Are both of our major political parties radical?

It looks that way to me.

When I was in college, I described the differences between conservatives, liberals, and radicals this way: Conservatives believe America is a great country, though it would be even better if we moved back in the direction of our roots and traditions.

Liberals believe America is a good country, but would be great if it reformed in some important ways (at that time, mainly through civil rights for blacks, enhanced rights for women, and a less belligerently America-centric foreign policy).

Radicals reject both the highly favorable and the relatively favor view of their country. They believe America is not good and needs a major overhaul to have any chance of becoming good.

Even in college, I recognized that this framework is a simplification. But many decades later, I still consider it a useful way of looking at the ideological divide.

Back in the day, there was no question about where the two political parties stood. Republicans were conservative. Democrats were liberal.

But today, I’m not sure either party remains in its former camp. Arguably, both parties are now dominated by radicals.

Let’s start with the Democrats. On the surface, they seem to be split down the middle between liberals and radicals. In 2016, Bernie Sanders, a socialist, commanded about 50 percent of the presidential primary vote in his contest with Hillary Clinton, a liberal. In 2020, Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who also wants a major overhaul of America, combined to command about the same percentage.

Joe Biden, who purported to represent traditional liberalism, managed to hold off Sanders, though it was touch-and-go for quite a while.

The death of George Floyd tilted the balance of power among Democrats in favor of the radical faction. For a critical mass of Democrats, the conduct of four police officers in Minneapolis, along with scattered cases of similar misconduct in other jurisdictions, seemed to clinch the case that America is incorrigibly racist and repressive — on top of its other supposed sins, such as homophobia, rampant sexual harassment, “climate denial,” science denial, imperialism, and unbridled capitalism.

It was enough to make one think that a critical mass of Democrats secretly harbored these suspicions already.

If Biden’s victory over Sanders was a win for liberalism over radicalism, the victory was largely pyrrhic. In my view, Biden’s agenda was more amenable to the Vermont socialist than to traditional liberals. Thus, it’s no accident that Sanders and his protégé , Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were just about the last Democrats outside of Biden’s family to advocate that he remain the 2024 race.

Therefore, I submit that the split in today’s Democratic party isn’t between radicals and liberals (though many Democrats still fit the latter description). Rather, the split is between avowed radicals and radicals who want to conceal their radicalism because they doubt America is ready to embrace it. (The latter group will probably be in the ascendency for a while due to the Democrats’ defeat in 2024.)

Many Republicans are traditional conservatives. But today, the party is dominated by Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.

I submit that MAGA is more radical than conservative. Although unlike radicals on the left, it certainly views mainstream Americans as fundamentally good (and not responsible for any of their problems), it takes a dim view of contemporary America.

It’s not just that America is no longer great, as the name MAGA states. America isn’t even good. It needs radically to be transformed.

MAGA holds that America’s elites, through a “uniparty,” have run the country into the ground. The result is, as Trump said in his first inaugural address, “American carnage.”

In that speech, Trump stated:

For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.

Washington flourished – but the people did not share in its wealth.

Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed.

The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation’s Capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land. . . .

For too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

That’s the MAGA view stated plainly. Our elites have betrayed the American people and hollowed out the middle class. As Trump put it, “The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world.”

But that’s not all. A cabal of “neocons” and neoliberals has, for dark reasons, led the nation into "endless wars” that waste trillions of dollars, cost thousands of Americans their lives, and make us less, not more, secure.

To enjoy the fruits of cheap labor (and in the case of Democrats, to increase their voter base), our elites have flooded the country with illegal immigrants. These immigrants increase criminality, drain resources, and (according to Trump) eat our pets.

This is not the profile of a good country.

MAGA is ambivalent about America’s goodness even as compared to our foreign adversaries. Some in the movement blame America for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And Trump himself, when reminded by Bill O’Reilly that Vladimir Putin is “a killer,” responded: “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”

Radicals believe America needs radically to be transformed. The MAGA agenda calls for radical transformation — the deportation of all illegal immigrants, mass firings of federal employees as part of a larger plan to dismantle the administrative state, tariffs in amounts unprecedented in modern American history, and the pullout of U.S. forces from the Middle East.

I’m not taking a position here on the merits of any of these policies or stances, some of which I agree with. I’m just saying that, taken together, they form a radical agenda. Indeed, no recent American administration, Republican or Democrat, has advocated, much less implemented, even one of these policies.

But it’s not just the MAGA agenda that makes the current GOP radical. Ronald Reagan was a conservative, not a radical. Yet, parts of agenda seemed radical at the time.

Moreover, his first inaugural address spoke of “one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history,” an inflation that “distorts our economic decisions, penalizes thrift, crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike [and] threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people.” He also spoke of “idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, human misery, and personal indignity.”

But even in the context of an economy in far worse shape than the one Trump inherited, Reagan did not speak of “a small group in our nation’s capital,” or of an “establishment,” that willfully protects and enriches itself while Americans suffer.

Reagan described a misguided Washington, not an evil, conspiratorial one. And, in the true conservative spirit, and with his distinctive sunniness that contrasts so starkly with the dour and perpetually angry Trump, he said the nation would recover from its serious woes by a revival of traditional Americanism:

If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on Earth, it was because here in this land we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on Earth. The price for this freedom at times has been high, but we have never been unwilling to pay that price.

Trump’s first inaugural address contains no such tribute to the traditional American ethos. Instead, the fix would occur because “I will fight for you with every breath in my body – and I will never, ever let you down” and because “from this moment on, it’s going to be America First.”

It will be interesting to see the extent to which Trump’s second inaugural address follows the outline of his first.

Finally, it goes without saying that Reagan would never have deflected criticism of the Soviet Union or any American adversary but saying, as Trump did, “you think our country’s so innocent?” Reagan’s party was all about rejecting those who “always blame America first.” Trump’s party is very different.

I consider myself a conservative, not a radical, but I don’t deny that there’s a case for MAGA radicalism. My purpose here is not to denounce it. My purpose is just to identify it and to note what seems to be the absence in our politics of a major political party that thinks contemporary America is a great, or even good, country.