerance through bottom-up market-based reforms instead of top-down ones.

What's most striking is the political map these new coalitions would create. Dividing America into a virtue-populist and a liberty-progressive or progressive-equity party would roughly recreate America's political arrangement during the Third and Fourth Party Systems. The virtue and populist political party would do well in rural areas, small towns, industrial areas, urban cores, and the South. Its base would be the South and the rust belt, and socioeconomically it would be the party of the poor and working class. The liberty and progressive party, or alternatively the progressive and equity party, would dominate the suburbs and exurbs. Its base would be on the coasts, the West, and the North. It would socioeconomically be the party of business, professionals, white-collar America, the upper half of the middle class, and the “meritocracy.” It would effectively recreate the political map of the pre–New Deal era. The virtue-populist party would win states Democrats used to win. The liberty-progressive or progressive-equity party would win states Republicans used to win. These arrangements aren't only possible, they're well-tested. Far from creating something novel, this realignment would restore a political order that ruled America just outside our personal memories.

For most of American history prior to our era, it was the wealthy and educated—not the working classes—who supported progressive modernizing policies. Wealthy businessmen and social reformers drew from the same demographics and supported the same political party, the “pro-business” Federalists, Whigs, or pre–New Deal Republicans, who attracted support from the wealthy, professionals, and the upper classes. At the same time, it was the working classes and new immigrants who usually supported populist parties of social traditionalism that opposed modernizing plans. The Democratic-Republicans, Jacksonian Democrats, and Bryan Democrats were all deeply suspicious of banks, business, and the aristocratic pretensions of wealth. They had little faith in the plans of the elites, suspecting them to be Trojan horses intended to subvert America's republican values to better profit off their backs. Having demographically rearranged its political coalitions to address the industrial age, America may be falling back into old habits now that those industrial-era problems have faded.

The new party system these new coalitions would create would actually be positioned to address the new problems America faces. Unfortunately, if you match the specific problems we face over the coming years against the ideologies and interests of the new coalitions that appear to be taking shape, something disturbing jumps out. They divide America not around clashing ideas but zero-sum battles for spoils. They set the stage for a bitter and angry era obsessed over fighting who in America deserves more rather than how we might best strengthen it together. At a dangerous moment in history, the political coalitions that seem likely to emerge are a recipe for acrimony, conflict, failure, and national decline. Whatever you think of the national parties today, these parties would be worse. We should stop this new party system from forming while we can.

THESE ARE THE WRONG PARTIES FOR AMERICA

For everything that's wrong with our existing political coalitions, at least they're organized around ideas—“conservatism” versus “liberalism.” Some people claim our current parties are principally divided on wealth and class, but that's never actually been the truth. Republicans draw both from wealthy investors and working- and middle-class traditionalists, while Democrats draw both from economic populists and socially advantaged progressives. What actually divides America's parties today isn't class or wealth but ideology. Both parties take for granted that the purpose of politics is to help every American live in a better, richer, freer, and safer nation. They simply disagree about what that means, and how to best go about achieving it. Democrats prefer to empower government to shape America into their version of a better future. Republicans want to empower people to decide for themselves how to get us to that better future. Even when acting parochially, and whether or not it's always carried out in practice, at least both parties justify and think about their ideas in terms of what will make the nation better for everyone.

This new party system that appears ready to emerge would exchange a politics of clashing ideas for one of clashing interests. It would concentrate those who benefit most from the information-age economy into one party while concentrating working-class and poorer Americans who benefit least into another. The virtue and populism party would represent the working class and those most displaced in the global economy. It would be a party of anti-elitism, disproportionately representing those most harmed by disruptive economic and social change. Its opponent would be considered the party of the economic and cultural elite. It would disproportionately represent people benefiting from disruptive economic and social change.

