Is America returning to the political centre?

AS WE all know, fashion styles are sometimes taken too far and then they go out of style. Women were wearing white gloves in the 1960s, but unless you are a butler or a Disney toon, there is no excuse for them today.

Political trends also tend to come and go, reflecting changes in the cultural zeitgeist. Reaganism was all the rage in the 1980s while Clintonism was very hot in the 1990s. After Barack Obama, the first African-American president, was elected in 2008, political forecasters predicted that we were entering the age of post-racial America where multiculturalism would rule the day.

In 2002, political analysts John Judis and Ruy Teixeira published a study, “The Emerging Democratic Majority”, in which they argued that the political future belonged to liberal Democrats. A coalition consisting of young educated professionals joined by ethnic minorities (including Blacks, Hispanics, Asians) would together transform the American political culture and determine who would occupy the White House.

Much has happened since that book was published, and the two authors’ expectations that America’s older white men and women sans academic degrees would vanish into the electoral thin air, and that the conservative agenda would become, like white gloves, a relic of the past, were not fulfilled.

Instead, in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election loss of Hillary Clinton and during the age of President Donald Trump, the political trends seemed to reverse. The mostly white members of the electoral base of the reactionary Republican president were rejecting multiculturalism, feminism, and gay rights and other liberal fads, and celebrating the return of militant nationalism and cultural conservatism.

But then Trumpism ignited a political backlash. Liberals who still dominated America’s powerful institutions, including the Mainstream Media (MSM), academia, Silicon Valley, and the entertainment industries, were launching a counter-attack.

Indeed, against the backdrop of the rise of #MeToo, the Black Lives Matter (BLM), and the LBGTQ movements and the political unrest that followed the killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, Democrats and liberals seemed to have been energised.

But the election of Democratic President Joe Biden didn’t mark the re-birth of an emerging Democratic majority. If anything, many political trends on the political left seemed to mirror the radicalisation occurring on the political right, with the Democrats moving to the left just as Republicans embracing a far-right agenda.

Hence if Trumpism symbolised the rise of white nationalism, left-leaning progressives were now advancing the identity politics of non-white ethnic groups. The call for “law and order” on the right was answered by demands to “defund” the police on the left.

And if Republicans urged abolishing Obamacare and cutting taxes, left-leaning Democrats pressed President Biden to spend trillions of dollars to fund social programmes and pay for them by taxing the rich.

But the American voters elected President Biden because they perceived him as an old-fashioned centrist Democrat and wanted him to replace the radical right-wing President Trump. They didn’t seem to buy into the new political fads, represented by the term “woke” that has captivated the progressive left with its emphasis on the notion that systemic injustices and prejudices were at the core of the nation’s identity and needed to be rectified.

The signs of political backlash against “wokism” became evident last November when the Democrats lost the governorship of Virginia after parents complained that public schools in the state were trying to indoctrinate their kids. They were teaching them the curriculum of the so-called “critical race theory” that centres on “white privilege” as the main cause of inequality and injustice in America. And, ironically, some of these same white parents had voted for President Obama in 2008.

Another indication that Democratic voters were fed up with the progressive fads influencing their party was this year’s election of Eric Adams -- a centrist Democrat and former police officer, who ran on a law and order platform -- as the mayor of New York.

It was in New York, like in other large cities dominated by Democrats, where progressive policies have been embraced in recent years. Left-leaning Democrats tried to “reform” criminal justice by, among other things, imposing lighter sentences on lawbreakers and putting fewer people in jail while pursuing a more accommodating approach towards drug addicts and the homeless.

The result of these experiments has been a major surge in crime, homelessness and social disorder in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco. Hundreds of homeless people are camping now in residential areas, drugs are being sold in the streets, and residents, fearing being attacked and carjacked by criminals, avoid walking in the streets or driving around entire neighbourhoods.

San Francisco, once considered to be America’s most beautiful city, has suffered the stench of urine and faeces on its streets as the homeless and thugs roam the city, and drugstores are closing or refusing to stock goods on shelves due to shoplifting. San Franciscans are regarded as the nation’s most progressive electorate. But even they just had enough of the degraded conditions of their city and the chaos in the streets.

In response, a majority of voters decided to “recall” -- aka giving the boot to Chesa Boudin, the city’s district attorney who, instead of representing the victims of crimes, seemed to be more concerned about the criminals; for example, paroling a felon who drove while drunk and killed two women crossing a street. Asian American residents, a third of the city’s population, were particularly critical of his handling of recent assaults on members of their community.

The sentiments among residents of Los Angeles aren’t very different. During the recent Democratic primary in the race for mayor of the city, voters saw a surge of support for a moderate mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, who campaigned on ending the lawlessness in the city.

It’s not that Democrats have embraced Trumpism and white nationalism. But they seem to be resisting the wokism fads of identity politics and open borders to illegal immigrants, and the assumption that transgender women who are biological men should be allowed to take showers in their daughters’ high school locker rooms.

But the most serious political blow to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has been the failure by the Biden administration to win public and congressional support for its huge spending programmes. And if, as expected, the Democrats lose control of Congress after the midterm elections in November and inflation continues to surge, it’s unlikely that those programmes would be resuscitated in the next two years.

The problem is that while Democrats are showing signs of trying to return to the political centre, Republicans still seem to be under the sway of former President Trump and Trumpism. Hence while more than 60 per cent of Americans, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, support charging former president Trump with the crimes he committed on January 6, 2021, only around 20 per cent of Republicans share that view.

But similar opinion polls also suggest that numerous moderate conservative Republicans like former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, or former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, could be nominated as the next Republican presidential candidate if Trump withdraws from the race, which is what Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell from Kentucky would also like to see.

In a way, the rise of Trumpism on the right provided a political momentum to the upswing of Wokism on the left -- two political fads that tend to ensure the survival of the other. And if the former president is re-elected in 2024, expect a complete takeover of the Democratic Party by the progressives.

So if centrist Republican McConnell is elected as the next Senate Majority Leader after the midterms, he would have a chance to work together with centrist Democratic President Biden to promote policies and programmes that voters care about and to cooperate on issues like the Ukraine War. In that case they could achieve a common goal: A chance to weaken the respective wings of their parties who believe that America ceased to be a politically centrist nation.