How the Political Spectrum Turned Inside Out

The political landscape of two decades ago seems almost unrecognizable now. Back then, opposing wars and the surveillance state was so completely coded as left-wing that Republicans regularly denounced Ron Paul as a liberal squish. Some of the same cable news pundits who cheer for Democrats today were almost universally viewed as paladins of the right. Vaccines weren't really seen as a left/right issue at all—and if you pushed people to tell you which tribe was more open to anti-vaxxism, they'd likely as not point to the crunchy left.

Some of the changes since then simply reflect shifts in particular individuals' images or opinions. (If you think too hard about what the politics of the Taylor Swift/Kanye West beef used to be, you'll get a headache.) But there's been a deeper transformation too. Ponder that phrase I just used: "the crunchy left." In an era when the conservative press is increasingly prone to publishing paeans to alternative diets and cottagecore lifestyles, how many people still think crunchy implies left in the first place?

When George W. Bush was president, Alex Jones was a vaguely countercultural figure who had cameos in Richard Linklater movies and filled his website with denunciations of police brutality. Insurgent liberals tried to claim a little populist cred by styling themselves "libertarian Democrats." There was serious talk of asking Sen. Jim Webb (D–Va.)—a Second Amendment-friendly Vietnam veteran who celebrated Southern Scots-Irish culture and admired the Jacksonian populist tradition—to be Barack Obama's running mate. Partly for the contrast, yes, but also because both were early critics of the Iraq War.

A decade later, there was serious talk of asking Webb to be Donald Trump's secretary of defense. I don't think Webb's worldview changed substantially in that period. So what did? How did the political spectrum get turned inside out?

Crises and Coalitions

The easy answer would be that our maps of the spectrum are constantly evolving, as different issues emerge, disappear, and grow or shrink in salience. While COVID-19 was raging, the conservative New York Post ran a story about the Hong Kong flu of 1968–69, pointing out that no one was social distancing at the Woodstock festival; the effect was to make that hippie mecca sound like a monument to old-fashioned American grit and resilience. I don't think many conservatives in 1969 spoke of Woodstock in those terms. But by 2020, "What do you think of hippies?" was no longer a significant political question and "What do you think of COVID?" was.

Yet the changes I'm describing here go beyond that sort of constant churn, for at least three reasons. The first is the presence of another political dimension beyond left and right: a factor that nine academics, writing in 2021 for the American Journal of Political Science, called an "anti-establishment orientation." The people who adopt this worldview, these scholars wrote, distrust "the established political order irrespective of partisanship and ideology."

I'll be using that term a bit more broadly than the folks who coined it do. They define the orientation as a particularly Manichean and conspiratorial sort of populism: As two of the authors, Adam Enders and Joseph Uscinski, put it in a follow-up paper for The Forum, the worldview involves "an innate struggle between the good 'people' and a nefarious, self-serving 'establishment.'" But I'll be roping in a broader range of Americans whose politics are shot through with distrust for powerful institutions, even if they're also cynical about ordinary people or think our leaders are more misguided than evil. The important thing for our purposes is that this distrust operates independently of "left-wing" and "right-wing" concerns. It might lead someone to jump from supporting Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The second reason these changes go beyond the normal year-to-year churn is education polarization: Voters with college degrees are increasingly likely to be Democrats, and voters without them to be Republicans. This isn't a uniquely American phenomenon—similar diploma divides have opened in most Western democracies—and so it probably stems from more than just American causes. But as suburbanites with lots of schooling identify more often with the party deemed liberal, and as working-class people who didn't go to college identify more often with the party deemed conservative, the definitions of liberal and conservative are bound to evolve. If some of those voters are closer to the antiestablishment orientation than to the conventional left or right, that will intensify the effect.

The third reason is a series of three events, each of which threw U.S. institutions into crisis mode: 9/11, the Great Recession, and the COVID pandemic. Besides their immediate direct effects on the country (by, say, killing nearly 3,000 people and destroying an iconic part of the New York skyline), these allowed the government to adopt emergency powers, reshaping society in more sweeping and pervasive ways. That put a different set of issues at the center of our debates, sparking rapid changes in our political coalitions. And since many of those new policies enriched or empowered large, hierarchical social institutions, the antiestablishmentarians were especially open to finding new allies.