These new political coalitions would almost certainly respond to our challenges in predictable and troubling ways. The party that welcomed postindustrial changes would naturally focus on integrating America's elite into the new opportunities of the global economy. Its instinct would be to manage the relative decline of the United States so America's elite would continue to harness global opportunities to generate global wealth—not ensuring middle- and working-class Americans retain their relative prosperity to the global middle class. Its perspective would be postnational, viewing the world as one great community and questioning whether it's even appropriate to wield state power to advantage American workers over the poor citizens of other nations. Its opponent, fearing postindustrial changes, would naturally focus on economic and social resentment. In a fruitless attempt to preserve a fading position, it would lash out at change while targeting those it perceived as unfairly flourishing. Its instinct would be to wall America off from the world to stop the inevitable. Each coalition would be trying to preserve what's best for its team without concern for the other. One coalition would be looking out for the mobile global economic class and the other for the less-mobile economically disrupted. Politics under these new parties would no longer be about what we believe but who we're for. Debates would no longer be about methods of governing but whether our politicians can deliver an agenda for us against them. It's about our group getting ours and your group not taking yours. It's zero-sum politics pitting half of America against the other half. It would be a very ugly era for America.

America has frequently experienced outbursts of class politics, which in part is why populism has long played a role in American party politics. America has also lived through various incarnations of identity politics, whether urban versus rural, Northern versus Southern, Eastern versus Western, immigrant versus “native,” or other categories, such as gender or race. America's parties during the Populist and Progressive Era, although divided around ideology, also roughly divided Americans based on prosperity and class, unleashing exactly the sorts of ugliness, anger, identity politics, and corruption one would expect. These fights however always took place in the background of booming long-term national prosperity, in which new groups could claim new opportunities and resources without anyone losing out. They fought over how to fairly divide a growing national pie, how best to manage an economic system of exploding opportunity and complexity, and how best to leverage increasing national wealth and power in the world. In a world in which prosperity is no longer growing so quickly—in which for one group to gain another group has to lose more—the effect of this style of politics will be far worse.

This realignment is a recipe for destructive policies on countless issues, including trade, immigration, taxes, cultural differences, not to mention countless unknown issues with which we will have to struggle as we adapt to a fast-developing future. One party would fight for policies benefiting the elite economy without regard to its impact on the working and rural people whom they considered backward. The other party would punish elites they believed had stolen their prosperity and dignity with rigged systems and elite-driven policies. One party would patronize, dismiss, and seek to reeducate those they believed ignorant. Another would rage and resent those they believed criminal and out-of-touch. Each party would be inclined to fight for policies that made their constituents better off at the expense of the Americans they didn't represent—that they saw not simply as opponents but as enemies. This zero-sum debate over resentments and spoils dangerously escalates the stakes of our disagreements. In this hypothetical era, every opportunity would have to come at the expense of a rival and every lost election would become a personal tragedy. In this new politics, losing an election wouldn't just mean new policies that violate your values. It would mean your enemies stripping away your means to live—threatening your savings, job, home, and opportunities for your children.

Such a realignment would be a recipe for corruption as the party in power rewarded its own while punishing rivals. It's a recipe for unfairness, with the wealthy seeking to protect their wealth and treating the lower and middle classes as tragic reclamation projects. It's a recipe for protected elites and national decline, as those who are thriving have no reason to care about the fates of those who aren't. It's a recipe for contempt, as each half of America gains hard reasons to hate and fear the other. It's a recipe for drastic Gilded-Age level inequality, as no one would be looking out for what's best for everyone, only what's best for their own. It's a recipe for creeping authoritarianism, as parties wield power carelessly and tyrannically to coerce and punish those whom they resent and fear. Most worrying, it's a recipe for staggering instability. Losing an election would impose an intolerable cost—allowing those who resent you to strip away resources, opportunities, and the means to your family's future. It would mean standing aside so that people who hate you could hurt you. It's a political world seeming to require any action, no matter how radical, to seize and maintain power to avoid the punishing cost of losing to your enemies.

