In part one of this series, I suggested that political parties in most Western democracies are realigning along the schism of Court versus Country. This new division does not replace but instead cuts across the familiar cleavage of Left versus Right. That leaves four distinct factions in play: Court Conservatives, Court Progressives, Country Conservatives, and Country Progressives. The shifting alliances and tensions between these four factions play out differently in each nation. However, one consistent pattern is that rural, non-college-educated, and working-class voters are drifting away from Progressive factions toward Country Conservatives. This pattern is reshaping party politics throughout the Western world.
In the case of recent U.S. political realignments, the basic facts of the past decade are familiar to American readers. The big question is how to interpret those facts. Progressives, academics, the mainstream press, European leftists, and Democratic Party leaders agree that what we’re seeing inside America is a resurgence of a 1930s-style fascist dictatorship. They’re mistaken. Viewed in a more reasonable, fair-minded way, with appropriate comparisons to other Western nations along with other periods in American history, I believe what we’re seeing is a reworking of U.S. party politics along the lines of Court versus Country. And this realignment is playing out within the United States in a distinctly American fashion.
On the Republican side of the aisle, Court Conservatives have spent the past eight years in a state of deep internal division. Some have worked in a businesslike manner to pursue common policy objectives with Trump and his supporters. At the other end of the Court Conservative spectrum, a few have torn up their party affiliation and defected to the Democrats. Then, there is every position in between. These internal divisions have left America’s Court Conservatives, by historical standards, in an unusually weak position. First, their leaders failed to put forward a viable third-party candidate in 2016. Then, they failed to challenge Trump in either the 2020 or 2024 primaries successfully. Each new failure........