What do the mid-term elections signal about the changing ideological tides in America? E.J. Dionne sees the rise of a radical center, and David Brooks sees the end of a conservative era. But painting in these usual broad strokes doesn't capture the schizophrenia of our politics and culture. The reality is that in some ways we are moving to the right, in others to the left, while in still others the center seems to be holding. More specifically, four different sets of developments have interacted to shape our political landscape: an ideological shift to the right on markets, a victory of the center on the welfare state, a social conservative shift to the right in the moral basis of our politics, and a cultural shift to the left on social norms. These trends have defined our politics since the late 1960s, and there is no reason to think this election marks a shift away from them.

If we take the late 1960s to the present as our time frame, it is clear that there has been a shift to the right in the approach to the market. Both parties have embraced free trade and deregulation, the power of unions has markedly declined, globalization continues apace without any real alternative, inequality has increased, and the legitimacy of privatizing functions of government has risen. This shift is even more obvious in Britain, where the touchstone of the Blair Labour government was a rejection of Clause IV of the Labour Party constitution—which committed the party to “common ownership of the means of production—in favor of a modernizing theme that emphasized the role of education in preparing people for markets.

At the same time, the center has held on the size of the welfare state. As Paul Pierson pointed out in a now classic 1994 book, Reagan and Thatcher each failed to make their desired cuts in the middle class welfare state, although they did have some success in cutting services to the poor. The reasons for this are what you would expect: programs like Medicare and Social Security have built up large constituencies that politicians challenge at their peril. This explains why the recent market-oriented thrust to privatize Social Security failed, even with the aforementioned growing ideological support for markets. But at the same time, liberals have been unable to significantly expand the welfare state thanks to the right’s effective mobilization on tax “relief.” The result has been a kind of stalemate, with neither side gaining a real upper hand. (In an interesting twist, the Bush period has seen an embrace of both, in a policy of tax-cut-and-spend financed by outside borrowing.)

This period has also seen a now endlessly dissected social conservative shift to the right in the moral dimensions of its politics. This was initially driven by the mobilization of religious voters, and has been reinforced by the need to fight terrorism. As Lydia Bean and others have argued, what we have seen is the transformation of a religious identity into a political identity. This transformation has not been one of a shift in the underlying distribution of political attitudes in the population (underlying attitudes have stayed fairly constant), but rather a political activation of certain parts of these voters’ identities. On issues ranging from abortion to gay marriage to national security, this conservative religious strand differentiates the U.S. from many of our more secular Western European counterparts. An entire industry has sprung up to teach Democrats how to talk to these voters, a testament to their power in swinging national politics.

Fourth, there has been a shift to the left in the liberalization of social norms and the growth of “post-materialist” values. Norms around gender equality, gay rights, extra-marital sex, protection of the environment, and the importance of personal fulfillment and self-realization have all grown considerably since the 1960s. On gay rights, younger cohorts are much more supportive than older cohorts, indicating the way the generational replacement is liberalizing the issue. In some ways, this social liberalization over time is slowly producing a political liberalization of our politics, most obviously on the widespread legitimacy of gay civil unions, an issue that was not even on the table a decade ago. Some have argued that this is likely to be one basis of a Democratic revival, as Democrats are better positioned to be the party of the future because they will be increasingly be able to harvest votes from an increasingly educated and professional public, the groups who are leading the charge towards these post-materialist values.

Nothing in the 2006 mid-term elections does much to shake the impact of these broader trends on American politics. The projected results should be heartening to liberals—not so much for partisan reasons, but, to paraphrase the title of Alan Wolfe’s new book, as an indication that American democracy still works. But I would not confuse anger with Iraq and with Congressional scandal with a broader shift to the social and political landscape.

Over the long run, these trends do not so much predict which party will be elected—the aggregate impact of these trends has been roughly even in the past two Presidential elections—as they define the character and direction of our politics. Our only Democratic president in the last 26 years balanced budgets, embraced markets, reformed welfare, courted socially conservative swing voters, preserved Social Security, and was roundly defeated in his attempt to expand health care, all of which are consistent with the broader developments described above. New leaders may take advantage of changing circumstances to chart a new course, but they have not done so yet.

Cross-posted at New Vision’s blog, Foresight.