Progressivism and Populism challenge Liberalism and Conservatism as tjhe leading American ideologies, political parties and cultures.
There is a continuum of political ideas that range from those that are more to less rationalized and which coalesce at various points as forms of social groupings Three of these nodal points are ideology, party and culture. Conservative and Liberal as well as Progressive and Populist are currently available configurations of ideas that are all three.
An ideology is a set of highly mutually articulated ideas and propositions that avoid contradiction and emphasize the interlocking of its propositions so as to explain all contingencies about social life and explain how society and politics should be organized. Ideologies suggest oughts and not just descriptions while sociology, political science and political analysis in general present themselves as just presenting the truth however the chips may fall. ARepublican and a Democratic operative can agree on what the polls show even if they disagree as Democrats and Republicans today can disagree on whether the First Amendment is a bedrock principle. Good examples of these ideologies are National Socialism, which coherently combined Social Darwinism with the belief that race was the most important division between groups and so explains that all races contend with one another to survive for the fittest and it follows that it is necessary to eliminate the Jews because they are a mongrel race incapable of creativity while the English and the Germans are allied races who can work together despite their unpleasant opposition. Soviet Marxism is an ideology which combined Marxist notions of historical materialism with the surplus theory of value and also with Czarist authoritarianism so as to insist on the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat that could and would and should remake human beings so that they become obedient workers and a transformed patriotism which will now regard such new people as free, these people anxious not to violate the new kind of person who lauds the leadership. Democratic Socialism is an ideology which believes in a democracy where the government owns the means of production and the main vehicles of consumption such as health care and education,
The umbrella ideology of American society that until recently covered both Conservatives and Liberals was an ideology in which democracy combines Lockean individual rights with government understood as making and remaking the social contract and providing a balance of governmental powers so as to keep government from becoming tyrannical. Here governments are established so as to provide each citizen with life, liberty and the achievement as much as possible of each their own purpose or happiness.
These ideologies are all presented through their social movements. Students for a Democratic Society adopted the Port Huron Statement that included propositions and controls about environmentalism as well as other more direct political matters. Southern segregationists had all Southern Senators sign a pledge for "Segregation Now and Forever”.Every movement has specific goals that are supported in ideology and effectuated through government.
Conservatism and Liberalism are both ideologies, distinct from one another under the umbrella of democracy, however some Conservatives prefer to think of the nation as a republic because that emphasizes election to office rather than a near universal electorate for citizenship while Liberals think that a general electorate is required to make a modern republic. The Union of South Africa was a republic in name only when blacks couldn’t vote and the Southern United States was a republic in name only until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Conservatives combine laissez faire economics along with trickle down economics and small government and individual effort in a pretty seamless web to which is adding on vigorous law and order to contain the mischief of those who would disrupt this happy arrangement of people naturally or customarily getting along with one another. Killing a spouse happens but is not a threat to society while looting department stores is a threat to social order. So there is a Hobbesian world where peace is precious even if generally prevalent and peace the requirement of the abundances available through commerce and industry. Liberals, for their part, combine vigorous intervention by government as any number of ways to allow people to thrive, the only agency powerful enough to guarantee the liberties that mob rule and government itself can do to undermine liberty. Gun control is a symbol of the great divide between the two. Conservatives think that arms held by the population can protect the people from tyrannical government while Liberals think that only government control of firearms can keep disorder under control and that private arms are no counter weight to government whose tyranny can be controlled only under the internal dynamics of government itself, most importantly the separation of powers into three branches. In general, Conservatives believe small town communities compensate for and control both government and big city sophistication that makes fun of traditional values.
