Welcome to the Cato podcast. I'm Ryan Bourne, Cato's R. Evan Shaff Chair for the public understanding of economics.

If you've been watching politics over the past decade, you've probably noticed that something fundamental appears to have changed. The big dividing

lines no longer seem to be mainly about taxes, spending, or even the size and scope of government.

Instead, politics now often turns on questions of how you perceive your identity, your stance

on immigration, sovereignty, nationhood and culture. What's striking is that my guest today saw

much of this coming years ago. Steve Davis's new book, The Great Realignment, details the

thesis he's been working on for some time, that we're living through a historic shift in the

axis of politics, away from the old left-right economic battles of the 20th century, and towards a new

politics centred on non-economic conflicts that nonetheless have deep economic roots.

Steve is a former colleague of mine at the Institute of Economic Affairs, where I think his

official title these days is Senior Education Fellow, and I'm delighted he's here to talk about

the thesis, why he thinks this

realignment is here to stay and what it means for us as libertarians. Steve, welcome.

Welcome, and delighted for being on the show with you. Steve, what is the great realignment?

Well, it's pretty much what you described there.

So the essential theory underlying my analysis and book is that at any given time in any political community, although there are many, many things that people disagree about and which are the subject to political contestation and debate, there's always one issue that is particularly salient, and that issue is one that matters a lot to a lot of people. And so this is the aligning issue. Politics is

aligned or structured around that. And it divides politics into two broad sides, which we usually

conventionally call left and right or have done for the last 200

years. And people also use, people use the aligning issue to work out which side of that binary

divide they're on, and also how far they are on one side or the other. Now, since the 1920s,

I would say, in certainly the United States and the UK, earlier in some other

countries, the big dividing issue was, as you said, capitalism or socialism. Do you favour a broadly

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