For years now, American conservatives have been engulfed by an intellectual civil war, with various shades of the “New Right” fighting to overthrow “Conservatism Inc.”. What is less well-understood, however, are the changes taking place on the centre-left: the broad liberal plain where much of the American establishment sits (as distinct from the self-identified Left proper, who have lost much of their Bernie-era energies and are now sliding back into political obscurity).
Since the liberal centre is the establishment, the institutions and personnel who comprise it do not tend to think of themselves as belonging to any particular school of thought: their worldview usually forms the official common sense. There is no “liberal movement” like there is a conservative one, and the kind of sectarian squabbling over dogmas and heresies that is so common on the Right is rarer on the centre-left.
The paradox is that the establishment often has less of a functional gatekeeping capacity and is vulnerable to sudden ideological capture from below: this is how the social justice movements of the 2010s became so influential. Despite Barack Obama’s warnings against identity politics and Joe Biden’s rejection of “Defund the Police”, radical ideas remain entrenched in institutions. The hegemony of DEI in corporate and academic settings, the outsize importance of gender ideologies in the liberal idiom, and the sway of dysfunctional pseudo-humanitarian responses to crime and immigration in big cities illustrate just how incomplete the liberal pushback against runaway cultural progressivism has been.
Yet the liberal establishment is not entirely hopeless. When it comes to economics and governance, it has an enviable penchant for pragmatism and reinvention. While pundits foresaw a return to Third Way Clintonism under Joe Biden, the octogenarian president instead favoured an open repudiation of the Washington Consensus and a sweeping programme of re-industrialisation — which, though imperfect, remains more advanced than what Republicans are offering by way of governance: an endless return to Reaganomics.
Liberalism’s challenge is in staying on this economic course while tamping down on the recurrent cultural excesses of its activist base. Despite what the culture warriors may say, the new American centre is economically to the Left of Reagan-Clinton globalism but culturally “live-and-let-live”: voters care about bringing jobs and factories back but have little time for hardliners on both ends of the culture war.
There are a number of Democratic candidates and elected officials who — whether or not they conceive of themselves as inheritors of the liberal torch — represent new and heterodox approaches to centre-left politics. Taken together, they may hold the secret to building a future liberal majority for a post-globalised, post-culture war America.
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