Political ideas have a limited shelf life.  After WWII, politicians droned on about “the authoritarian personality,” hoping to make sense of what Germany had done.  During the McCarthy Era, politicians searched under every stone for “communist sympathizers.”  Today, politicians in both political parties―who have agreed on nothing for over a generation―declare we are living through a Populist moment in America.  This, too, is an idea with limited shelf life.  Populism is a fleeting irrational political movement that a little policy tinkering on behalf of the middle class can attenuate.  Guided by the hope that such tinkering is all that need be done, both political parties are now trying to win the support of the middle class.  The middle class surely needs help, but our malady in America is not Populism.

The real malady, anticipated by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1840), has been long in the making.  The twin and unsustainable developments of the post-1989 world order―globalism and identity politics―are its latest manifestation.  Americans of the future, Tocqueville wrote, would increasingly lead split lives: on the one hand, their focus would drift ever upward, toward romantic cosmopolitan dreams of a harmonious peaceful world; on the other hand, their focus would be directed inward towards themselves, to the point of losing sight of their neighbors altogether.  What is globalism, if not this romantic cosmopolitan dream?  What is identity politics, if not a pretext to build imperviously small and self-enclosed individual worlds in which there is no need for neighbor to work with neighbor to build a world together?

Life split in two may be unsustainable, but it is tempting.  Historical compromises and prejudices burden all the nations of the world, and make nations mixed blessing, at best.  Might we find release from the unbearable weight of our national histories by looking beyond them, to an imagined world community that is stainless and pure, not least because we have not yet achieved it?  There lies the temptation of the globalist, who believes enlightened elites can manage our affairs from on high and free us from the ambiguous inheritance of every nation.  When we turn our attention from our nations to ourselves, the frenetic pace of everyday events and the numbing anonymity in the modern age never quite allows us to get a fix on who we are.  Might we finally discover a stable resting place in a comprehensive “identity” that no one dare doubt or challenge?  There lies the temptation of identity politics, which provides solace in the imagined world we construct either in solitude or in solidarity with like-minded others―but in both cases out of sight with our real-world neighbors, who remind us that there are others not like us in the world to whom we must nevertheless attend.  Undisturbed by our real-world neighbors, we live out “selfie” lives that save us from anonymity and ask nothing of us as citizens.

Globalism and identity politics have given us a bifurcated world, a world whose defining features can be summed up in the phrase, management society and selfie man.  In such a world, in Tocqueville’s words, we are “either less than men or greater than kings.”  Being “less than men,” we conclude that we are incapable of self-government, and so turn our fate over to managing elites; because we live selfie lives and think we are the only thing that matters, we are “greater than kings.”  In this sort of bifurcated world, no meaningful life can be created, even though we may, for a time, be sustained by the euphoric release that globalism and “identity politics” gives us.  Human life must be lived on a human scale.  That means it must be lived in our families, civic associations, religious organizations, and municipalities—the institutions on which Tocqueville’s Democracy in America focused so long ago.  There is no euphoric release in these institutions, only the ongoing difficult work of building a world with our neighbor, guided by the civility that those institutions alone, not the state, can nourish.

Neither of our political parties is currently equipped to address the ever-growing anxiety, frustration and impotence felt by American citizens because the human scale of life has been lost.  The human scale is precisely what the phrase, “the middle class,” captures.  Middle class life is more than an economic standing.  Middle class life is life lived on a human scale.  Our political parties today, however, want to treat the middle class in economic terms and go no further—hence, their incessant use of the term, Populism.  That is why an updated New Deal from the Democratic Party and the New Nationalism of the Republican party will ultimately fail.  The political party that wins the future will be the one that revitalizes our country by directing all of its policies towards empowering the institutions of society that can save us from the debilitating bifurcated world in which we now anxiously live.

Joshua Mitchell is a professor of political theory at Georgetown University, and a Contributor to the American Project.