I started really reading substack about a month or so ago, and it has quickly colonized much of my time. The fact that it is essentially wordpress combined with twitter—a blog with social media built in—means that it’s easy to find new blogs, and it’s easy to spend hours reading them.

Much of substack, at least the section of substack the algorithm has shunted me onto, is obsessed with politics: political reporting, political commentary, and political development. The more I read, though, the less clarity on political matters I seem to have.

Part of this may be generational: I’m an old millennial; I turned 18 in 2000. The 1990’s were the decade of The End of History, that time when liberal democracy seemed not ascendant, but already utterly victorious and hegemonic. This was before 9/11, before the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, before Obama—before Trump. It was, in many ways, a very different world.

My understanding of politics in my late teens was pretty basic: you had the Republicans, who were conservative on both economic and cultural issues, and you had the Democrats, who were liberal or progressive on both economic and cultural issues. Of course, this understanding was faulty. My understanding of the Republicans was more or less correct, but the Democrats had not really been much of a liberal or progressive party, especially on economic issues, for a while at that point. The big realignment of the parties in 1964/1968 had left a Democratic Party that maybe really was truly left-leaning on economics and social issues, but that version of the party died pretty quickly. Jimmy Carter’s failed campaign in 1980 was both perhaps its apotheosis and its grave.

Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992 was the victory of the “Third Way” of Democratic politics; in other words, it was the victory of neoliberal economic policy with a “wait-and-see” attitude on many cultural and social issues. Despite its name, neoliberalism was (and is!) really a retrenchment of market-friendly economic policies. That is: neoliberalism is really just a new face for conservative economic policy. So: certainly by the 90’s, the Democrats were really a sort of center-conservative party, while the Republicans were a more staunchly and truly conservative party. In a two-party system, this meant that electoral options for voters were narrow indeed.

Unsurprisingly, this situation didn’t last. Pressure continued to mount for progressive cultural and social change from feminist, queer, black, indigenous, critics, just to name some of the most prominent. The Democratic Party came to see that differentiating themselves on social and cultural issues, such as gay marriage and abortion, was a winning strategy at the voting booth—though it’s worth noting that the party followed the lead of others on e.g. gay marriage, and did not lead itself. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were both officially opposed to gay marriage, for example, until the polling showed that a near super-majority of Americans were in favor.

But as the party moved leftward on cultural and social issues—a trend that intensified in the 2010’s—it continued to hold a firm line on neoliberal economic questions. The Obama administration’s response to the Great Recession in 2009 and following is a great example; more than a trillion dollars was allocated to shore up failed corporations, yet millions of Americans lost their homes as the value of real estate plummeted (but the terms of mortgages remained unchanged).

It was into this context that Donald Trump erupted in 2015. Most Americans—of both parties—were sick of neoliberal economic policies (even if they didn’t use that term to describe them). A growing segment of Americans were also increasingly concerned with the advance of liberal and progressive cultural values: while gay marriage rapidly gained supermajority support, questions around transgender identity and rights, as well as questions as to how to address racial inequality, would prove more controversial.

Trump knew how to stoke concern and resentment on both fronts. He presented himself as a populist on economic issues—promising a return of manufacturing jobs, for example—while also doubling down on traditional Republican views of liberal culture, describing black protestors as thugs and deriding trans people.

Trump’s position—and his brash, politically neophyte way of campaigning—meant that most people in power didn’t take his presidential campaign seriously. And then, he won the Republican primary—and not by a narrow margin, but a massive one. His brand of politics (and, presumably, his personality) were exactly what Republican voters were looking for.

It’s hard to say whether Trump is best understood as a cause or as an effect of what has happened to our politics since. Either way, Trump’s presence has only intensified the strange realignment of the parties. The Republicans remain staunchly—even reactionarily—conservative on cultural and social issues, while presenting themselves as populist on economic ones. (The fact that they rarely, if ever, actually work to enact legislation or policy to help the working class, seems to have had little impact on most voters.)

Meanwhile, the Democrats have shifted more and more attention to their liberal and progressive cultural stance, while solidifying a quiet but unapologetic deference to neoliberal economic policy. This was clearly on display in both 2016 and 2020; Bernie Sanders campaigned on an economically left-wing position, but famously presented a more muted stance on social and cultural issues (his ambivalence towards gun control was especially commented-upon in 2016). Clinton did just the opposite, and though Sanders garnered serious support, the culturally progressive but economically conservative position won the primary. Of course, it lost the election (though to be fair to Clinton, she did win the popular vote—a noteworthy if, ultimately, irrelevant caveat.)

