footnote 1 These patterns operated across long historical cycles, in which the political logic of one or other party was able to set the national agenda, even as the White House might alternate. From the 1930s until 1980 the Democrats were able to play this role, on the basis of a coalition of capital-intensive industries able to make limited but real concessions to the militant working class of the period. Thus, from 1865 to the 1920s, Republicans ministered to the needs of heavy industry, which constituted the basis of mass employment and rising wages for the working class of the Northeast. Ruling-class coalitions constructed mass bases by arguing that their particular interests could satisfy the material needs of at least a fraction of direct producers. Historically, party politics in the us rested on competing hegemonic claims. What follows, then, is an attempt to provide an initial sounding of the deep fractures or fault-lines that structure us politics. The fourth component, closely related to the third, is the contrast between two rival geo-political logics: globalized liberalism versus America First. We might call them multicultural neoliberalism, on the one hand, and macho-national neomercantilism on the other. The third component, which exists in contradictory synthesis with the second, is a contrast of political logics-programmatic ideologies, aiming to mobilize a range of class fractions and interest groups-which cannot be reduced to the two parties, although it overlaps with them. If this can be traced back to Reagan, or jfk, it was institutionalized by the Obama White House and has been heightened under Trump. This structural condition shapes a further feature: the personalization, or charismatic inflection, of political leadership, underpinned by the presidential system. With stagnant secular-growth rates, the party struggle in the us has become to a large extent a zero-sum redistributive conflict, which explains the extreme severity with which it is carried out. First and most importantly, the two political parties are constituted by coalitions of rent-seeking groups, both at the top-the big donors, higher-level elected representatives and party officials-and, to a certain extent, at mass level. T o read the 2020 election results, it may be useful to specify the four fundamental elements of us politics in the contemporary period.
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