The Great Realignment: Going the Way of the Whigs

“I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me”

—Ronald Reagan

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Scott Circle in Washington, DC, is named for General Winfield Scott, a career Army officer who served in every conflict from the War of 1812 through the early Civil War. He was the presidential nominee of the Whig Party in 1852 and lost decisively. There is an equestrian statue of the general at the center of his eponymous circle. He is longingly and forever gazing south at the White House, making him and his horse the only figures who have spent even more time coveting that real estate than Joe Biden. (Or, if you prefer, the Bush family.)

Scott and Biden share a more important similarity.

The Whigs disbanded less than two years after Scott’s defeat. It was an early event in the greatest partisan realignment in American history, which included the Civil War and ran on until the end of Reconstruction in 1877. We are living through another major political party realignment, arguably the most dramatic since the death of the Whigs and birth of the Republicans.

While the last one included a literal civil war, this one will not, which is good, as the private firearms are mostly held by just one side. This realignment will probably not include the replacement of one of the major political parties with another (or others), though that might not be so bad.

This issue of Capital Research magazine examines some of the influencers who are trying to derail the ongoing realignment and return American politics to the deteriorating regime of a decade ago. The essays analyze erstwhile staunch Republicans that became the so-called Never Trumpers, and some of the institutions they created for that purpose.

This is an important part of the history we’re living through, but it is far from the whole story. Any honest look at the ideologically eclectic cabinet and allies of the second Trump administration reveals the other side.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard got herself crosswise with the Hillary Clinton mob in early 2016 precisely because she was loudly supporting socialist Bernie Sanders over Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. If Sanders had won the White House in 2016, it’s easy to imagine the talented, charismatic, and pleasant-to-gaze-at Gabbard taking a similarly high place in his administration, perhaps even as his vice president.

Instead, Hillary Clinton, playing the ever-bitter sore loser, accused Gabbard of being a tool of the Russians. Then President Biden put her under surveillance by the Transportation Security Administration. All this was done without a scrap of evidence that Gabbard had done anything suspicious, other than fail to stay on Team Regime.

Similarly, Joe Rogan, the most influential podcaster in the short history of podcasting, endorsed Sanders in 2020 and Trump in 2024. One of the reasons Elon Musk is the world’s richest man is because regime Democrats have been the best customers for politically correct electric vehicles. And Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with the golden name for any Democratic primary, wanted to become the party’s 2024 presidential nominee, but was blocked from even running against the feeble Joe Biden.

Critics of Gabbard and the rest may claim they’ve “changed” over the past eight years, but that’s backwards. They haven’t changed any more than Republican nepo baby Liz Cheney, who morphed smoothly from NeoCon to Never Trump, as if those were the same thing all along.

The issues that more or less differentiated the parties just a decade ago are now either reversing entirely (e.g., free trade, foreign military intervention, free speech, and national security state spying) or no longer as decisive (labor unions, climate policy, and taxes).

To one side have gravitated those who defend the regime ramparts: military interventionism, the public health bureaucracy, the national security state, the university industrial complex, public education and big bureaucracy in all its manifestations. To this we can now add the equally creepy international censorship movement and letting transsexual men play women’s sports.

Although the regime party is currently on the ropes and losing support, the Democratic Federal Workers Party has the advantage of having a cohesive agenda. Republicans are succeeding and vacuuming up traditional Democratic refugees precisely because they are the anti-regime party, but it’s not clear their coalition holds together when those factions start debating how to replace the regime they’re taking apart.

A good example is independent left-leaning journalist and Twitter Files star reporter Matt Taibbi. Taibbi was also a big fan of Bernie Sanders, who said this of him: “Matt Taibbi is one of the few journalists in America who speaks truth to power.”

In February, and to the surprise of nobody who has followed him, Matt hinted that he had voted to send Donald Trump back to the White House. He told the libertarian Reason magazine his motive was primarily ending the censorious assault on free expression that has been infecting the Western democracies:

I didn’t publish who I voted for because I never do, but you can probably guess. But look, the reason was that I saw this, and you would see these documents talking about how we just need to do this, this, and this, and we’ll be part of this common digital environment with the Digital Services Act and everything. And you think about what that world would look like, and you know, we could be living in a dystopia within 18 months or even less. It was absolutely horrifying.

I think libertarians should be thrilled with all this stuff. I mean, not only on this, on the speech front—where there are a few hiccups on the speech front with the Trump administration—but for the most part, it’s been great. And Vance, in particular, by the way—Vance was the first politician who brought this up in the presidential campaign. You know, we’ve been pushing for people to kind of make it an issue, and he brought it up during the campaign, and I think he really believes in it, and it shows. That was a great speech, I thought, that he gave, and it was a real reaffirmation of what American values are.

So I get kind of tingly listening to it.

Eight years earlier, Taibbi published Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus, a compilation of his campaign trail reports for Rolling Stone. The title gives away his opinion of Trump at the time. Amazon described the book this way:

Taibbi grasped the essential themes of the story: the power of spectacle over substance, or even truth; the absence of a shared reality; the nihilistic rebellion of the white working class; the death of the political establishment; and the emergence of a new, explicit form of white nationalism that would destroy what was left of the Kingian dream of a successful pluralistic society.

Taibbi has not repudiated any of his prior work, and there’s no reason he should. Like many who have drifted from the honest left into the GOP tent, he did so because the Democrats abandoned positions dear to him, and the Trump-Vance team gleefully picked them up. The parties moved, Taibbi did not, and the allegiance remains transactional. If Republicans reacquaint themselves with conventionally conservative positions on free speech and military intervention, then Matt and many like him will head swiftly to the exits. (He has already begun to question the deportation proceedings against Columbia University protester Mahmoud Khalil.)

Policy is the priority, not politics.

If it hasn’t already occurred, it may soon be absurd to refer to the parties as “right” and “left” in any way that makes traditional sense. A long overdue hurricane has hit our ideologies and everyone, including the politicians, is either surfing or drowning in the waves. The objective of this issue is to examine how this has been going for one part of one of the major factions.

The whole story is too big for one magazine issue. The history we’re living is unlike anything that preceded it in the memory of everyone alive. Some claim to know where it is headed, but they’re either ignorant, lying, or both.

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This article was first published in the April/May 2025 issue of Capital Research magazine

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-great-realignment-going-the-way-of-the-whigs/