When Barack Obama won his re -election in 2012, he seemed to represent the beginning of a new era of democratic hegemony, which prompted the emergence of a new generation of young voters, secular and non -whitening voters.
It is too late, the 2012 elections appear to be like the end of the afternoon: the final victory of social movements in the 1960s over the Republicans, Reagan, the dominant.
Instead, it is the three Trump elections – in 2016, 2020 and 2024 – that look as if they had a new era of politics, which was defined by the Donald C sign. Trump is a conservative populism.
Whether you call it a reorganization or not, the American policy was not itself since Mr. Trump won the nomination of his party. The two parties collide with the previous consensus areas, even as they reach Détente on issues that have identified the 2004 and 2012 polarization elections. It could be exhausting for anyone who reached Mr. Trump. You can even feel that American policy has turned upside down.
Even Mr. Trump, there was a lot about the American policy that you could consider as a release from it. The meaning of the two parties seemed clear. Republicans like the three -legs of the small government financial province, the religious right and foreign policy. Like Democrats, the working class and change and the causes of liberal activists.
Every four years, the two parties mostly sued the same battles on the same issues. They reformulated the arguments about war and diplomacy. Spending on spending and tax discounts; “Family values” and social movements in the 1960s; Or trade and free institutions against employment and protection of jobs. This led to the predictive demographic divisions and long -term frequent electoral trends.
All this changed when Mr. Trump fell to the elevator. On some issues, it can look as if the parties have turned into places. Today, Mr. Trump is seeking the working class championship, and seeks against elites, to protect US jobs and criticize the foreign policy of the United States, while Democrats defend the Foundation, the rules and the old consensus of foreign policy.
The long regions of the consensus of the two parties suddenly became strongly disputed. Immigration, free trade and alliances in post -war America and even America’s support for democracy at home and abroad all have defined conflicts between the two parties during the Trump era, instead of the areas of agreement. However, at the same time, it seems that the two parties have come to a truce in the most bitter battles in the Bush Obama era, such as the war in Iraq, social security and marriage of the same sex.
Many of the Old Foundation of the Republican Party – such as Chenez, Romans, Paul Ryan – is now without a home. At the same time, many former Obama supporters find Robert F. Kennedy Junior to Elon Musk, suddenly themselves near the Trump Center.
This new party struggle has led to very different electoral alliances. In 2016, Mr. Trump has made tremendous gains among white voters without a university degree, including in the northern states, where Republicans were unable to maintain penetrations. Since then, he has made greater gains between young, black, Latin and Asian voters – and this has done by representing everything Democrats believed that these groups oppose them.
After three Trump elections, the party gap between white and non -white voters has now become smaller than any time since the 1964 Civil Rights Law was enacted. The partisan generation gap has decreased by two thirds. Perhaps the most striking, the old class gap between the wealthy, the poor, the capital and the work apparently disappeared.
Exit polls Find Mr. Trump loses voters who get more than $ 100,000 a year, while winning voters, including those who get less than $ 50,000. If anything, battles appear in the twentieth century as reasonable areas of consensus of the two parties, with the appearance of Republicans apparently the appearance of employment and infrastructure spending, while Democrats seem more open to standard cancellation and treatments on the side of presentation of problems such as housing and energy.
Instead of ancient class struggle, there is a new educational gap. Before Mr. Trump, people voted in the same way with or without a testimony. Now, the gap between the voters with or without a large degree like the gap in income in 2012 – along the way to the dawn of survey research.
In some cases, electoral transformations in the Trump era can be explained as an acceleration of long -term trends; In other cases, they are new developments. Either way, these trends brought American policy to a completely different place.
The word “r”
Whether all this is a “reorganization” dependent on how one defines the term. Restore a single party that gets a great political feature for decades. With this measure, Trump’s elections are clearly limited. The Republicans barely carry any meaningful feature; Even if they do so, it is not clear at all if it will last for four years.
However, Trump’s elections have two advantages to reorganize: they changed the main political struggle between the two parties, and led to similar changes in the two coalitions. These changes are not simple and not only because of the individual strength of Mr. Trump, too. Like previous reorganization, it is part of a broader political change that occurs throughout Western democracies, where the remains of the old industrial political system are replaced by something different.
In the country after the country, the parties to the old industrial left, such as work in Britain or the Socialists in France, carried out the support of the working class for a new type of conservative populism, driven by a new set of issues, such as immigration, trade and national sovereignty.
These issues are not suitable for the old left -left ideological spectrum. In fact, many right -wing parties now adopt a luxury state. However, in every case, the popular conservatives argue that the elites used democratic and transitory institutions of the national border to push their interests and reasons at the expense of ordinary people. These political movements have yet to build a permanent political majority, but their criticism was however the most effective messages in politics.
On the other hand, the outskirts of the center depend on the support of a new category of wealthy university graduates. These parties may still yearn for the working class championship, but this was not their decades’ exciting power. Instead, they derive their energy from the ideal progressive activists in the college, whose cultural and economic views of the working class are often alienated. Even when these parties aim to help voters from the working class, their policies do not pack electoral punch. Instead, their electoral wealth depends on the formation of alliances with the classical liberal conservatives, but the traditional, who oppose the popular right to trade, immigration, foreign policy and democracy.
The transition from the class policy in the industrial era has been continuing since the 1950s and sixties, when wealth after the war and an expanded safety network was often satisfied with a century of demands of industrial workers. Shortly later, the rise of a new generation of educated youth activists in the college helped to achieve a new set of issues in the foreground-from civil rights and women’s rights to Vietnam-which helped break the new deal alliance.
This was the last great revolution in American politics. In some sense, all that one can consider is empty of it before Mr. Trump enters this time or shortly after that. The parties have been redefined. Even the three -legged stool legs in Reagan can be reformulated as an opposition to the cultural revolution in the 1960s and the anti -war movement and the great society. The repercussions have defined the following five contracts of battles and electoral trends to the movement.
It was too late, Mr. Obama’s victory over Mr. Romney was the culmination of this era. In a recent election, Democrats and Republicans took over their usual positions and seized the battles of the times. In the end, Mr. Obama won ModestBut it seems that it provides a decisive judgment on the era as a whole: the liberals won.
By 2012, America was a multi -ethnic, secular and liberal society. Less than 50 years after the Civil Rights Law, America elected a black liberal president. It will be soon, supposed to elect a major. Gay marriage was common, and it will soon be the law of the earth. The next marijuana was. In just a few years, the demographic transformations promised to convert the humble victory of Mr. Obama into a permanent democratic majority.
This liberal victory in the cultural war came against the background of the financial crisis and the war in Iraq, which simultaneously dealt with huge strikes on the consensus of the Reagan era over the smaller government, the record disruption and the foreign policy of the new province. With the victory of Mr. Obama, the conservative political coalition was completed after the 1960s.
Four years later, Mr. Trump destroyed the remaining three -legged stools in Reagan and redefined the Republican Party on a new set of issues. He seized the cloak of populism, change and the working class, through his campaign on the latest issues: trade, China, immigration, energy, and excesses of one of the dominant in the college, liberalism, “politically correct” or “wake up”. In the end, the Democrats lost their basic message and voters who imagined were part of their base.
While the Republicans did not win a landslide -like collapse, Mr. Trump’s popularity won the political discussion sufficiently. Regarding border security, local energy production, trade, China or standard cancellation, Democrats are heading towards the core of Mr. Trump’s agenda. The two main exceptions-abortion and democracy-were a republican wounds, and wounds prohibited the most crucial republican victory and withheld the extent of seizing the popularity of maintaining the American policy center.
Whether you call it a reorganization or not, it is a new era of politics.