Relax! Even if You Lose Big Today, Both Parties Are Going Extinct!

Chill
out, America. Whether the Republicans win big or the Dems hold the
line, both major parties are on the path to extinction, at least in
their current forms.

Whichever side emerges victorious, both Republicans and
Democrats should face up to a much bigger truth: Neither party as
currently constituted has a real future. Fewer and fewer
Americans identify as either Republican or Democratic
according to Gallup, and both parties are at recent or
all-time lows when it comes to approval ratings. Just 39
percent give Democrats a favorable rating and just 33 percent do
the same for Republicans. Not coincidentally, each party has also
recently had a clear shot at implementing its vision of the good
society. If you want to drive down your adversary’s approval
rating, just give him the reins of power for a few years.

What’s going on? The short version is that political, cultural,
and even economic power has been decentralizing and unraveling for
a long time. Whether you like it or not, The Libertarian
Moment is here, a technologically driven individualization of
experience and a breakdown of the large institutions—governments,
corporations, churches, you name it—that used to govern and
structure our lives. The result is that top-down systems, whether
public or private, right wing or left wing, have less and less
ability to organize our lives. That’s true whether you’re talking
about the workplace, the bedroom, or the bar down the street (that
may now be serving legal pot). This is mostly good, though it’s
also profoundly disruptive too.

That’s from my new column at
The Daily Beast, which argues that the future belongs
to

…politicians and parties who champion policies that embrace
economic and social decentralization will own the future, even as
they wield less power by letting people discover how they actually
want to live. Whoever wins tonight would do well to remember that.
Because if they don’t, they’ll be losers again, and sooner than you
think.

Conservatives/Republicans can live with some decentralization in
economic issues and education policy, but they really can’t abide
by rapidly proliferating lifestyle choice. Liberals/Democrats are
desperately trying to structure commercial life and restrict
choices when it comes to health care, school lunches, and more. If
both sides don’t realize the impossibility of their positions, they
will become even less representative of contemporary America. If
that’s the case, it was nice knowing them.

More here.