Will A New Right-Left Synthesis Transform American Politics?

American politics is in a time of upheaval, as old ideological lines dissolve and the changing economy demands a rethinking of the social contract. Recently, several prominent thinkers have proposed new policy and political syntheses that marry approaches usually favored by the right with solutions from the left. In a December 2005 article in The Weekly Standard entitled "The Party of Sam's Club," Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam suggested that the Republican Party pay attention to the economic needs of the fragile working families who make up the party's base, even if it means giving up small-government orthodoxy.

From a different direction, Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute recently proposed an alliance of liberals and libertarians -- "Liberaltarians," as he called them in an article in the New Republic – to produce “a politics that joins together under one banner the causes of both cultural and economic progress,” ending the fifty-year old fusion of libertarians with conservativism. Each of these represents a version of ideological synthesis that could transform our approach to domestic policy, as well as the political alliances that shape those policies. In a third article, “The Rise of the Republicrats,” Ezra Klein of the American Prospect described these new alignments and the political challenges they would pose to the current alliances and parties. After brief presentations by these authors, E.J. Dionne of the Brookings Institution and the Washington Post, one of America's most thoughtful analysts of the role of ideas in politcs, will comment.

Participants

• Ross Douthat
  Associate Editor, The Atlantic
• Brink Lindsey
  Vice President for Research, The Cato Institute
• Ezra Klein
  Writing Fellow, The American Prospect
• E.J. Dionne
  Senior Fellow in Governance Studies, The Brookings Institution
  Columnist, The Washington Post
• Mark Schmitt (moderator)
  Senior Fellow, New America Foundation