Again and again, intellectuals who are focused on one-dimensional people fail to explain society and in particular politics. The main problem with the median voter theorem is that few people are one-dimensional. If America were divided into four one-dimensional groups for the past 300 years, the logical conclusion would be that some time ago America would have been divided into 4 nation-states and the only relevant issue would have been how the division took place.
I think one of the major issues is that you can either be a Jeffersonian, or you can have a society with modern levels of sophistication and wealth/major influence in state affairs. Not both. Many of the more influential libertarians act like they can have both. It "worked" okay for Jefferson because he was part of a tiny aristocracy with certain privileges, but that's not a model that scales or is compatible with modern American arrangements or morality. Historically, most Jeffersonians understood they had to prioritize simplicity and being left alone. It requires choosing liberty at the expense of material benefits and prestige. You can still benefit from the advances of the larger society, but you can't be a national insider. It simply is not a philosophy that can be applied to national government, and attempts to do so inevitably end up serving one of the other groups. "Just America" has a similar problem with trying to take a strategy beyond functional limits, but I've always found it jarring to call today's progressives Puritans, and I find it similarly jarring to call today's libertarians Cavaliers. Both are long gone--aristocratic influence doesn't really survive a switch from regional interests to national power. Some similarities exist, but that's because competing aristocracies rooted in different "regions" of the national "meritocratic" class have arisen.
You say, "Real America takes distrust of elites too far. It resists hard truths (about the pandemic, for example). It puts too much faith in Donald Trump." The distrust of elites and faith in Trump are reactions to the egregious overstepping by the elites who populate the other three Americas. The overstepping dates back to the anti-war antics (perceived as anti-Americanism) of collegians, academics, media types, and politicians in the 1960s. If the elites were somehow tamed or made irrelevant, the passions stirred in Real Americans would subside and they would revert to 1950s-style behavior.
I can buy most but not all of this four-way split. But "Just America" seems to conflate at least two completely different groups. What is now coming to be called "wokism" was not even an organic movement but has been inflicted on us by malicious people like Alinsky and Gramsci for the purpose of destabilizing the institutions that protect civilization, just as Mao did when he started China's Cultural Revolution. The "progressive" movements of 1900-60 had no real connection to "wokism"; after they won the Civil Rights Acts they all either petered out into hippie culture or got co-opted by the Soviet-funded peace movement.
As for "Free America", it does not deserve the blame for anything because its proponents have never ruled the country. Reagan and others have paid lip service to them but never delivered on it.
I agree that people are much more multi-dimensional than this framework suggests. But maybe the current info and communication landscape amplifies these differences into identities. We self-sort and silo, through the matching and cascading dynamics of social media and cable news. But our groups also bounce off each other in counterproductive ways - seeing the worst excesses of the other groups, dunking on each other, canceling, etc. A lot of the interaction is superficial but feels much deeper. (I think that's a Martin Gurri point.) So there's a combo of separation and closeness between groups that's kind of the worst of both worlds.
Again and again, intellectuals who are focused on one-dimensional people fail to explain society and in particular politics. The main problem with the median voter theorem is that few people are one-dimensional. If America were divided into four one-dimensional groups for the past 300 years, the logical conclusion would be that some time ago America would have been divided into 4 nation-states and the only relevant issue would have been how the division took place.
I think one of the major issues is that you can either be a Jeffersonian, or you can have a society with modern levels of sophistication and wealth/major influence in state affairs. Not both. Many of the more influential libertarians act like they can have both. It "worked" okay for Jefferson because he was part of a tiny aristocracy with certain privileges, but that's not a model that scales or is compatible with modern American arrangements or morality. Historically, most Jeffersonians understood they had to prioritize simplicity and being left alone. It requires choosing liberty at the expense of material benefits and prestige. You can still benefit from the advances of the larger society, but you can't be a national insider. It simply is not a philosophy that can be applied to national government, and attempts to do so inevitably end up serving one of the other groups. "Just America" has a similar problem with trying to take a strategy beyond functional limits, but I've always found it jarring to call today's progressives Puritans, and I find it similarly jarring to call today's libertarians Cavaliers. Both are long gone--aristocratic influence doesn't really survive a switch from regional interests to national power. Some similarities exist, but that's because competing aristocracies rooted in different "regions" of the national "meritocratic" class have arisen.
Hard to imagine a worse summary of Hayek.
You say, "Real America takes distrust of elites too far. It resists hard truths (about the pandemic, for example). It puts too much faith in Donald Trump." The distrust of elites and faith in Trump are reactions to the egregious overstepping by the elites who populate the other three Americas. The overstepping dates back to the anti-war antics (perceived as anti-Americanism) of collegians, academics, media types, and politicians in the 1960s. If the elites were somehow tamed or made irrelevant, the passions stirred in Real Americans would subside and they would revert to 1950s-style behavior.
I can buy most but not all of this four-way split. But "Just America" seems to conflate at least two completely different groups. What is now coming to be called "wokism" was not even an organic movement but has been inflicted on us by malicious people like Alinsky and Gramsci for the purpose of destabilizing the institutions that protect civilization, just as Mao did when he started China's Cultural Revolution. The "progressive" movements of 1900-60 had no real connection to "wokism"; after they won the Civil Rights Acts they all either petered out into hippie culture or got co-opted by the Soviet-funded peace movement.
As for "Free America", it does not deserve the blame for anything because its proponents have never ruled the country. Reagan and others have paid lip service to them but never delivered on it.
I agree that people are much more multi-dimensional than this framework suggests. But maybe the current info and communication landscape amplifies these differences into identities. We self-sort and silo, through the matching and cascading dynamics of social media and cable news. But our groups also bounce off each other in counterproductive ways - seeing the worst excesses of the other groups, dunking on each other, canceling, etc. A lot of the interaction is superficial but feels much deeper. (I think that's a Martin Gurri point.) So there's a combo of separation and closeness between groups that's kind of the worst of both worlds.