As I wrote last time, the United States is in the midst of another realignment, this time away from the GOP.
For years idealists have dreamed of a realignment in Japanese politics, away from factional wheeler-dealing and towards true policy-based competition.
Washington's traditional allies are eager for a more hawkish leader than Obama, whose nuclear deal with Iran and reluctance to deploy US forces against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria have fueled fears of an American realignment towards Tehran and away from the Gulf states.
Erdogan's regional foreign policy initiatives, his flirtation with Iran, his split with Israel, and his courting of supposedly suspect countries such as Syria have led western commentators to speculate about a "strategic realignment" in Turkish policy, away from the west and Nato and towards the Arab and Muslim worlds, in parallel with the AKP's pursuit of a neo-Islamist agenda at home.
When this a priori assumption about the external world is combined with noisy sensorimotor estimates, adaptation initiates a realignment of our perception away from veridicality and toward the temporal relationship experienced during adaptation.
Partisans on both sides keep waiting for a transformative, realigning election that sweeps all their enemies away, and when the realignment doesn't happen or seems to happen and then fizzles, they try to pin the blame on personalities rather than looking at deeper trends.
In the meantime, general elections are looming in France (May) and Germany (September) -- along with possible realignments that could draw Europe away from the United States.
Later realignments have shifted MD 36 away from the railroad in several locations, but three crossings remain: one north of Lonaconing, one south of Lonaconing near the MD 935 intersection, and a third crossing near Westernport.
Realignment has decentralized the bargaining power away from the top and down to the conferences, even to individual colleges.
As Reva Siegel and I document in a new afterword to the second edition of our book (the 2012 edition that's posted here), Republican strategists throughout the 1970s and well into '80s carefully cultivated the abortion issue in the service of party realignment, with the aim of peeling away urban ethnic Catholic voters from their traditional home in the Democratic Party.
