The Nature of Political Coalitions
In an era of fragmenting political identities and shifting ideological boundaries, it is increasingly apparent that familiar left/right or liberal/conservative labels fail to capture the deep moral and even metaphysical intuitions guiding political life. Rather than asking what policies people support, we might instead ask, what kind of world do they feel is right?
What if we looked at contemporary politics differently—not by ideology, but by our general orientation toward nature and politics organized around three foundational questions:
What kind of order is desirable?
What kinds of change feel right?
What constitutes health, vitality, or degeneration?
Each question corresponds to a set of latent coalitions—overlapping but often politically misaligned—who share affective and metaphysical assumptions about nature, time, and value.
1. What Kind of Order Is Desirable?
Hierarchy and Harmony: Sees order as natural, divinely sanctioned, or culturally inherited. Coalitions include traditionalists, Catholic integralists, and ethno-conservatives.
Optimization and Function: Views order as a technical problem—systems should be streamlined, efficient, and resilient. Found in technocrats, rationalists, and market-oriented thinkers.
Relational Entanglement: Sees order as emergent from mutual dependence and ecological co-constitution. This underpins ecological thought, plurality theories, and anarchist municipalism.
2. What Kinds of Change Feel Right?
Gradualist Conservatism: Change must be slow and adaptive; revolution leads to collapse. This is traditional conservative fusionism.
Accelerated Selection: Change is good when disruptive—progress through competition, innovation, and filtering. This is the break-everythingism of Silicon Valley.
Cyclical Decline and Return: All change is degeneration from a mythic past; seeks restoration. This is Steve Bannon.
Co-evolutionary Liberation: Change should be mutual, liberatory, and metabolically grounded.
3. What Constitutes Health, Vitality, or Degeneration?
Moral-Biological Fitness: Health as strength, clarity, and competition; degeneration as weakness or impurity. This is Joe Rogan.
Civic Integrity and Elitism: Health is institutional coherence, moral restraint, and capable elites. This is JD Vance.
Ecological Regeneration: Health is resilience, repair, and systemic interdependence. This is the entire left.
Aesthetic Vitalism: Health is intensity, beauty, and mythic renewal. This is fascism and also RFK Jr.
These ontological categories cut across familiar political lines. Romantic rightists and ecological leftists may both oppose techno-optimism. Darwinist realists and neoliberals may share a reverence for selection mechanisms. Traditionalists and degrowthers both reject hypermodern acceleration.
This suggests that the possible coalitions of the future will form less around party politics and supposed policy alignment and more around shared metaphysical dispositions—about nature, time, order, and moral worth.
Understanding this structure helps explain the strange alliances and fractures of the present. And it might offer a language for reshaping politics—not around consensus, but around the plurality of worldviews we already inhabit.