This is not a realignment we want. No one wants to live in a country like this. It's against every American's hopes and dreams. We don't want a zero-sum class-based politics. We don't want public officials to wield power corruptly, rewarding friends and crushing enemies. We don't want parties driving up further inequality, encouraging political tribalism, or engaging in an aggressive tit-for-tat for power that gradually erodes democratic norms until the safeguards of the republic crumble. What everybody wants is a national political debate that seeks the solutions that are best for everybody. We want parties and a government that treat us all with dignity. We want public officials who wield power carefully and with the interests of everyone always in mind, even those who voted against them. This realignment is a potential disaster for America.

We can choose a better future if we want it. Instead of allowing the winds of history to tear our party coalitions apart, we can harness those winds for a national renewal.

REBUILDING A BETTER PARTY SYSTEM FOR AMERICA

If we simply wait for America's existing party system to collapse, we have a good idea what happens next. At first, America will fall into a period of political instability and chaos. America's factions and interests, thrown cold into the wild, will wander blindly through the Fifth Party System's rubble for a time looking for new alliances to build new majorities. Eventually, they will form new coalitions out of the wreckage, but those coalitions will likely be ones we don't want. They'll divide us in destructive ways, leading America into a difficult and angry new era of zero-sum politics. We can do better. We can create our own new party system, reshaping politics by choice into a new alignment we like. We can launch a political renewal instead. To do it, we simply have to choose a new great debate that addresses the issues Americans now want and need addressed. From there, we can rebuild new parties prepared to actually discover solutions to our problems, unleashing a fresh era of national reform. The key is to define the message.

Not all parties are the same because not everybody joins a political party for the same reason. Sometimes people band together into a party because they share a similar vision for the future. They may disagree about many things, but they stand united in their desire to see a particular dream achieved. Other times people join a political party because they share a common fear. Their members may also disagree about other things, but they're committed to fighting against this mutual threat. When people unite around a common vision, they create an agenda party—a group of people united around a shared agenda. When they unite around a common threat, they create an opposition party—a group of people united to fight against a mutual danger. What separates an agenda party from an opposition party isn't whether the party promotes an agenda or opposes one, but which of the two is the thing that unites its members. Every political party has policy white papers on countless issues, hundreds of programs they'd like enacted, regulations they'd like changed, programs they'd like funded, and issues they'd like addressed. Every party hopes to stop the agenda of their opponents. The difference between an agenda party and an opposition party is which of the two came first—whether the agenda built the party, with the opposition following from it, or whether the opposition built the party, with the agenda following from it. The Fifth Party System Democratic Party is an agenda party. The Republican Party is an opposition party.

Most party systems begin with an agenda party proposing a new and disruptive program. In response, those alarmed with that program either unite into an opposition party to stop that agenda, or they create their own rival agenda party presenting America with an alternative program. The Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans were both agenda parties united around the clashing visions of Hamilton and Jefferson respectively. Andrew Jackson's Democrats were an agenda party united around Andrew Jackson's vision of Jacksonian Democracy, but the Whigs were an opposition party united around a shared distrust of the other party's agenda. The Whigs had beliefs and a strong agenda, including the supremacy of Congress, support for a national infrastructure plan, and opposition to wars of expansion, but what really united the fractious Whigs was a deep distrust for “King Andrew” Jackson. Lincoln's Republicans were an agenda party united around the Republican antislavery agenda and the ideal of the sanctity of every man's labor. The Civil War Democrats were an opposition party united around shared anger over the Republican program and Republican Party domination after the war. The Civil War Democrats had a clear agenda of fighting Reconstruction, opposing tariffs, and deference to state authority, but what really united Democrats was opposition to the Republican Party and its vision for America. Bryan's Democrats and Theodore Roosevelt's Republicans were both agenda parties battling over clashing visions of populism and progressive modernization.