So this is what our political landscape looks like today: we can choose a cultural reactionary who pretends to care about working-class people (but who will do nothing to actually help them), or a cultural progressive who is pretty frank about refusing to do anything to help working-class people. (It is worth noting that the Biden administration actually did do some minor, though significant, things to support working-class interests, including supporting unions during strikes. However, his administration has also made a point of downplaying these actions, especially in the case of the FTC’s struggle with tech monopolies. Even when the Democrats do something for working people, they seem to know they need to hide it, lest they spook some of their large donors.)

This situation is sad enough as it is, but it gets worse. Again, I’m an old millennial, and so I had long taken it for granted that the progressive/liberal cultural position was only going to grow in strength as time went by—young people, after all, are almost always more culturally permissive than their elders. But there is growing evidence that this just isn’t the case. Gen Z men, in particular, seem to have taken a sharp conservative turn, at least on some specific cultural and social questions. Of course, this is a generalization, and there are plenty of liberally-minded Gen Z men. But if the victory for gay marriage had seemed to usher in a 2nd sort of “end of history” moment, in which cultural progressivism marched inevitably into victory, that has now been revealed as an illusion. This also means, of course, that if the Democratic Party has built its strategy by tacking left on culture and remaining center on economics, they may discover they made a big mistake.

Now, it must be said that the set of “options” that I outlined above was electorally accurate, but of course the opinions held by voters were more various. In truth, we could probably identify four basic political groupings in the late 90’s and into the 2000’s: you had Republican loyalists (conservative on economics and society), Democratic loyalists (less conservative on both, especially social issues), libertarians (conservative on economic issues, but generally rather liberal on many, though not all, social issues), and a large and diverse group of leftists we can generalize as socialists (leftist on economic issues and quiet liberal on social issues). Even these groupings mask disagreements, of course. But I think this gives us a reasonably accurate, if still imprecise, understanding of American politics 20 years ago.

These 4 basic groupings still describe a decent number of people, but the new political landscape is full of contradictions—or, at least, confusions. Old assumptions about what suite of political positions one would hold are fast fraying. Plenty of substack writers will hold, for example, downright reactionary views on feminism, race, and LGBTQ rights, while also condemning US foreign policy as too aggressive, and wanting a protectionist economic regime. Using the four labels above, how would we characterize such a person? Conservative on culture, isolationist on foreign policy, and populist on economics. They just don’t fit into any of the old categories at all. Now, such a person is very likely to support Donald Trump, and the other politicians who are swimming in his wake (J.D. Vance, obviously, but also Matt Gaetz, Marjory Taylor Greene, and others), so perhaps that is the only category we can assign them to. Does this make them standard-issue Republicans? I’m not really sure; it seems there still is a significant, if often quiet, segment of the Republicans that are pining for a return of the old form of their party. Hence we get people talking about the “alt-right”, and while I do think that term is helpful, it’s not always quite clear who it does or doesn’t describe

I think the rise of this new Trumpist/alt-right position says a lot about the direction that US politics will take in the next 20 years. What has changed, though, such that this new intersection of concerns is a growing demographic? Isolationist views are not new, and have long had a place in the Republican party (even if they were always a marginalized minority). Likewise, paeans to the working-class are nearly as old as the republic, and have been common in both parties. I think it’s the new energy against progressive cultural and social issues that is the main animating force behind this new political position.

Of course, conservative and reactionary attitudes towards cultural and social change are not new. After all, women didn’t even gain the right to vote until 1920, and that took decades of activism. Likewise, the right to marry someone of the same sex/gender was only enshrined at the federal level in 2015, and was—and is—bitterly opposed by many. Civil Rights legislation, first proposed in the 1860’s, didn’t pass until a century later. (Indeed, opposition to genuine racial justice in this country is older than our constitution, and continues with extreme vigor.)

Even so, I think there is a new alt-right mode of conservative cultural politics at hand today. In many ways, the success of this new conservatism is in part due to the failure of the old conservatism, (as well as over-reach on the part of cultural progressives, as I will suggest below). Although there hyper-reactionary conservatives who just want to roll back most or all of the cultural and social changes of the 20th century—one gets the suspicion that J.D. Vance, after all, seems to think that perhaps women shouldn’t vote—the newer, younger conservatives seem to have a narrower focus. I think most of these figures take some of the cultural changes of the last few decades for granted: they generally aren’t opposing gay marriage or women’s role in the economy, but they do oppose trans rights, they seem Black Lives Matter as a threat to social order, and in general they are tired of progressive identity politics (while, of course, simply instantiating their own brand of regressive identity politics).

