The problem for both Democrats and Republicans is that this election is not about left and right, at least the way those labels have come to represent a set of cultural attitudes and values on issues like freedom and government, religion and tolerance, the right to life, and the right to bear arms. Rather it is a referendum on neoclassical economics, the free market, the invisible hand. And while both parties had become magnets for zealots on these value sets, in the process neither paid much attention to their members' views on economic issues. Now that economics have come to the fore, both parties find themselves with a mix of free marketeers and protectionists, laissez-fare and interventionists. Thirty years of a dwindling middle class, increasing economic hardship at the bottom and growing wealth and extravagance for the 1% has put values on the back burner; "it's the economy stupid".
How politicians can have ignored this for so long is a mystery. Democrats were diverted by the allure of the symbolism of a black president, who promised change (on which he delivered far less that was expected of him). Republicans thought they could avoid defeat by feeding xenophobic rhetoric to the increasingly hard-up and angry whites seeing the promise of the American dream of improving living standards and social mobility being trashed in less than a generation; and who easier to blame than immigrants and foreigners? The Republicans' conundrum was that their core message was appealing to a shrinking share of the electorate and yet to appeal more broadly would mean a message that would alienate their core (or at least contradict the narrative the fear and loathing they had been promulgating since the mid-90s).
So here were are; a referendum on the legacy of Ragan and Thatcher, on the policies of trickle-down and supply-side economics. Yet neither party has a coherent position; the establishment in both are fluent in Adam Smith and the neoclassical economics of Milton Friedman, while the base -- the "maleficiaries", those on the loosing end of what turns out to have been a zero sum, not a positive sum game -- want something more Keynesian.
Given the enormous institutional inertia of the political system, don't expect the question to be resolved this year, perhaps not even for another two or three election cycles; if then; if ever.
