In both parties, there’s a gap between the inherited orthodoxy of a decade or two ago and the real interests of today’s electoral coalition.

Today’s Democratic Party is a coalition of relatively upscale whites with racial and ethnic minorities, concentrated in an archipelago of densely populated blue cities. Today’s Republican Party is predominantly a Midwestern, white, working-class party with its geographic epicenter in the South and interior West. What will that political future look like? You may find yourself voting for a party you could never imagine supporting right now. The 2016 race is a sign that American politics is changing in profound and lasting ways by the 2020s and 2030s, partisan platforms will have changed drastically. The future is being built before our eyes, with far-reaching consequences for every facet of American politics. The type of conservatism long championed by the Republican Party was destined to fall as soon as a candidate came along who could rally its voters without being beholden to its donors, experts and pundits. What we’re seeing this year is the beginning of a policy realignment, when those new partisan coalitions decide which ideas and beliefs they stand for - when, in essence, the party platforms catch up to the shift in party voters that has already happened. The reassembling of new Democratic and Republican coalitions is nearly finished. The partisan coalitions that defined the Democratic and Republican parties for decades in the middle of the twentieth century broke apart long ago over the past half century, their component voting blocs - ideological, demographic, economic, geographic, cultural - have reshuffled. Though this election feels like the beginning of a partisan realignment, it’s actually the end of one. On left and right, it feels as though a new era is beginning.Īnd a new era is beginning, but not in the way most people think. An avowed socialist has made an insurgent challenge for the Democratic Party’s nomination. The Republican party is fracturing around support for Donald Trump. and author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States.įor political observers, 2016 feels like an earthquake - a once-in-a-generation event that will remake American politics. Michael Lind is a fellow at New America in Washington, D.C.

This is what america looks like