It is neither accurate nor useful to keep repeating that the United States just witnessed another round of the electoral routine by which the two parties taking turns winning and losing and the president's party usually loses the midterms.
True, much of what transpired was a punitive voting that could later swing back the other way. Nonetheless there remain new and striking elements, even if some remain embryonic. These are the elements that deserve our attention, serving as potential signals for the trajectory of the future, even if the master hyperbolists among the enthusiasts for change inflate them.
What is new here is the other side of the novelties of Trump's two elections to the presidency, which likewise cannot be reduced to mere routine cycles.
For the first time, pluralism, ethnic and religious, was reflected in political representation. It may be said that America had already elected the Catholics Kennedy and Biden to the presidency, and the Black and Muslim Obama. The officials being elected today, however, are incomparably more numerous, and more importantly, they come from different social milieus and represent a broad variety of worldviews.
Likewise, an entirely new tradition is emerging in American political life, democratic socialism; it has been tinged with jarring populism fueled by the inflated identity politics and the sophistries of NGOs- a tradition that had been alien to the American political imagination. A new generation of politicians is emerging, and it is not yet clear what it will add to political life or take away from it.
The elections have shown that money’s influence on politics has its limits, even in the United States, and even when that money comes from the titans of technology and artificial intelligence. They also showed that there are limits to the utility of using national identity to incite against foreigners and those who are different, and to identity’s capacity to stand in for "bread and butter." The same holds for the idea of the idolized leader and for how far America is prepared to surrender to him absolutely.
One of the most important results, and one that deserves more of our time, is perhaps that the two-party system, as the established form through which American democracy works, is now in very much doubt.
American history, in fact, is teeming with examples of the two centrist parties being shaken, and of their wobbles being fleeting moments. In the 1890s, in reaction to the economic inequality produced by industry and the monopolies, the agrarian Populist movement emerged to raise its radical social demands. Although it struck out on its own as a political movement, it soon lost its independence and its organizational presence, and some of its demands were absorbed into mainstream political language.
After the crash of 1929, "right-wing,left-wing," and mixed populist forces rose, such as Father Coughlin, enemy of capitalism, the banks, and the Jews. However, the New Deal and the welfare state put the two centrist parties back in command of the levers of political life.
Even between 1964 and 1972, during the battle over "civil rights" and the Vietnam War, extremist elements gathered within the Democratic Party: from within it rose the right-winger George Wallace, as well as the antiwar protest movements and radical leftist groups. The Democrats' Southern constituency, which opposed civil rights, swung toward the Republicans, changing both parties in equal measure.
But America never experienced, neither with Barry Goldwater on the right nor with George McGovern on the left, what 1930s Europe witnessed: the rise of fascism and the complete destruction of the center by the force of extremist polarization.
And while Reagan gave the Republican Party a more populist tinge, rendering it more accommodating of extremist groups and factions, religious ones especially, he did not break the basic rules by which political institutions revolve around the center. Clinton, for his part, anchored his Democratic Party in the center, with a shift to the right aimed at winning back the Democrats Reagan had won over.
In recent decades, however, things began to change. Centrist parties lost strength under the impact of globalization, the outsourcing of industries, and the job losses caused by the technological revolution and the service economy.
And as social media inflamed disagreements and laced them with doses of fake news, the populisms of right and left agreed on stripping trust from the traditional political "elite," stigmatized as corrupt, in favor of "the people."
The two main parties thereby became frameworks within which extremist movements grew. In the Republican Party, the "Tea Party" appeared in 2009 as a reaction to Obama's reforms, and then Trump was elected in 2016.
The Tea Party set a precedent where party unity was concerned. The movement sought to defeat traditional Republicans in the primaries and push more hardline Republicans into Congress. Trump, in turn, adopted policies that ran against the traditional consensus on the economy, immigration, international relations, and more, making loyalty to his person the foremost criterion of partisanship.
Alongside Trump's first election, Bernie Sanders's star rose as a possible Democratic presidential candidate, and it was said that the groundwork for his rise lay in the 2011 "Occupy Wall Street" movement, which put class inequality at the forefront of political debate and proposed unfamiliar forms of political action.
Today we are witnessing a culmination of those transformations, one that may well prove impossible to halt or contain. It could blow apart both parties at once: between Trumpists and traditional Republicans who dare to reclaim their pre-Trump traditions; among the Trumpists themselves, as some blame others for the defeat; and between traditional Democrats and democratic socialists, especially if the latter fancy changes that America cannot bear.