Each of those events also coincided, more or less, with a switch in which party occupied the White House, making the landscape even more fluid. The 9/11 attacks came just eight months after Bush entered the Oval Office, transforming what until then looked like it might be a low-key presidency whose biggest foreign policy concern would be trade with Mexico. The Great Recession began while Obama was running for president, and it arguably ensured his election; Joe Biden, similarly, took power while the pandemic was underway.

The one change in presidencies that did not coincide with one of these emergency events came with Trump's election in 2016. Needless to say, a large swath of the country regarded his arrival as an emergency too, though the beginning of his term didn't bring the kind of big, sudden shifts in public policy that we saw after 9/11 or the financial meltdown. (Before COVID hit, Trump's most substantial changes to the system lay in the judges he appointed. And it is the nature of judicial appointments to show their impact in the long term: Trump made it possible to overturn Roe v. Wade, but not until Biden was in office.) Trump's rise to power was itself a consequence of two crises—it is difficult to imagine him being elected in a world without the war on terror or the Great Recession. But since his election fell between crisis events, we will treat it as a separate turning point.

We can use those milestones to divide the 21st century into several distinct eras, each with its own distinct political landscape. The first few months of the millennium, with the country led by a lame-duck Bill Clinton and then a peacetime George W. Bush, were more an extension of the last century than a part of the new one. Then we got the period from 9/11 to the Great Recession, the period from the recession until Election Day 2016, and the period from Trump's win until COVID. Americans then retreated into their homes (or were told to, anyway) before emerging into—well, we'll get to what we emerged into soon enough.

First, let's revisit that time between the first two crises. In particular—since all sorts of interest groups and voting blocs have drifted from one coalition to another in this century, and we haven't space to cover them all—let's focus on that most footloose force in politics, the antiestablishment sector.

From the Fall of the Towers to the Fall of Bear Stearns

In the wake of 9/11, the most conspicuous topic of debate was terrorism. Officials invoked the threat of another attack to justify everything from the occupation of Iraq to the detentions at Guantanamo Bay.

There were other issues, of course. The GOP mobilized socially conservative voters by campaigning against gay marriage, a concept that was much more controversial then. And Democrats defeated a Republican plan for the quasi-privatization of Social Security—itself a sign that the spectrum had been reshuffled, given that a Democratic president had been working on a bipartisan quasi-privatization plan just seven years earlier. (The impeachment fight of 1998 derailed it.) But no matter how excited people got about entitlements or same-sex unions, the political spectrum centered around the war on terror. And that didn't change until the housing and banking dominos started falling in 2007–08.

At the beginning of this era, public horror over the September 11 attacks gave the administration wide latitude to respond as it pleased. Shortly after 9/11, a Gallup poll showed 88 percent of the public backing the initial military operation in Afghanistan. Only one member of Congress—the California progressive Rep. Barbara Lee—voted against the resolution that authorized it. The rump opposition was a mix of leftists, libertarians, and paleoconservatives, and even these groups were divided, with many figures favoring at least a limited response to the assault. (At Antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo published a column a few weeks after 9/11 headlined "Kill 'Em—and Get Out.") At this point, in fact, many antiestablishment sorts were enthusiastically pro-war: In the wake of a foreign attack, it's not hard for a suspicious nature to be turned more toward enemies abroad than enemies in high places. Indeed, if they become convinced that some of their domestic enemies are agents of those enemies abroad, those suspicions can at least temporarily turn populists into enthusiastic enforcers of the state of emergency—albeit ones whose eagerness to ferret out foes can disrupt the social order if it goes further than their rulers prefer.

Iraq was much more controversial than Afghanistan. While Democratic leaders lined up to support the war, there was a fair amount of dissension among the party's rank and file, fueling Howard Dean's insurgent 2004 presidential campaign and energizing the so-called netroots of online liberals. Four years after Dean's campaign fizzled, a freshman Illinois senator named Barack Obama, who had opposed the Iraq invasion, snatched the party's presidential nomination from Hillary Clinton, who hadn't.

While a number of prominent pro-war bloggers described themselves as libertarians, the main libertarian institutions, from the Cato Institute to the Mises Institute to the Libertarian Party, opposed attacking Iraq. (Reason published arguments on multiple sides of the issue, though the editor and most of the magazine staff opposed the war.) There was also a small group of antiwar conservatives centered around The American Conservative, who didn't really have a political home. (When the magazine invited 18 writers to weigh in on the 2008 election, more of them backed Obama than the Republican, though the majority refused to vote for either one.) All this created more space for antiestablishment left/right/libertarian cooperation.

