Bad News for Liberalism

Daniel Drezner has a link to a TNR article which contends (in the terminology of this blog) that socialists (equity seekers) and conservatives (traditional order seekers) are squeezing out liberals (liberty seekers) as socialists and conservatives, now in greater numbers (thanks to gerrymandering) forge alliances across the populist (William Jennings Bryan) axis, aka the illiberal axis. More and more, I think, the parties will view conservatives or socialists as their base, and attempt to woo liberals over to their side, rather than the more traditional sense that Republicans were a hybrid liberal-conservative party while the Democrats were a liberal-socialist party. Liberals may find more and more that thay lay outside either party. If the country really is more liberal than it is not (its founding is quintessentially liberal) then one of two things will eventually happen. Either a third party will rise up and replace one of the parties, or one of the parties will lurch back toward the liberal pole and establish electoral dominance until the other party does likewise.