Thanks for those two very helpful suggestions. I made both changes to the article. I think I was trying to make the point about the Venn diagram the way Sirota did, without thinking about it.
Fareed Zakaria made that same point recently about the Republicans having lost the culture war. For example, look at the normalization of homosexuality in US pop culture. I think that’s right, but it’s also beside the point. My line on “conservativism,” which I’ve argued elsewhere, is that it boils down to pure social Darwinism, so “big ideas” were never crucial to conservatism. Look at Edmund Burke’s almost Zen skepticism about reason. Only progressives care about big ideas; conservatives care about “traditions” which amount to rationalizations of animal instinct (i.e. the instincts for dominance, predation, patriarchy, racism, and the master-slave relationship).
Your view seems a little more conspiratorial than mine in that you’re saying, I think, that Trumpism is a top-down Republican rejection of democracy. On the contrary, I’d that this was an accidental capitalizing on a grassroots hunger for authoritarianism in the US. There’s a global backlash against centrist, neoliberal forms of democracy because they’re not bold enough to solve the world’s major problems that are emerging.
Trumpism is the American form of that backlash but it came from the ground up, from the radicalization of the Republican Party that’s taken decades. Trump was obviously a demagogue who saw a marketing opportunity, an opening for a certain message to carry the day. His mental disorders enabled to push the fraud to the limit; thus, he captured the party and turned it into a cult.
But I don’t see this happening as a result of a conscious choice made by Big Money to clamp down further on democracy. Trump was too unstable for wealthy people. For the same reason, big businesses don’t like doing business in Russia or China where there’s no reliable rule of law.
The two-party system is indeed odd. It’s a winner-take-all system, whereas the parliamentary one seems more stable but also stale, because all the parties have to reach compromises that end up pleasing no one. There are backlashes against that system in Europe, and Russia and China seem to be pushing the agenda for what might come after democracies, namely clever kleptocracy or totalitarian technocracy.