With dissident Democrats feeling excluded both from the government and from their party's leadership, for example, there was a small genre of think pieces about the alliances that might emerge if liberals found their inner libertarian or libertarians found their inner liberal. In Salon in 2005, future Reason editor Matt Welch declared that the "Republicans are now the party of big government and optimistic Wilsonian adventures abroad, while the Democrats flirt anew with federalism, fiscal sobriety and sour isolationism"; he urged the Dems to go all-in on Wild West antiauthoritarianism. The following summer, Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas claimed to have identified a new breed of "libertarian Dems," though on closer examination libertarian turned out to be his way of rebranding modern American liberal: In Moulitsas' account, the libertarian Democrat defends the Bill of Rights but also wants an active government to protect us from corporations. At the end of the year, Brink Lindsey, then based at the Cato Institute, wrote a New Republic story headlined "Liberaltarians." He wasn't very enthusiastic about the politicians Moulitsas had been hailing, but he still was hopeful about fusing "libertarian means and progressive ends."

If any of this was to manifest itself in political activity on the ground, as opposed to the dreams of bloggers and columnists, pundits expected it to appear in the Southwest or the Rockies, where Democrats were used to courting leave-me-alone voters. Writing in The New Republic right after the midterm elections of 2006, Thomas B. Edsall suggested that "a new Democratic ideology—pragmatic, culturally conservative, libertarian—has begun to emerge in the Mountain West." He noted that Jon Tester, one of Moulitsas' alleged libertarian Democrats, had just won Montana's Senate race with a campaign that did not merely attack the USA PATRIOT Act but in the process managed to outflank his Republican opponent on gun rights. Edsall concluded that the Western Dems transcended the divide between the Clintonian centrists and the left, making them "uniquely well-positioned to help break the Democrats' ideological logjam."

Needless to say, that isn't what happened. No one calls Tester a libertarian anymore. Maybe Colorado Gov. Jared Polis carries that old Mountain West flag, but he's an outlier. In the Democrats' 2008 presidential primaries, the candidate who came closest to embodying Moulitsas' prototype—former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel—didn't get many votes; he eventually made a bid for the Libertarian Party's nomination instead. Ironically, the 2008 candidate who best embodied the hopes of the people calling for a liberal-libertarian alliance was running in the Republican primaries: By arguing forcefully against the Iraq quagmire, wartime restrictions on civil liberties, and Bush's corporatist economic policies, Rep. Ron Paul (R–Texas)—himself a former Libertarian presidential nominee—made many progressive doves swoon.

The same impulse that had netroots liberals flirting with libertarians also had them flirting with populists. Sometimes they crossed the streams: One of the figures identified as a "libertarian Dem" in Moulitsas' article was Webb, who appealed to some libertarians with his arguments against the Iraq War and for criminal justice reform but whose views on trade and other issues ultimately put him in a different category. Indeed, Webb's platform of economic populism and foreign-policy restraint felt almost—dare I say it?—America First.

When the Obama team reached out about giving Webb the vice presidential slot, the Virginia senator shot the idea down by declaring that he had no interest in the office. ("After being approached several times by the campaign and by Obama himself," Webb recalls, "I declined to be considered at all.") If you want to imagine a really different configuration for the political spectrum today, imagine a timeline where Webb took the job and became Obama's designated successor.

Speaking of America First: The country music legend Merle Haggard acquired a right-wing reputation during his first burst of fame in the 1960s and '70s, thanks to listeners who took his songs "Okie From Muskogee" and "The Fightin' Side of Me" as hippie-hating anthems. But his politics were always more complicated than that, and even before 9/11 he had a history of worrying about government surveillance and intrusion. A little less than a year after the attacks, he made a wisecrack about Bush's attorney general at a concert in Kansas City: "I think we should give John Ashcroft a big hand—right in the mouth!" (He added: "The way things are going I'll probably be thrown in jail tomorrow for saying that, so I hope y'all will bail me out.") In 2003 he recorded "Lonesome Day," which imagined a future when "the men in black come kickin' in your door / and guitar-playin' outlaws lay spread-eagled on the floor." And by 2005 he was explicitly calling for pulling out of the Middle East in a song called, yes, "America First":

Our highways and bridges are falling apart
Who's blessed and who has been cursed?
There's things to be done all over the world
But let's rebuild America first…

Let's get out of Iraq and get back on the track
And let's rebuild America first

Bring the troops home, invest in infrastructure, fear the deep state, put America first: All this might scan as MAGA populism today, but at the time it was taken as a sign that Haggard had taken a turn to the left. Haggard himself didn't seem to think he was a man of the right: Appearing on Bill Maher's show Real Time in 2007, he greeted the audience with the line, "Good evening, friends and conservatives." He had made the same joke in concert at least as early as 2002.

