New America Foundation think-tanker Michael Lind sees a war of the zombies ahead for America:
[B]oth American conservatism and American progressivism in their familiar forms are dead, but decay has not caught up with them yet, because both are in a state of suspended animation.
The world changed radically when the global economy crashed in 2008, but the news has not yet reached Washington. The Republicans are giving long-discredited Reaganomics another good old college try, while Barack Obama, having surrounded himself by veterans of Bill Clinton's economic team, is practicing, or malpracticing, 1990s style neoliberalism, or "Rubinomics," named after Democratic Party fundraiser and Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.
Reaganomics and Rubinomics were both toxic political byproducts of the generation-long asset inflation of the late 20th century in the United States....Financialized conservatism differed from financialized progressivism, but the two schools of thought were both based on cheerful happy-talk scenarios in which there were no deep conflicts of interests between the rich and the rest in America.
That happy illusion is now at an end, or at least rapidly coming to an end.
Both Reaganism and the form of progressivism latched onto by the Democratic Party after they abandoned the working class (or after the working class abandoned them post- Dem embrace of civil rights in the 60's) depend on a rising tide that will lift all boats. That is, both depend on a non-zero-sum world. In a non-zero-sum world the rich may get richer, but so does everyone else too, which tends to keep the discontent tamped down. Once the truth becomes clear - that a gain for the rich is a loss for everyone else, and vice versa - the knives come out and the battle is on.
There's a lot I'd argue with in Lind's analysis. He's a Hamiltonian, a centrist, a former neocon, and co-author of The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics. All of which I think are at best misguided, at worst immoral. His analysis of progressive support for infant green technologies is dead wrong, imo. It's not about coddling a client demographic but basic R & D support that will incubate new and eventually self-sustaining technologies.
But still, I think he's not far wrong in what he sees coming further down the road.
But the world of Reaganites and Rubinites collapsed in 2008, when it became clear that much American and global wealth had been illusory....
The most probable outcome, when the depth of wealth destruction becomes clear, is likely to be crony capitalism....
The right will try to preserve and expand a simulacrum of free enterprise, in the form of defense contractors and privatized welfare state functions. The left wing of the elite will try to create a zombie economy based on taxpayer-subsidized "green industries" that would collapse without tax subsidies and mandates on utility rate-payers. Each party will try to cut the zombie sector of its rival in order to fund its own pet zombies...
Meanwhile, most ordinary Americans will work in industries that, unlike elite zombie sectors like defense, private healthcare, higher education, the higher civil service and the subsidized green economy, are not rigged and protected from competition. ...
As the "classes" wall themselves off from competition in their protected, subsidized crony capitalist and nonprofit and public sector jobs, the masses are likely to insist that they, too, deserve to be protected from zero-sum competition with foreign workers and immigrants....
At some point, a national populist movement in the spirit of Ross Perot, Patrick Buchanan and Lou Dobbs will almost certainly reappear in the United States. As in Europe, the next American populism is likely to focus on immigrants, who compete with many American workers, more than on trade, which affects comparatively few.
In a fight between crony capitalists of the oligarchic left and the oligarchic right on the one hand and a national populist movement on the other that wants to close the door to the trade and immigration policies that favor the interests of the oligarchs, who will win?
In some Western countries, national populists may successfully combine support for the welfare state with restrictions on outsourcing and mass immigration. In others, like the United States, the crony capitalists of the oligarchic left and oligarchic right may create Latin America-like societies, in which a cosmopolitan, globe-trotting elite dwells in fortified communities and downtowns and rural manors, surrounded by a mass of the poor and near-poor, for whom the "progressive" crony capitalists seek slightly higher levels of means-tested welfare.
Lind thinks the crony capitalists will win out. I tend to agree.
There is of course another more radically progressive alternative that doesn't occur to Lind:
and: