The "Unusual" Yet Ubiquitous Left-Right Alliance: Towards an Anti-Establishment Center
AP reports: "The House narrowly rejected a challenge to the National Security Agency's secret collection of hundreds of millions of Americans' phone records Wednesday night after a fierce debate ... The vote was 217-205 on an issue that created
unusual political coalitions in Washington, with libertarian-leaning conservatives and liberal Democrats pressing for the change against the Obama administration [and] the Republican establishment..." The New York Times writes "disagreements over the program led to some
unusual coalitions." Similarly, NBC opined the "amendment earned fierce opposition from an
unusual set of allies, ranging from the Obama administration to the conservative Heritage Foundation."
Every time you have this convergence of progressives and conservatives against the establishment, it's regarded as "unusual" "odd" or "bizarre" -- even though it keeps coming up on issue after issue: war, military spending, trade, corporate power, Wall Street, fossil fuel subsidies, as well as -- in the case of the NSA spying on the citizenry -- the central issue of Constitutional rights and civil liberties.
As documented below, the meme in the media and elsewhere is a permanent note of surprise, when it should be an established aspect of U.S. politics:
There are in fact two "centers" -- one that is pro-war and Wall Street (the establishment center) -- and another that is pro-peace and populist (the anti-establishment center).
The establishment keeps the left and right populist factions at bay by demonizing them to each other -- "let's you and him fight" is the mindset -- which is why MSNBC so often feeds hate of conservatives and Fox feeds hate of progressives. If they were to pay more attention to issues, they might break them down and it might become clear that
there's quite a bit the principled left and right agree on. Meanwhile, establishment Democrats and Republicans collude on war, Wall Street and much else, effectively reducing principled progressives and conscientious conservatives into pawns of the Democratic and Republican party establishments.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/17830-the-unusual-yet-ubiquitous-left-right-alliance-towards-an-anti-establishment-center
Going for Bolingbroke
American politics is no longer best understood in the left-right terms that defined 20th-century debates. Rather, our landscape looks more like a much earlier phase in democracy’s development, when the division that mattered was between outsiders and insiders, the “country party” and the “court party.”
As theories go, it’s well suited to the times. The story of the last decade in American life is, indeed, a story of consolidation and self-dealing at the top. There really is a kind of “court party” in American politics, whose shared interests and assumptions — interventionist, corporatist, globalist — have stamped the last two presidencies and shaped just about every major piece of Obama-era legislation. There really is a disconnect between this elite’s priorities and those of the country as a whole. There really is a sense in which the ruling class — in Washington, especially — has grown fat at the expense of the nation it governs.
The problem for conservatives isn’t their critique of this court party and its works. Rather, it’s their failure to understand why many Americans can agree with this critique but still reject the Republican alternative.
... as much as Americans may distrust a cronyist liberalism, they prefer it to a conservatism that doesn’t seem interested in governing at all. This explains why Republicans could win the battle for public opinion on President Obama’s first-term agenda without persuading the public to actually vote him out of office. The sense that Obama was at least trying to solve problems, whereas the right offered only opposition, was powerful enough to overcome disappointment with the actual results.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/opinion/sunday/douthat-going-for-bolingbroke.html?_r=0
Interesting that these two articles were published at the same time, both addressing populism vs the establishment, one from a left perspective and one from the right.