Flash forward to the 2024 Republican National Convention. Each time vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance entered the hall during the first three nights of the gathering, the house played "America First" as his walk-on music. I can't say whether Haggard would have approved, but I'm pretty sure the Republican vice president of two decades earlier would not.

From Occupiers and Tea Partiers to Sanders and Trump

By the end of 2007, the Great Recession was underway and the economy was starting to replace terrorism as the nation's central package of political issues. The new crisis sparked two protest mobilizations, Occupy Wall Street on the left and the Tea Party movement on the right.

Occupy contained two big factions and several smaller ones. The big tribes were the left-anarchists and the social democrats, and they were constantly at odds: Many social dems wanted to put together a list of demands for economic reforms, while the anarchists disdained conventional politics, distrusted statist reforms, and were more interested in building a new society in the shell of the old. The smaller tribes included a contingent of Ron Paul libertarians, an assortment of Marxist sects, and the devotees of various conspiracy gurus, from Lyndon LaRouche to David Icke. Given how much the social democrats' influence would rise with Bernie Sanders' presidential campaigns, it may be jarring to remember that the anarchists seemed to have more momentum at the time—part of a global wave of horizontal and municipalist movements that had been erupting from Buenos Aires to Madrid, sparking dreams of more decentralized and participatory politics.

The Tea Party movement had an easier time overcoming its internal ideological divisions. For one thing, pretty much everyone involved was willing to engage in conventional politics. Also, it was built around economic issues—opposition to taxes, bailouts, Obamacare—which allowed libertarians and pro-market social conservatives to work side by side without much trouble. The more important tension among the Tea Partiers was the divide between the decentralized networks of grassroots volunteers and the centralized organizations of political professionals. The former absorbed a number of free-floating anti-establishment types, while the latter were more prone to promoting longtime Republican pols who had adopted Tea Party branding.

The true-believing Tea Partiers—the activists more interested in rolling back state power than in merely changing which party was exercising it—were more likely to be open to unusual alliances. Here and there, that included discussions with Occupy. In late 2011, for example, a group of local Occupiers and Tea Partiers exchanged ideas at an art gallery in Richmond, Virginia. One Tea Party activist told Salon afterward that the two groups "could be the mothers and fathers of a second American Revolution." (Put that on the pile of broken dreams.)

The war on terror periodically returned to the headlines, most notably with the rise of ISIS. But mostly it stayed in the background, where opinions were freer to drift. As disillusioned vets came home from Iraq and Afghanistan and as what initially looked like overseas victories turned stale, public sentiment turned against both wars. By 2013, a majority of Americans—67 percent—were telling an ABC/Washington Post poll that even the Afghan War hadn't been worth fighting in the first place. From Barbara Lee to the Heartland in just 12 years.

We knew for sure that the 9/11 era was not just dead but buried on February 20, 2016. A week earlier, a Republican presidential candidate named Donald Trump had stood on a debate stage in South Carolina, arguably the most hawkish state in the Union, and declared: "We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East….They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none." On the 20th, he nonetheless won the state's Republican primary, finishing 10 points ahead of his nearest rival.

Trump did not govern as a dove, of course. And while he complained constantly about the surveillance state, he regularly signed bills to keep its powers in place; he seemed upset only that it sometimes aimed its surveillance at him and his allies. Nor did he seem interested in rolling back the crony capitalism that Tea Partiers had complained about. Indeed, the GOP's self-styled populists suddenly seemed less interested in complaining about crony capitalism at all; if you called it "industrial policy," they might even endorse it. When Republicans talked about the evils of big business now, they were less likely to be rejecting the corporate state and more likely to want to steer it in a new direction.

There was some good news for libertarians. Not only was the right less enthusiastic about foreign wars, but the left was more open to arguments about the ways superficially benign laws could expand the reach of police and prisons. But generally speaking, the antiestablishment right became more nationalist, the antiestablishment left became more socialist, and the space for left/right cooperation seemed to diminish. On the militant edges of politics, street protests were increasingly polarized between antifa radicals and alt-right reactionaries. (The latter, interestingly, drew in some ex-libertarians and ex-Occupiers.) At the beginning of the decade, ending mass incarceration had been a transpartisan issue; now the idea was increasingly coded as left-wing. That was partly because of the so-called Great Awokening, which moved race and gender toward the center of public debate, though here too there were complications: Some voices were chiefly interested in reducing police power, while others seemed more interested in expanding human resources bureaucracies.

