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Politics post-Paul

I’m not the Ron Paul enthusiast that Daniel McCarthy is, but I think he’s onto something in speculating that Ron Paul represents some sort of future for the GOP. Excerpt: More significant than the overall percentage Paul claimed last night, however, is the 48 percent he won of the under-30 vote. This augurs more than just […]

I’m not the Ron Paul enthusiast that Daniel McCarthy is, but I think he’s onto something in speculating that Ron Paul represents some sort of future for the GOP. Excerpt:

More significant than the overall percentage Paul claimed last night, however, is the 48 percent he won of the under-30 vote. This augurs more than just a change in the factional balance within the GOP. It’s suggestive of a generational realignment in American politics. The fact that many of these young people do not consider themselves Republican is very much the point: Paul’s detractors cite that as a reason to discount them, but what it really means is that the existing ideological configuration of U.S. politics doesn’t fit the rising generation. They’re not Republicans, but they’re voting in a Republican primary: at one time, that same description applied to Southerners, social conservatives, and Reagan Democrats, groups that were not part of the traditional GOP coalition and whose participation completely remade the party.

There’s more at stake here than the future of the Republican Party, though. The style as well as substance of Ron Paul’s movement is radically different from the 1990s right, and the substance itself is different not only in terms of what Paul’s supporters want but what their priorities are.

As Daniel goes on to say, the issues that defined post-1960s conservatism just don’t matter all that much to young people today. Paul is too old to be around to take advantage of the shift, which will take some time to play out. It seems all but impossible today to imagine a party as ideologically rigid as the present-day GOP making any kind of meaningful change. But it’s coming. And it’s coming to the Democratic Party too. As Daniel points out, both left and right in America organized themselves around the same issues these past 40 years. Barack Obama campaigned as a change agent, but he’s governed like a conventional Democrat.

What’s hard to see right now is what the main issues defining US politics, left and right, will be. What do you think? It seems obvious that the economy will be far more important, and on a number of levels, than it has been — but neither left nor right today seems to have the slightest idea how to meet the structural challenges facing us. Foreign and defense policy will surely be determined by the relative lack of money … but in what ways? Cultural issues will no doubt continue to be important … but which ones, and why? Most people understand that the question of same-sex marriage is a lost cause for social conservatives, but I believe that the directly related, indeed subsequent, question of religious freedom in an era of gay civil rights is going to be a big cultural and political issue in the decade or two to come.

Other thoughts? I’m thinking that relative scarcity is going to force people to re-establish community ties that had been strained or severed thanks to the freedom and mobility that money bought for many of us. We may have a more localist future because the federal government will not be able to do nearly as much for us.

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