The new Republican coalition

Rather than muscular internationalism, social conservatism, and supply-side economics, the three legs of the stool of the conservative coalition in the coming years seem more likely to be, broadly speaking, American nationalism, religious communitarianism, and market economics. That’s a closely re­lated coalition. The change has been evolutionary, not revolutionary, and conservatism has not changed as much as the broader Republican coalition has under the forces of populism.

The internationalists who were more defense hawks than democracy promoters can find a lot to like in a constructive nationalism. The supply-siders are be­lievers in free markets, they just tend to emphasize growth at the margins more than using markets as tools of problem-solving. The social conservatives share the worldview of religious communitarians, if not always the same political instincts. There are many similarities, but this also stands to be a different conservatism in some important ways.

It is, for one thing, an ideological coalition that evinces a yearning for solidarity as much as a hunger for freedom. The ideological coalition that is progressivism will likely change in similar ways in the coming years, as an emphasis on conformity overtakes an ethic of lib­eration. This gradual evolution of the ideological Right and Left reveals an underlying shift in American life that we are only beginning to understand.

The interaction of the elements of this new coalition will also, unavoidably, be different. As before, the three elements would need to restrain one another’s excesses to make the whole more functional and appealing. Religious communitarians might help to make nationalists less livid and more tolerant, and to make the “marketists” less libertarian and in­dividualistic. Nationalists could make religious conservatives less universalist and make marketists less cosmopolitan. Marketists could help make nationalists less isolationist and religious communitarians less collectivist.