Steve Davies: The Great Realignment

The political map we grew up with is obsolete. What comes next could be far more turbulent than anything we've seen so far. Historian Stephen Davies, author of The Great Realignment, joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell to make the case that the upheavals of recent years – Brexit, Trump, the rise of Reform – are not aberrations to be waited out, but symptoms of something far more structural: a once-in-a-century shift in the organising principle of politics itself. For a hundred years, the central divide was economic.

Now, he argues, it is existential – a clash between rooted national identity and open cosmopolitanism that is scrambling every alliance, every assumption, and every party's electoral map.

The term "populism", Davies contends, is not merely inaccurate but dangerous – a label that allows established institutions to patronise and persistently underestimate the movements they most need to understand. And to those who believe economic recovery will drain the energy from nationalist politics: he is unsparing. The voters driving the realignment are not, at root, angry about stagnation. They are angry about identity. Those are not the same thing, and no growth strategy will make them so.

The show looks at where free marketeers fit in a world reorganised around culture rather than capitalism – and Davies' answer is bracing. The nationalist right's actual agenda, he argues, is functionally incompatible with limited government. Mass deportations, reindustrialisation, reshored supply chains: none of it can be delivered without a very large state indeed.

And then comes the prediction that may prove most provocative of all: that the Brexit divide in British politics will flip – with the nationalist right eventually embracing a Europeanist identity defined in civilisational terms, and the cosmopolitan left recoiling from what that Europe would actually become.

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