Anti-libertarians, hardhats, communitarians.

Libertarians are liberal on social issues and conservative on economic issues, but there's no real term for the opposite, people who are right-wing on social issues but left-wing on economic issues. (I've occasionally heard them referred to as "hardhats," "populists," "communitarians," or simply "anti-libertarians," but there's no agreed-upon term for them in Political Science.) Yet I've noticed a lot more of those people showing up over the last three years.

Sometimes this takes an overtly racist form; a few days back, a White conservative was talking about how he only opposed welfare because it goes to racial minorities and immigrants, and would support social democracy in a racially homogeneous nation like Norway or Japan. In other cases, it's rooted in cultural traditionalism rather than ethnic nationalism; Tucker Carlson is perhaps the most prominent example of this, as he's repeatedly criticised capitalism for undermining traditional values and dissolving traditional communities. (And in fairness, he's not wrong about that, I just don't share his values.) And even among the mainstream right, there's been a surge of anti-capitalist populism; it's not uncommon for Trump supporters to talk about how immigration really benefits the corporate elite by providing them with a cheap source of labor, at the expense of American workers. These sentiments are also strongly correlated with anti-Semitism, since Jews are unfairly but frequently associated with the wealthy elite and with globalist cosmopolitans.

Maybe these "hardhats" have always been around as reluctant Republicans, Blue Dog Democrats, and independents, and it's only in the chaos of the current political climate that they feel comfortable expressing their real views. Maybe it's because of the real and perceived failures of globalised capitalism, and legitimate concerns about the harmful effects of globalisation on rural working-class Americans are getting conflated with anti-immigrant xenophobia and racism. Or maybe it's just political tribalism; they're opposed to the liberal capitalism of centrist Democrats like Obama and Clinton, which causes them to support the opposite of capitalism and the opposite of social liberalism. Probably it's some mix of all three.

At any rate, it's a phenomenon worth paying attention to, since recent polls show that "communitarianism" is just as popular as libertarianism, and not that much less popular than right-conservatism or left-liberalism. It's also a worrying trend, in my opinion, since ideologies like Ba'athism and Nazism show what happens when these sentiments are taken to their logical conclusion.