Political Velocity and Stability: How Democrats and Republicans Hold Themselves Together - a podcast by Justin Ahn

Politics is the means by which we as a society decide what to change and how.

So, let's think of political dispositions as a spectrum from wanting a return to the past, to no change, to change into a future, to rapid change into an immediate future. These positions are driven by how happy you are with the way things are, which is primarily determined by whether you are part of "the elite" or not. Politicians love railing against the elite, yet both the Democratic and Republican parties have both elites and non-elites. So how do they manage this internal tension?

GOP: the alliance is stable as long as 1) the populists remain inactive and unable to actually topple the establishment and 2) populist anger redirected to another definition of the elite. The former is being threatened by Trumpism, while the latter is fulfilled by white identity politics and the conservative media machine. 

Democrats: cynical liberalism, or a hopelessness for real change, denies the fundamental premise of liberalism, although it may appease the elite; in this case, the alliance is fundamentally flawed. Alternatively, optimistic liberalism has an emphasis on vision and virtue, which means that all Democrats are philosophically bonded. At the same time, magnitude setters like Bernie Sanders anchor the party and provide a clear identity, though they also threaten the establishment's stability.`

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