A Guide for the Politically Homeless
Why we need a political realignment.
There seem to be two words in the air at the moment, that keep popping up in articles and finding their way into American political discourse. One is “sleepwalking.” The other is “homelessness.”
The “sleepwalking” is obvious enough. After the most consequential election in American history, pitting Biden against Trump, with democracy in the balance, we once again have… the most consequential election in American history, pitting Biden against Trump, with everything even more in the balance and with everybody just that much angrier at each other.
On the Democratic side, the sense is of spending the last year waiting to have what David Brooks calls “The Conversation” about Joe Biden… and never quite getting around to it. None of the major potential rivals were willing to challenge him. He wasn’t willing to step down. And it’s not clear that anybody ever really pushed it—even as Biden’s poll numbers continued to plummet.
On the Republican side, there was the charade of a primary campaign, dutifully covered by the media. There were collapses (DeSantis), surprises (Ramasawamy and then Haley), internecine dramas… and none of it mattered. “There is no way around it,” The New York Times felt compelled to report this month. “The Iowa caucuses … are not a battle between dueling ideologies or policy priorities or America’s role in the world. They revolve around one man.”
What the sleepwalking means is that everybody for the next year follows a sort of prearranged dance. The parties whip up their talking points. The press reports breathlessly on the electoral horse race. Voters punch their ballots… with precious little conviction in either candidate.
The other word of the moment is “homelessness”—and that seems to cover the state of mind of many of those voters. As of early 2023, 49% of American voters identified as “independent”—nearly double the number who identified themselves with either major party and an increase of 18 points from 2004. That’s, of course, without any viable third-party candidate or independent movement having emerged on the scene.
What that means is that some vast number of Americans find themselves suspended between these two poles—sleepwalking all the way to the voting booth in November and finding themselves with no real outlet to express their sense of political homelessness.
There are two great models that I’m aware of for understanding how this condition came about. One is the analysis in Martin Gurri’s book The Revolt of the Public, in which Gurri says, basically, that it’s the internet, stupid. The advent of the internet (and, particularly, of social media) launched a drastically new era in the history of communications in which the “public” and “authority” find themselves arrayed against one another. Trump had a first-mover advantage by running for president on Twitter and by working out how to position himself as standing for an outsider public even while occupying the presidency. As a formula for winning elections in the internet age that really shouldn’t be so difficult to follow: A new generation of liberals will need to figure out how to array themselves on the side of the “public.” But Democrats have been a bit slow to adapt, and Trump, since 2016, has managed to convincingly paint Democrats as the side of “authority,” the “establishment,” the “elite”—a branding that is electorally fatal for the Dems unless they can somehow rectify it.
The other model for understanding what’s been happening is complementary. It’s that the political center is still rooted in a post-Cold War neoliberal vision, with its somewhat utopian belief in globalization, free trade, and the inevitability of democracy, and that the flaws of that vision have been exposed faster than the professional political class has realized. The old belief, as British former politician Rory Stewart put it on The Good Fight podcast, was that “public opinion was a sort of bell jar, with very few votes at the extremes,” while the events of the last two decades “turned that bell jar into a kind of U-shape with the votes at the extremes and nothing left in the middle.”
One conclusion is that—like it or not—a viable politics going forward has to fit itself into that U-shape and has to be situated within the camp of “the public.” Either reasonable people can figure out how to do that, and adapt to the changing structure of the times, or else the Trumps of the world will be the only ones who crack the code on this era.
For those who find themselves “homeless”—no longer quite speaking the language of what is still anachronistically considered the “political center”—there’s an opportunity to consider what the next political turn will look like. Iconoclastic, free-wheeling thinkers like heterodox academic Michael Lind have put together some interesting propositions—a kind of renewed New Deal, with a government that is dedicated to addressing class inequities but also is willing to adopt the sort of nationally-tinged, somewhat protectionist language that Democrats have long eschewed. The point here isn’t whether you agree with this approach or not, but that a “scrambling” is already well underway, that there will soon be an opportunity to shuffle the decks of the standard-issue political positions, and the ideas that align most with “the public” will tend to win out.
From my vantage-point, these are the issues that seem to be up for grabs—that really matter to people and that can be slotted one way or another into some new political consensus:
Big Tech. The major social platforms wield an unimaginable influence over the lives of most Americans. An increasing number (parents especially) have come to feel that that influence is malign—but successive governments have been singularly unwilling to step in and regulate Big Tech, whether on antitrust grounds or over concerns about privacy, with requests from even major tech executives for a more active government role going unheeded. Congressional attempts to restrict TikTok and a Federal Trade Commission antitrust suit against Amazon illustrate an emerging recognition within government that tech can no longer be simply left to the private sector, but it’s belated and doesn’t correspond to the magnitude of the issue, particularly in the era of Artificial Intelligence. Anyone in politics who takes a clear stance on Big Tech will, at the very least, have the public’s attention.
Free speech. A great deal of the culture wars of the last years—whether over mask mandates, content moderation on the internet, cancellations, etc.—can be boiled down to a concern that free speech is under assault and that “authority,” under Gurri’s schema, is attempting to reassert its hold over a restive body politic by clamping down on civil liberties. Those who most vigorously advocate for free speech and expression will tend to reflect the mood of a public that is concerned over its ability to speak its mind.
Inequality. It’s widely understood—in large part thanks to Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns—that economic inequality is the great American social ill. But it is not at all clear, at least on the surface, which party is better suited at addressing it. The GOP has been more successful at mimicking a populist stance. The Sanders/Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party gives the impression of having the most substance to offer. There seems to be a territory to seize, which has deep roots in the New Deal and Progressive tradition and which positions government as offering “countervailing power” to globe-trotting or wage-slashing corporations. Anyone who takes up that rhetoric immediately has the ear of the American public. Anyone who articulates a viable vision for reducing inequality is a step ahead of where either party currently finds itself.
This election is likely to be about none of those things. It will turn on either Joe Biden’s age or Donald Trump’s abundant character failings. And, likely, most of us (even the politically homeless) will stick to our party lines and sleepwalk through the year. But the “great scrambling” is happening and the “homeless” must sooner or later articulate some viable political position. At the very least, it’s an interesting time to think through these questions. As Gurri puts it, “the public” is a new “dispensation striving to become manifest.” Whatever the ideas are that prevail, they will need to take that new sensibility into account.
Sam Kahn is an associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.
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What about for those of us who are politically homeless because we are anti-debt, anti-deficit, anti-economic coercion, somewhat tax averse, and socially liberal? I guess we can go fuck ourselves. If covid taught us anything, it's that the most popular thing is to give away trillions, don't raise taxes, but then complain about the inflation and blame it on Russia or greedy companies. People are stupid as shit. Who wants to be a goddamn populist.
It isn't the internet but a structural issue--the Electoral College., which makes any third party a risk that might put a minority vote-getter in power. And because of the way votes are allocated in the EC, it has put minority vote-getters in power in 2000 and 2016--twice already in this century, and it will get worse. A secondary issue is the primary system, which essentially allows Iowa and New Hampshire to choose our candidates (with considerable hype by the media). If we had all primaries on one day, we would have a far more representative swath of the population; and they should be primaries, not caucuses, which lend themselves to intimidation.