Political Realignment?

[Meta Blog]

Originally from Myrhaf,

Bill Quick speculates in a long post that America will be seeing a political realignment in the near future. His analysis of America's class system (not the Marxist model you expect) is fascinating.

I would disagree on a minor point, his historical explanation of the conservatives' failure to fight big government.

the global depression of the thirties shook their confidence and they, in some part, ceded to the left certain moral high grounds as they came to agree with the notion that government was needed to restrain capital in order to prevent "market failures."

Their confidence was shaken because they accept the moral premise of altruism, which undercuts their free market economic ideas. We saw the same thing happen in 1995 with the government shutdown. The Democrats and the MSM stood firm and the Republicans collapsed in disarray. They did not really believe in fighting big government because they were undercut by their moral premises.

One realignment I fear is that the religious right will make a deal with the environmentalist left. They both oppose freedom and want to take society back -- the right wants to take us to the middle ages and the left wants to take us to the Pleistocene. I fear they will make a deal saying, essentially, "The right can have its way on abortion if the left can have its way on the economy. The right can enchain man's spirit, whereas the left enchains his body." Such a realignment would put America into two clear-cut camps, individualists and collectivists.