Arnold Kling is poised to lose his bet that America is headed towards becoming a One-Party State. Nonetheless he says

I still think that the 2010 election will turn out to be an outlier relative to the trend line. I think that if President Obama had not appointed Tim Geithner and re-appointed Ben Bernanke, he could have positioned himself and his party as reluctant participants in the bailout. Instead, with Geithner and Bernanke, Obama made the bailouts and the Democrats inseparable. ,

Take away those appointments, and the whole dynamic of this election could be different. The public is saying, "We hate the bailouts." The Democrats are stuck saying, "You are stupid and irrational." Without Geithner and Bernanke, they could be saying, "You’re right. We wanted something totally different.

This represents a completely different view of electoral politics than I have. I am not sure the bailouts really mattered. I tend to think if it hadn’t been that then the entire focus would have been on the stimulus. If there hadn’t been a stimulus then it would have been about ObamaCare. If there had been no ObamaCare then it would have been about how Obama is a do-nothing President who promised change and delivered the same old Washington as usual.

In short, I don’t think politics has very much to do with policy.

I also don’t see how a one-party state is sustainable in the long-run. Its going to be in someone’s interest to break-up the current coalitions into something else.

My guess is that the evolution would move towards the social wars and Black and Hispanic social conservatives would peel-off into the GOP. However, my general take is not that there would be some particular schism but simply that the incentives are ripe for schism.

Yet, while I think politics and policy are fundamentally different beasts, it is the case that policy can become a political litmus test. Politics is largely an expression of tribalism: Us vs. Them.

However, how do you decide if someone is really Us or Them. One way is simple membership in an ethnic group. One way is being from a particular part of the country or having a particular accent. This is why one party democracy is possible where there is a strong ethnic majority that fears outsiders as in the case of Singapore and Japan.

In a multi-ethnic society, however, a key way identify your group membership is by supporting policies that are ostensibly “pro-Us."

This is why things like TARP get to be footballs. I admit that there is a pointy-headed debate over the merits of TARP. One can feel that TARP set the stage for a larger government power grab or that it prolonged moral hazard or that it was too kind to the banks, etc. However, I don’t know that pro and anti TARP pointy-heads fall neatly into conservative and liberal camps.

Moreover, I think most of the pointy heads are at least sympathetic to TARP as a real-time decision. Am I going to far to suggest that even if Arnold thought at the time TARP was a bad idea, he could still see why even very pro-market pro-emergent order people might be for it? If you give even a little credence to the world-wide economic collapse story then you can see how the aftermath of such a scenario would not be a friendly place for classical liberals.

Nonetheless, TARP makes for a good football. It signals that one is either pro or anti activism. ObamaCare, likewise does the same. Activism is generally good for the rising demographic and bad for the falling demographic. Thus, supporting TARP and ObamaCare naturally signals that you are with the Democrats and against the Republicans, irrespective of who actually created the policy or the merits of the policy itself.

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