The Fifth Party System Democrats are a classic agenda party. Democrats disagree on many things, but since the 1930s the one thing common to every Democrat is support for the ideology of the New Deal—the idea that experts, given the right resources, can design a better America that serves working people and the least well off. Modern Democrats oppose the policies and programs of the Republican Party—a party with ideals that stand in direct opposition to the Democratic agenda—but the Democratic Party wasn't designed to stop Republicans. It was designed to promote New Deal liberalism. The Republican Party, on the other hand, is a classic opposition party. It's a collection of people united to fight a common threat, New Deal liberalism. Republicans have always had a long list of policies they hoped to implement, whether revising tax codes, unwinding regulation, reforming entitlement programs, limiting abortion, preserving the traditional definition of marriage, strengthening defense programs, restructuring welfare, tightening crime controls, or encouraging charter schools. Yet these items didn't create the Republican Party, and they're not what really unites Republicans. Republicans are united around a shared conviction that New Deal liberalism is harmful and thus the Democratic Party must be stopped. Many Republican policy ideas, in fact, are just plans to undo things post–New Deal Democrats have already done.

To launch the next great debate, someone has to create a new agenda party. They need to unite half of America around a new compelling agenda to address the problems ahead. To do that, they need to build a party ideology distilled into a message—a sentence explaining how the party's principles and ideas will create a better future. The raw principles that make up party ideologies are unspecific, and there's always disagreement about how to apply them at any specific time and place. The ideas that make up a party's agenda—all the rules and regulations, programs and plans, budgets and legislative bills that are specific plans for government—are messy and complex in their specificity. A message is the link explaining how the party intends to turn its principles and ideology into tangible plans for change. In the language of corporate marketing, a party's message is its “brand,” summing up how the party's beliefs and agenda will actually improve people's lives. During the Fifth Party System, the Democratic Party message was that Democrats would deliver mass prosperity and national progress through the New Deal's expert-led social planning and reforms. The Republican Party's message was that Republicans would defeat this New Deal style “big government,” defending and preserving America's traditional liberties and its virtue. In one easy-to-understand sentence, these messages linked the principles each party supported to the agendas of ideas they proposed.

A successful party message has to offer a positive vision about the future that inspires people. To bind people together in a joint enterprise, you have to give them something honest in which to believe. Americans are a can-do people, a nation of pioneers and entrepreneurs. Americans carved a modern nation out of untouched wildness. They invented the electric lightbulb, the airplane, the automobile, rock and roll music, and the Hollywood blockbuster. They built a rocket ship, fired it off into space, and sent people to hit a golf ball on the surface of the moon. It's in the American character to believe there's no problem we can't solve with hard work and ingenuity. A successful party message in America can't just rage at enemies and voice resentments. You can win some elections by preying on people's cynicism, offering the right incentives, or bashing your opponents as worse than you are. People might vote for you without believing in you, but they won't join you. Nor can a successful party just buy off constituencies with a random hodge-podge of policies and issue papers. It has to offer a narrative explaining how all those policies and issue positions contribute to something larger and more important. It has to demonstrate that the party recognizes the nation's problems, has identified their cause, and has real plans to address them.

It isn't difficult to discover the right message for our current moment in history. We know the issues Americans care about, and we know their worries and their fears. They worry about declining opportunity. They're battered from all quarters by change. They fear the nation is declining. They think unfair barriers are erected in certain people's way. They have a sinking feeling that working hard and playing by rules will no longer be rewarded, because the rules have changed but nobody told them. They worry there are people who control their fate who aren't looking out for them, and who don't even like them. They think corruptions and dishonesties have overwhelmed the system at every level and they no longer have a fair chance. These, and nearly all the other worries seeping into politics, all come down to different variations of the same concern: Americans fear the American Dream is vanishing.

As we move into the Sixth Party System, that's the most compelling message around which we can build new parties. We should renew America's parties around restoring, defending, and protecting the promise of the American Dream.