Now it could be that the fault lines in this new conservatism are simply due to a tactical retreat—after all—women working, even in high-powered positions—and gay marriage are both pretty popular among the electorate, and they are also both realities that have been stitched deeply into society (though as mentioned above and addressed below, debate around women’s rights continues in various ways). In truth, there is no easy way to undo these changes without wreaking havoc on society and the law. Meanwhile, questions around things like reparations for slavery or the status of trans people are still unresolved and much more controversial. Perhaps the new conservatives have admitted defeat on the former issues just so they can focus their energy on the front that they might still win.

I think there is more going on here, though. In large part, many Americans see women’s rights and gay rights as inoffensive—so long as those rights are understood in a limited way. Women wanting to work, for example, seems to many like an issue of basic fairness. If a woman can do a given job, why shouldn’t she be able to, well, do it? Likewise, for most straight people, gay marriage is neither a problem nor a threat: if gay men want to marry men, and lesbians want to marry other women, why should that bother anyone else? Many Americans agree, I think, with the sentiment that “no one should care what other consenting adults do behind closed doors.”

However, the questions which have been central to progressive cultural and social movements more lately have a different character. The movement for reparations for descendants of enslaved people, for example, would presumably involve the transfer of at least many billions of dollars from or through the federal government. That’s a lot of money, and many white people balk at the idea: two men getting married doesn’t cost us anything; but reparations sure seems like it would. Likewise, discussions of trans rights raise a host of thorny questions. Not only are many people concerned about the potential presence of male-bodied people in women’s restrooms, but the difficulties are more fundamental: accepting that transwomen are women would entail a change to most people’s understanding of what the word “woman” means, exactly. Obviously, for many (cis)women, that might feel uncomfortable. But also for straight men, it raises personal, fraught, even embarrassing questions.

In other words, the new lines of culture war would seem to have more at stake, even for people who are generally liberal or simply apathetic to such debates. The momentum towards gay marriage proved inevitable, in part, because most people had nothing to lose by its victory, even while a small but significant minority had much to gain. But the new proposed changes are different: many Americans perceive a threat in the air.

Whether they are right to perceive a threat from the “new” identity politics (of course neither the call for trans rights or for reparations,  the two examples I use here, are new at all—but their place in the limelight of American politics and culture is) is a deeper question, and one on which I imagine many people will disagree. But that many Americans perceive a threat here is, I think, pretty much beyond debate. And I suggest this perception is powering a new realignment in political activity.

Whither this new realignment may take us, I won’t pretend to say. It has been interesting—and very sad, in my opinion—to see how the push for genuine economic change reached a real crescendo around 2016—and then quickly crested and collapsed. No one, it seems, is talking any more about Medicare for All. The ultimate failure of both the Sanders and Corbyn campaigns, in the US and UK respectively, does signal the end of real opportunity to see real economic progress for working people of all races, ethnicities, and genders. The recent maneuvering by Emmanuel Macron in France to deny the right of the victorious left-wing alliance to form a government there is another signal that such a movement is likely dead-on-arrival.

What we are left with, then, are two options, each of which seem profoundly disappointing, each in their own way (although they also show quite an overlap of disappointing positions too!) It seems to me that American politics in 2024 is a reminder of the impotence of political action to really fundamentally fix the problems before us. Politics certainly changes things, of course, and it can even make good changes. But over and over, we see that the old problems reassert themselves in new ways. Slavery is defeated, only to be replaced by segregation, lynching, and share-cropping. Of course, this nexus of repression wasn’t as bad as slavery—and that difference matters! Still, it’s hard to see how this process of slow changes through more sophisticated forms of labor discipline ends at a truly just society. This lesson seems even more brutally taught in, for example, the failure of the Arab Spring, or the reactionary turn of politics in Israel. It seems that so often, genuine efforts to right the wrongs of the past just create new wrongs in the present—which someone will try to solve in the future with, at best, extremely limited success.

Of course, this recognition of the failure of liberalizing movements is often invoked to justify conservatism along Burkean lines. And while I am certainly feeling pessimistic, I certainly don’t think any of this means we should be opposed to or even apathetic to a politics of (good) change. I do think it should remind us though, that ultimately, our hope for justice and righteousness can’t rest on political economy. Although I am sympathetic to the long trajectory of the Social Gospel and its heirs, I think it was both theologically and politically bankrupt, promising far more than it could ever deliver and fundamentally misunderstanding the reality of sin. The world is far more broken than secular political analysis, whether liberal, or Marxian, is able to recognize.

To put it simply, I think that genuine Christian theology teaches us that history is a political problem—but without a political solution. But I’ll have more to say on that another day.