I’ve heard talk that a political realignment in this country may be in the offing, result of the breakdown of the alliance between social conservatives, right-populists, and the part of big business that doesn’t much pretend to care about looking human. For a long time, that part of the business elite had little trouble wrangling the other two elements into line by hiring politicians who mixed a palatable cocktail of religion, nationalism, and economic “freedom”. This year things have changed. Waxing right-populist conservatives, tired of being persistently ignored by the Republican business elite, refused to drink the cocktail again and (ironically) nominated themselves a billionaire businessman from New York City who, true to his new profession, holds little in the way of values or policy prescriptions other than whatever platitudes he thinks will appeal to his voters.

What’s a solid business conservative, reliant on the old Republican formula and ever alert to economic opportunity here and abroad, to do? Profits in this context don’t just depend on the governing elite’s pro-business orientation (a given whoever wins), they rely on the continuity of the system that produces those profits.

If Donald Trump actually does a lot of what he threatens—deporting profitable immigrants, penalizing corporations that send jobs elsewhere, refusing to start or continue interventionist wars, etc.—business Republicans, like the rest of the ruling class, risk losing their influence over the globalist neo-liberal order. They risk being cut off from the established sources of profit within that order. The business elite’s feelings about any element of Trump’s program (or sketch of a program) is not the issue; it’s whether Trump would stabilize and expand their profits or do the opposite, whether he would make room for other possible “winners” in the Great Game and its stock market or keep things as they are, and whether he would upset the globalist consensus among the US and European governing classes.

As ever, the bottom line is not who will bring us peace and prosperity but who will secure and expand the current system of profit-extraction and successfully keep the top people at the top.

Enter the leadership of the contemporary Democratic party, now understandably focused on Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president. Proposing itself as a Government of National Salvation facing down outright fascism on behalf of All Sane People, the campaign is now courting—and winning—prominent long-time Republicans. There is in fact an official organization to do just that, Together For America, which has attracted not just people like former US Senate candidate and Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, but profoundly ideological figures from the Republican right like Reagan-era death squad-coordinator John Negroponte and Bush-era/PNAC neoconservative Robert Kagan. And of course there is Henry Kissinger, who is not just Richard Nixon’s former Secretary of State and a mass murderer, but also the Clintons’ personal friend.

Does this represent a political realignment, with Hillary Clinton leading the way?

Yes, sort of, but not the way it seems on the surface. Crossover voting and (apparently) strange bedfellows do not by themselves represent a true realignment, which is a fundamental and persistent change in the alliances that decide elections. The success of the right-populist movement, one that nominated Trump with a minority of Republican primary and caucus votes, coupled with the flight of business Republicans and neoconservatives to Hillary Clinton, is simply one observable phenomenon embedded in a much larger, decades-long realignment in US society and politics, but not a political realignment in and of itself. In fact, it is the opposite.

What we're seeing this election--all the noise, grinding, and flying sparks worthy of a slow-motion wreck--is simply part of the current phase of the massive demographic change that's been occurring for some years now, one that will not be complete for at least a generation. We are slowly, violently moving from a conservative, white-dominated present (which still holds power despite the flashy, politically-motivated public relations nonsense of a race-and gender-integrated ruling class) to a significantly more diverse, but economically even more precarious future, where prosperity for the majority and the Democratic policies that support that overarching goal are things of the past.

There is a re-alignment going on, but it's the decades-long one rooted in demographic change occurring in the middle of the decades-long neo-liberal economic crisis. This election season is a sign of resistance to re-alignment rather than a sign of a politically or socially relevant shift in what the major parties really stand for. That re-alignment would mean the major parties really matter, and they don't matter apart from being tools the ruling class uses to hold power. The ruling class changes horses at will.

By itself, the march of establishment Republican figures towards Hillary Clinton represents the opposite of realignment; it is the US division of the globalized business elite circling the wagons around the single reliable ally they have left on the stage of presidential candidates. Looking for a re-alignment in this election is focusing on the horses, not the riders and their destination. A massive re-alignment of American society is indeed happening before our eyes, but it will take another two decades to shake out.