Parties, however, are not just ideologies though they may encompass some part of an ideology. Parties are political organizations aimed at capturing and exercising power in government and find common as well as contrary propositions they might wish to promote but which some of their principles they agree in words but not in practice. Parties have to accommodate the tight treasoning of ideologies so as to get themselves elected. So the Republican Party platform in 1936 admitted to some government interference in business so as to get a chance to defeat FDR. Clinton and Obama were more Centrist rather than Liberal so as to capture Reagan voters, however it was politically useful for Republicans to claim Clinton and Obama as dangerously Leftist, a full fledged Liberal not emerging until Biden.. So contemporary Republicans believe in a balanced budget but regularly pass legislation which increases deficits. Some believe in local control but national bans on abortion. Some emphasize laissez faire capitalism while others stress cultural issues to reclaim an imagined past. Democrats emphasize freedom of speech except for when it offends sensitized people. Parties used to wrestle over their political platforms so as to provide the coherence of ideologies but have abandoned platforms as unnecessary ways to meld together the party’s ideological strands so as not to create dissension within their internal factions. Democrats, for a while, distinguished between planks on civil rights from planks on civil liberties so as to gain support against McCarthyism without offending segregationists. The principles of a party are therefore ad hoc rather than carefully articulated to one another and new principles emerge as those of the party leader’s sense are important to their constituents, as when border security is promoted even though the use of undocumented or temporary workers has been a standard part of the American economy for many years.
A political culture, for its part, is a set of sentiments well or badly fashioned into principles that are supposed to describe a way of life that informs politics so as to foster or prevent the accomplishment of political ends. A culture is a term that is not restricted to the entire set of folkways that guide an isolated or preliterate society, or even to a modern nation, whereby it is said there is French or German or American culture, or even to high medium and low culture as forms of art fashioned to meet an ethnic or social class, but refers to a set of preoccupations which arise to consciousness at one time or another as seeming to its participants to be the inevitable and "natural" way to be at least within the particular environment in which it is placed. So people speak of baseball as a culture that preoccupies its season and has its distinctive flavor as can be said of people living within a particular corporate culture or an ethnic group culture. The same is so of political cultures which overlap senses of things for people of a similar political persuasion, those arguing among themselves and with opposing cultures about which of their tenets are more important and which have changed or been traduced, as when a Democrat says the party has left them rather than they have left the party because its general sentiments have been traduced. A Republican like Lynn Chaney thinks one particular issue, Jan. 6th, is enough to make her cooperate with Democrats.
Conservatism and Liberalism have tremained very hearty political cultures. They have outlasted monarchy and few Fascists still call; themselves that. The duo have outlasted various forms of totalitarianism, though not authoritarianism, which thrives in Africa and Asia. That is why I think they will outlast Populism and Progressivism, which are a hundred years old.. What are these two perennial political cultures so persistent, so much appealing to people as a set of ideas and as a movement?
Conservative and Liberal as ideologies, parties and cultures have lasted since at least the seventeenth century because they have availed themselves of shifting but themselves not so long lasting structural oppositions. There was originally the opposition between King and nobility that goes as far back as the Magna Carta which morphed into the opposition between king and parliament and was then in the nineteenth century between corporate employers and employees however much the captains of industry not feigning to be traditional rather than innovative however much the hardships that result in displacing people to new towns and new work on the grounds of the eventual advantage of a better way of life, Ford employees able to afford their own cars. Similarly, in Great Britain, the North of England is industrialized and votes Labor and was in favor ofBrexit while London and the South counties are Conservative and commercial.That opposition based on class is replaced regionally between the coastal elites and the land bound areas as that is exacerbated by the discrepancies of representation so that the less than a million population of Wyoming has the same number of senators as the forty million in population, but the central dispute shifting from economics to culture where coastal people are regarded as damaged by their sophistication and the heartland has traditional or more conventional social practices with the proviso that most cities in the heartland like Salt Lake City are Liberal rather than Conservative. The cultural divide at the moment is mainly about culture..
The pendulum between conservative and liberal does not switch every election or two or follow a cycle such as Schlesinger’s idea that Liberal innovation is followed by Conservative consolidation as was thought to happen when Eisenhower replaced Truman. Rather there are very long swings between the two cultures, each one pressing over an epoch. The coastal figures of Massachusetts and Virginia, stretching as far west as Jefferson’s Monticello. Dominated American life through John Quincy Adams and was replaced by and large by rural Democrats until the Whig and Republican leadership (Lincoln was previously a Whig) who presented and enacted their economic conservatism until TR and then Woodrow Wilson and then FDR who still remains the standard of what a Liberal is: government intervention, large entitlements, and internationalism, which persisted through Jimmy Carter, while the Reagan Revolution based on the Solid South becoming Republican in party and Conservative in economics and culture dominated afterwards and so, as I have said, Democrats had to present themselves like Clinton and Obama as Centrists but Biden was a surprising throwback to the Liberal New Deal.
