The American left and right loathe each other and agree on a lot
NORMALLY, YOU need read only the first six or seven words of a senator’s sentence to be able to correctly surmise his party. See if you can tell from the next 40 or so, an extract culled from a prominent senator’s recent book: “Today, neoliberalism is in. In the eyes of our elites, the spread and support of free trade should come before all other concerns—personal, political and geopolitical. In recent years this has led to a kind of ‘free-market fundamentalism’.” Suppose you were given a hint. The three proposed solutions for the neoliberal malaise are: “putting Wall Street in its place”, bringing “critical industries back to America” and resurrecting “an obligation to rebuild America’s workforce”.
If you guessed a Democrat—perhaps even more cleverly Bernie Sanders writing in his recent work, “It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism”—you would be wrong. It was in fact Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida and one-time presidential contender, writing in his just-published book, “Decades of Decadence”.
The populist era marked by Donald Trump’s ascension has been tumultuous for economic policy on both the American left and right. What was once heterodox has quickly become orthodox. It is easy to be drawn to where the new left and the new right are diametrically opposed, because partisans amplify disagreement, and because there are real differences on the role of policing, say, or whether pupils ought to be schooled in gender fluidity. What the culture wars distract from is that, on matters of economic policy, there is rather a lot of agreement. The culture wars may even have hastened the convergence between the two sides by quickening the break-up between the Republican Party and big business, which is now commonly derided as just another redoubt of wokeness.
2023-07-13 04:16:06
Post from www.economist.com