As those arguments came to a head with the protests and riots of 2020, another crisis event was remaking the spectrum yet again. With COVID bringing a new set of issues to the center of American politics—lockdowns, mandates, masks, vaccines—a whole new antiestablishment configuration began to emerge.

Where Are We Now?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who spent much of 2024 running an independent presidential campaign, is an environmental attorney long associated with the left wing of the Democratic Party. He is also a scion of a prominent Democratic family, and his father ran an insurgent liberal presidential campaign in 1968. That same year an insurgent conservative, George Wallace, carried five states as the nominee of the new American Independent Party.

The American Independent Party still exists. In April 2024, it endorsed Kennedy for president.

One way to interpret that is to declare that Kennedy had simply become right-wing. But while the candidate has moved rightward on certain issues in the last few years—he has become more of a border hawk and toned down his support for gun control—he is still an environmentalist eager to raise the minimum wage and expand the government's support for housing and child care.

Another interpretation would be that the American Independent Party had become less right-wing. Kennedy implied this when he accepted its nomination: He insisted that the organization had been "reborn as a party that represents not bigotry and hatred but rather compassion and unity and idealism and common sense." But while we'll have to wait to see what positions the party takes in the future, it has a history of veering away from conventionally conservative economic stances. Wallace's presidential platform included calls for everything from strengthening Medicare to building high-speed rail. And while some of that got toned down after Wallace left the party, it didn't disappear entirely. When the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram profiled the American Independent Party in 1974, for example, the paper found its members divided on the question of the anti-corporate crusader Ralph Nader. One speaker denounced him, but the chair of the Los Angeles County party declared that "Nader doesn't bother me. Maybe we need gadflies."

The cynical take on Kennedy's nomination would be that the candidate benefited from ballot access, the party benefited from having a well-known standard-bearer, and both said what they must to make that exchange work. And no doubt there's truth to that. But the chief reason for the alliance was surely more straightforward: Kennedy was a prominent critic of the government's COVID response, and he thus became attractive to voters who would have turned up their noses earlier. Another crisis had created yet another antiestablishment coalition.

As if to underline the point, the right-wing faction that controls the Colorado Libertarian Party attempted in July to snub the party nominee, Chase Oliver, and follow the American Independent Party's lead in giving Kennedy its presidential ballot line. The Libertarians' national secretary soon stepped in to stop this. But even if this merely almost happened, it's remarkable. In 2004—hell, in 2019—"a far-right splinter of the Libertarian Party nominates Robert Kennedy" would have sounded like a Mad Lib. COVID changed a lot.

Completing the circle, Kennedy then suspended his campaign and asked voters in the swing states to instead back Trump.

COVID accelerated some broader cultural trends too. A certain kind of conservative had long been attracted to alternative medicine. (Back in 1988, Jay Kinney noted that "the one place where the far right and the far left have been likely to meet is at the vitamin counter.") But this expanded enormously during the pandemic, and that helped amplify the right's other countercultural elements—the folks the conservative pundit Rod Dreher has dubbed "crunchy cons." A host of Whole Earth Catalog staples have grown more popular on the populist right: artisanal crafts, New Age spirituality, even psychedelics.

All that said, a certain stasis seemed to set in after the coronavirus, as though Americans emerged from lockdown only to find themselves entering a different sort of holding pattern. Politicians' COVID records have not been big factors in most postpandemic elections, except in the indirect sense that COVID spending helped fuel inflation. The Great Awokening has cooled somewhat too. The war in Gaza has intensified the divisions between the more and less hawkish factions of the Democratic Party, and the war in Ukraine has done something similar among the Republicans, but neither issue revamped the spectrum. The sense of stasis was underlined by what initially seemed to be a tired, wheezing rerun of a political campaign, with two old men who had already been president battling limply to hold the office for another four years or until they die, whichever comes first.

But then one of those old men dropped out of the race, and the other one picked a young running mate whose rhetoric frequently veers away from traditional Republican ideas. Beneath that static surface, elements were shifting, evolving, reassembling themselves, like a new consensus struggling to be born. You shouldn't expect the alliances of today to be the alliances of five years from now. And after another 20 years and who knows how many crises, who can say how the landscape will look?