Because it isn’t Monday yet, here is a blog post (for all of you betting on my blogging hiatus, the clock doesn’t start until Monday): 

Fortunately, the modern world actually provides many different examples of mature electoral democracies. I’m not positive about this, but my sense is that a survey of two-party dynamics would indicate that something roughly resembling the American pattern is the rule rather than the exception. In Spain, gay marriage was brought in by the Socialist Party. Labour in Britain is the party of the unions and the party of gay rights and multiculturalism. The Liberals in Canada are opposed by low-tax, traditionalist Conservatives. And so it goes.

Obviously, this would be more a topic for rigorous academic research than a blog post, but my sense of things is that there’s some relatively “deep” reason that this configuration of political coalitions is so much more common than the alternative. ~Matt Yglesias

A couple points: relatively few other “mature electoral democracies” are trapped in the prison of a two-party system and “this configuration of political coalitions” that he describes is not necessarily all that common outside of a very narrow band of Anglophone democracies and perhaps a couple western European democracies.  To the extent that it is as widespread as that, it is a relic of Cold War-era political alliances that are becoming increasingly moribund.  Time was when economic liberalism (“classical liberalism”) was not at all amenable to socially conservative and rural voters and there was a time when traditional Christian social thought, and not its radical and heretical varieties, compelled a defense of the interests of labour.  Populists used to be quite at home in the generally more conservative party in this country, and it used to be that the party of progressivism and the party of corporate interests was the same party.  These are the much more normal, natural alliances of different interests in Western societies.  If I had to sum up the opposition between the two camps, it would be one of protection vs. exploitation/desecration. 

I think we are actually beginning to see small but significant movements towards a realignment that would ally social conservatives with economic populists and anti-imperialists (a sort of Bryan-Cleveland fusionism) against their opposite numbers.  This would be a sort of Christian conservative socialism, provided that it would be understood that this “socialism” need not have anything to do with state socialism.  This would be “left-wing” only in the bizarre world in which we live where it is considered “right-wing” to start wars and concentrate power and money in a few hands (the exact opposite is more like it).