There are two present contenders to vie with the Liberal-Conservative dichotomy. They are prominent only recently as competitors to the dynamic duo. They are movements but are already distinctive in expressing themselves as ideology, party and culture. The first of these is Trump Populism which is related to the Southern Populists of the early twentieth century who did hold xenophobic and racist sentiments but also wanted to improve efforts for the poor and so wanted government intervention to provide services and also rejects internationalism, as did William Jennings Bryan and believed as well in cheap money as was expounded by Bryan’s cross of gold acceptance speech at the 1896 Democratic Convention. And also embraced Jim Crow racism. Populists today and back then have a general ideology which sees society as a zero sum game whereby the disparity of the wealth of the rich and the poor is the cause of evil rather than thinking of capitalism as a golden goose to be shackled and producing eggs for them, which is the view of Liberals. Instead, there are the good guys and the bad guys, objectively evil or good as well as subjectively so. Rich people are just mean while Marxists thought them just avaricious and thinking themselves responsible.
Trump is the modern version of Populism except that it is the rich who are the righteous people and the poor are the rascals and good for nothings and so Trump decries people who cross their borders for being Hispanic and want immigrants from white Norway and think of black urban areas as pestholes to be tightly policed. Trump also abandons internationalism even if it means not confronting the traditional and new opponents to America such as Russia and China. Don’t provide aid to Africa even if outbreaks there can spread disease to America. Trump also fills out his ideology with a lack of interest in constitutional safeguards of due process and regarding the executive branch as not only unitary, which means all government agencies must do his bidding, but also.superior to its other branches and so a threat to Constitutionalism that neither Conservatives or Liberals would entertain however much they might differ on civil liberties, which Liberals thought the very fabric of America while Conservatives relied on good sense to keep people from cruel repressions.
This Populist well articulated ideology becomes prominent in political life with the rise of Trump. Senators bend down to him because they are afraid of retribution but also because republican conservatism had become pallid, a way to get along or mildly resist the New Deal agenda., a holding action rather than a thrust forwards. That explains why Republican Senators are a solid or almost solid front in defending him and passing his agenda. He is crude but on the right track.And so there is reason to think that Trump’s successors will switch from Conservatism to Populism for the long point of view. But that is problematic because Trumpian Populism is deeply cynical about not only oppositional populations but of their own motives in that harshness is better than compromise and instincts and common sense more important than expertise, this set of sentiments constituting a culture and not just a political party that moves forward by wheeling and dealing.
Modern Progressivism.has its own full blown ideology, party and culture. It grew out of the Western tradition of the Progressives of the same time as Southern Populism, the end of the nineteenth century, introducing referendums, for example, as a way to counteract machine politics. Today it is a faction of the Democratic Party that leadership controls by having its members quell their own positions such as opposition to Israel by the Squad of Four lest that tarnish Democrats and lead to Republican victories. The main principles of Progressive ideology is identity politics, which concerns issues of the exploitation of women and minorities, and the selfsame war between the rich and the poor emphasized by Southern Populists. Socialists like Mamdani share that point of view and so think that Progressivism can inherit the Democratic Party
Both Progressives and Populists share the cultural tone of flaunting a sense of grievance, but Populists are also cynical in that they think overt events are undercut by deep conspiracies and that leadership requires a strong man who will rough thinks up never mind the niceties of constitutionalism and so modern Populism is a more present danger than Progressivism which just tries to move forward its agenda, Populist cynicism becoming tiring and unflattering to people and too simple minded a response to the complexities of Liberal hopefulness at organizational change to society our Conservative belief in custom and good sense. Will there be a rebound to a Conservative-Liberal axis when Populist Trump departs, so that internationalism and fiscal responsibility are restored and cultural advances like integrating ethnicities are reestablished ora new Populist order which maligns the identity politics of Progressives and plays fast and loose with constitutional issues such as due process? We will see. Politics and culture are never less than exciting.