The Rise of a New Centrism

Washington, you often hear, is a place so polarized that our leaders barely get anything done. But that notion is not exactly consistent with the past few years. Consider these major political stories:

• House Democrats this month rescued the House speaker, a Republican whom far-right members of his party wanted to topple after he helped pass a bipartisan foreign aid package.

• Senator Elizabeth Warren, a progressive leader, has worked on legislation with several conservative Senate Republicans, including Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance.

• Vance, for his part, recently praised Lina Khan — the chair of the Federal Trade Commission who is one of the most progressive members of the Biden administration — for “doing a pretty good job.”

• Biden has signed a more significant set of bipartisan bills — on infrastructure, semiconductors, gun violence, the electoral process and more — than any president in decades.

My editors recently asked me to make sense of this conundrum: A polarized country in which bipartisanship has somehow become normal. To do so, I spoke with Congress members from both parties, as well as Biden administration officials and outside experts. I emerged from the project believing that the U.S. was indeed a polarized country in many ways — but less polarized than people sometimes think.

On many high-profile issues, especially connected to economics, most Americans share a basic set of views. They favor both capitalism and government intervention to address the free market’s shortcomings. Most Americans worry that big business has become too powerful. Most are skeptical of both free trade and high levels of immigration. Most are worried about China’s rise and its increasing assertiveness.

I describe this emerging consensus as neopopulism. For a quarter-century after the end of the Cold War, policymakers operated under a different consensus, known alternately as neoliberalism or the Washington Consensus. It held that market capitalism, left largely to its own devices, would bring prosperity to the U.S. and freedom to the rest of the world.

Most Americans were always skeptical of the core components of the Washington Consensus. They worried about a world in which national borders meant less, and goods, capital and people could all move more freely. As it turned out, they were right to worry: Neoliberalism failed to deliver on many of its promises. Incomes for most Americans have grown slowly, and China and Russia have moved away from liberal democracy.

Neopopulism is a response to these developments and to public opinion. To different degrees, both Democrats and Republicans — both Biden and Donald Trump — have adopted it.