Court versus Country: The United States
In part one of this series, I suggested that political parties in most Western democracies are realigning along the schism of Court versus Country. This new division does not replace but instead cuts across the familiar cleavage of Left versus Right. That leaves four distinct factions in play: Court Conservatives, Court Progressives, Country Conservatives, and Country Progressives. The shifting alliances and tensions between these four factions play out differently in each nation. However, one consistent pattern is that rural, non-college-educated, and working-class voters are drifting away from Progressive factions toward Country Conservatives. This pattern is reshaping party politics throughout the Western world.
In the case of recent U.S. political realignments, the basic facts of the past decade are familiar to American readers. The big question is how to interpret those facts. Progressives, academics, the mainstream press, European leftists, and Democratic Party leaders agree that what we’re seeing inside America is a resurgence of a 1930s-style fascist dictatorship. They’re mistaken. Viewed in a more reasonable, fair-minded way, with appropriate comparisons to other Western nations along with other periods in American history, I believe what we’re seeing is a reworking of U.S. party politics along the lines of Court versus Country. And this realignment is playing out within the United States in a distinctly American fashion.
On the Republican side of the aisle, Court Conservatives have spent the past eight years in a state of deep internal division. Some have worked in a businesslike manner to pursue common policy objectives with Trump and his supporters. At the other end of the Court Conservative spectrum, a few have torn up their party affiliation and defected to the Democrats. Then, there is every position in between. These internal divisions have left America’s Court Conservatives, by historical standards, in an unusually weak position. First, their leaders failed to put forward a viable third-party candidate in 2016. Then, they failed to challenge Trump in either the 2020 or 2024 primaries successfully. Each new failure has only advertised Court Conservative weakness in today’s GOP.
Internal divisions among American Court Conservatives have been frustrating to Country Conservatives as well as to Court Progressives. Each faction feels that old-school Reagan-Bush Republicans ought, in principle, to side with them. Politically, however, these internal divisions have empowered other factions even while setting a limit on their total appeal. Donald Trump’s GOP, it seems, can count on some, but never total support from Court Conservatives. Similarly, Biden’s Democrats can always count on at least a few Court Conservatives to say nice things about them on TV.
Court Conservative disunity has not prevented Trump from going from one surprise win to the next. This is not because Trump has magical powers. It’s because anti-establishment right-leaning populists have rallied to him over time with unmatched enthusiasm. In the United States, Country Conservatives have greater numerical, institutional, and historical advantages than in any other Western nation. They’re not a majority of American voters, but they do form a plurality, and within today’s GOP, they far outnumber any other faction. In November 2016, Trump demonstrated that contrary to conventional wisdom, he could squeeze out an Electoral College majority with strong support from Country Conservatives and not much else. Democrats made a mistake by completely writing off these voters. It appears they’re making the same mistake again.
The ebullient Republican convention this summer was a clear demonstration of how Country Conservatives now dominate the GOP. Compared to eight years ago, few gestures were made toward the traditional Republican establishment. On the contrary, Trump doubled down by picking J.D. Vance as his running mate. Vance is unmistakably Country in this sense. His views on foreign policy, trade, immigration, and domestic economic policy are populist rather than Court-approved. Trump’s fist-shaking defiance right after the narrow attempt on his life only bolstered his status as a folk hero in the minds of his many supporters. That pugnacious reaction to danger is an instinct that Country Conservatives understand very well.
The Democratic Party, which in living memory possessed great strength among Country Conservatives, has long since pivoted toward Court Progressives for leadership, funding, votes, and ideas. The party has often been successful in winning elections by coopting Country Progressives while fending off the GOP. Four years ago, for example, Bernie Sanders energized left-wing populists, then dutifully led them into line behind the party’s Court nominee, Joe Biden.
Until recently, the conventional wisdom among Court Progressives was that they would defeat the GOP so long as it nominated Donald Trump. Our progressive superiors, therefore, made certain to hunt Trump through America’s court system and mockingly called on Republican voters to nominate him, even while backing MAGA candidates in Republican primaries—for example, in Michigan’s third congressional district during the 2022 campaign season. This was a strange move to make against figures simultaneously described as existential threats to democracy. In any case, it all backfired spectacularly. Court Party attempts to hobble Trump while boosting the MAGA wing of the party only made him stronger, ensuring his nomination and likely his election.
This summer, Court Progressives finally broke into deep division. This wasn’t because of any ideological split. Rather, it’s because the entire Democratic coalition was demoralized by the visibly decrepit condition of its leader, Joe Biden. Last week, Court Progressives solved that problem by engineering Biden’s removal and facilitating the succession of Vice President Kamala Harris. From a strictly professional perspective, one must admire their ruthless efficiency in doing whatever they must to survive. But their underlying problem is the same, with Harris at the top, and perhaps even worse than it was a few months ago.
Democrats have answered the immediate challenge of physical fitness for the nation’s highest office. Consequently, they’re experiencing a kind of sugar high, with a lot of help from the press. But Biden was never unpopular simply because of his age. He was unpopular because of his overly left-wing, demonstrably incompetent approach to one pressing U.S. policy challenge after another. Harris now inherits that unpopularity, and rightly so. She also has one major disadvantage, which Biden did not possess. Unlike Biden, Harris is one hundred percent politically correct. She is entirely a product of the twenty-first-century Court Progressive movement. Unlike Biden, she has no feel whatsoever for Rust Belt working-class voters that Democrats need to win back from Trump. Indeed, she may very well scramble the Electoral College map to the benefit of Republicans.
Harris and the Democrats also have another serious problem, one they and the legacy media prefer not to discuss. A significant percentage of Country Progressives have given up on today’s Democratic Party as hopelessly beholden to the nation’s Court establishment. They can see that Harris is an establishment figure par excellence. A good number of these left-leaning populists will, therefore, vote for third-party candidates, including Robert Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, and Jill Stein. Those candidates, combined, now poll around 8 percent. In a hard-fought race, that’s no small number, and it hurts the Democratic Party more than it does the GOP.
Still, the Democrats’ selection of Kamala Harris is an excellent indication of where the party stands now. As even liberal media outlets admitted not so long ago, Harris is disturbingly incompetent and (until recently) widely disliked within the party. Yet Court Progressives refuse to consider any other candidate. They refuse because they are captive to left-wing identity politics, and to pass over Harris would break that captivity. For this reason, among others, the Democrats will likely lose to Donald Trump in November. And I have to say, after the past eight years, they’ve really got it coming.
Colin Dueck is a professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Image: Jonah Elkowitz / Shutterstock.com.