I wrote this several days ago, but have resisted publishing it because my conclusions are somewhat depressing and I try to be as positive as possible. But hope untethered from reality is mere Pollyannaism, so here it is.

The past is never dead. It's not even past.
-- William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

We have been talking a lot in recent months about the possibility for political realignment of the parties. My way of thinking about these kinds of questions is more historiographic than political, and is based heavily on David Hackett's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in North America. I wrote a more lengthy summary of the book back in June, and you can consult it (or better yet, the book) for more details, but the basic thesis is this: This country was settled by four groups whose folkways still dominate our political and social lives. These groups were the Puritans (New England), the Cavaliers (younger sons of the nobility who settled Virginia), the Quakers (Delaware) and the Borderers (refugees from the violent Scottish border areas who settled Appalachia).

It would be a mistake to try and trace actual physical connections here. These folkways are more like "attractors" in cultural or political space or internet memes, than specific gated communities tracing their ancestry back 400 years. Another way to think about them is like the traffic jam that persists for hours after an accident has cleared.

In this model, the major political parties are not primary social constructs, but rather alliances between these groups. Since the 1960s, the two parties have each consisted of two folkways, with one partner being dominant. The Democrats were an alliance between the Quakers and the dominant Puritans, and the Republicans were an alliance of the Borderers and the dominant Cavaliers. No one likes to be dominated, and in the last 20 years we have seen a series of rebellions. On the Democratic side, periodic Green candidates like Nader come along and gave voice to Quaker concerns. On the Republican side, the Tea Party movement is basically a Borderer uprising.

This year, all hell broke loose in this fragile system because both junior partners threw up an effective, charismatic leader to challenge the power arrangements. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders provided a rallying point for Quaker sentiment, both inside the party and outside. He was crushed mercilessly by the Puritan leadership because in part, Quakers are uncomfortable with conflict. (Puritans, on the other hand, have burned people at the stake...) The Quakers are now all trying to figure out what to do next, and my data suggests that about 75% of them are still in the party, and another 20% will move to Jill Stein. Since all four groups represent roughy a quarter of the population, this explains Stein's 5% poll numbers. To grow, she needs to start by pulling in more of the Quakers.

The Borderer rebellion under Donald Trump was far more effective. He destroyed the limp dicked nobodies the decadent Cavaliers threw up and ended by crushing the bizarre spectacle of Ted Cruz trying to reunify the two groups. The shell-shocked Cavaliers are now wondering what to do next. Some are staying in the party and hoping to regain power once Trump has flamed out; some have moved to the Libertarians; and some have moved to the sidelines.

But the most disturbing Cavalier movement is towards the Democratic party. Clinton and the Puritans are now actively courting them, because I believe there has been a subtle convergence of values between the two groups - and I don't mean money (at least not yet). Cavalier culture includes a sense of genetic and cultural superiority inherited from the divine right of kings. (Their racism is all about dominance and assumed superiority. By contrast, Borderer racism is the desperate desire to not be at the bottom of the heap - see Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America).

In the past 40 years (as explained in Thomas Frank's Listen Liberal) Puritan culture has become further professionalised. Moreover the rise of assortive mating practices among the professional class has given them a kind of genetic superiority narrative based around mental labour. This narrative has the potential to provide Cavaliers a way to move past their old-fashioned racism into a new kind of class-based inbreeding. It's a win-win for both groups, but the courtship may take a few years.

The thing that is most disturbing about this pending alliance is that these groups are the ones with the most money. The gory details can be found in Edward E. Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism but the short version goes like this: The Cavaliers spent several hundred years extracting gold from the blood of African slaves and investing it with Puritan bankers in New England. The bankers got good returns for their clients, and made a lot of money on the side by piggybacking on the investments. This is the history of the 1% in a nutshell.

The other two groups have a different relationship with money. Quakers sometimes make money, but they aren't usually obsessed with it. Borderers have no problem with money, but they tend to use it rather than hoard it, and their leadership folkways celebrate the largess of a "Strong Man" (Trump steaks, anyone?) The financial prospects of the two groups for fighting back are not good.

As a result of this pending realignment, the political landscape is looking rather bleak. On the one side, you potentially have a party made up of the two richest groups, and on the other you have two smaller single-group parties that quite frankly can't stand each other. Quakers are quiet, Borderers are loud; Quakers are emotionally secure; Borderers are anxious. And to top it all off, the reason that the Borderers ended up in Appalachia in the first place is because the Quakers wouldn't let them settle in the Delaware Valley.

I think this is why Bernie stayed in the party. The Quakers need allies they can get along with and the Puritans are still the best bet. Our choices right now are either to try to give the Puritans a conscience within the party or to shame them by leaving. Neither seems particularly effective at the moment. At the national level, I think the best we can hope for is that the misery index just blows the whole thing up, but I really hate to rely on misery to accomplish things.

What does seem effective to me now is action at the state level. Here in Washington, we have a primarily Quaker culture on the west side of the cascades and a Borderer culture on the east side. Supported by a fair bit of tech money, we are making some progress on issues: We already have legal pot and marriage equality, and we have ballot initiatives this year for carbon taxation and a $15 minimum wage. So we may be heading for the wilderness, but at least it looks a lot like home.