Philippa Kaur

The sharp increase in political polarization in America over the past 50 years has been driven in part by how different generations think about politics. But the rise of younger generations to political power may actually erase the deep social divisions associated with polarization.

That’s one of the strong possibilities for the future suggested by the diverse array of findings of our research, including editing a collection of the most current work on how different generations of Americans participate in public life.

For the past 30 years, baby boomers (those born roughly between 1946 and 1964) and members of the Silent Generation (those born between 1925 and 1945) have driven and defined American politics. For the most part, the Silent Generation and the older baby boomers were the core of the Republican Party. And the younger baby boomers, along with many Gen Xers (born roughly between 1965 and 1981), formed the core of the Democratic Party.

Millennials (born between 1982 and 1995) and Gen Z (born between 1996 and 2013) lean liberal and are more likely to vote for Democrats. They were key contributors to Democratic election wins in 2018, 2020 and 2022, especially in swing states.

Based on our research, presented in “Generational Politics in the United States: From the Silents to Gen Z and Beyond,” earlier generations – the Silents, baby boomers and Gen X – are more divided than millennials and Gen Z.

We expect that in the future, highly partisan members of the Silent, boomer and Gen X generations will exit and no longer be part of American political life. They will be replaced by millennials and Gen Zers, who are less likely to define themselves as strong Republicans or Democrats. The greater consensus among young people today may lessen polarization.

This 1989 photo of a bipartisan group of members of Congress alongside President George H.W. Bush shows a moment of collegiality despite party differences.
Mark Reinstein/Corbis via Getty Images

5 decades of change

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the vast majority of Americans had views roughly in the political center, with smaller numbers of people holding notably right-leaning or left-leaning opinions. In general, most voters had a broad consensus on policy issues. The Democratic and Republican parties were also broadly centrist. During this time period, Congress passed the Great Society programs, the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act and the Clean Air Act with bipartisan support.

But over the past 50 years, fewer and fewer Americans have identified themselves as aligned with the political center, and more have described themselves as on the right or the left, either as liberals or conservatives. This has led to increasing differences between the political parties, with the Democrats to the left of center and the Republicans to the right.

Members of Congress now are more likely to stick with their political party when voting, rather than vote for legislation supported by the other party. Recent passage of legislation linking Ukraine aid with support of Israel has been described as “rare cooperation among the parties.”

This polarization has many causes, including the influence of special-interest money on lawmakers and parties and society’s increased economic inequality. But our research highlights the role that new and changing generations can play in future shifts in American politics.

American politics is the constant cycle of generations entering and exiting the political arena. Even more, variation in the social and political environment during each generation’s formative years notably affects the attitudes and behaviors each generation will subsequently adopt.

For instance, the youngest generation is used to a 24-hour online news cycle and has experience with contested elections. Changes in generational attitudes today hold the potential to lessen current levels of polarization.

Generations have different characteristics

When we look across the past century, our research finds profound differences in the demographics and political views of the generations today.

The millennials and Gen Zers are the most racially and demographically diverse generations in American history. They are the least religious, which means they are less likely than their elders to say they follow a religion, to believe in a biblical god and to pray.

Additionally, these younger generations are more likely to self-identify as liberal. As we and others explain in several chapters of our book, surveys show they are more liberal on a whole range of issues regarding social matters, the economy, immigration and climate change.

Millennials and Gen Zers also vote more Democratic than older generations. And there is some evidence to support the expectation that their governing style as elected officials emphasizes issues that millennial citizens care about. For example, a set of millennial mayors who held office at various times from 2004 to 2024 focused on traditional economic concerns but also added social justice perspectives to the mix.

There may be a way to bridge some of the nation’s political gaps – wait.
Andrii Yalanskyi/iStock/Getty Images Plus

A new political center?

The consensus on political views among members of these younger generations means there is potential for decreasing polarization. This would be a key change in American politics, we believe for the better.

But there are other possible scenarios. As the old saying goes, demographics are not always destiny. There are thorny methodological questions involved in pinning down the impact of generations.

Politically, young Republican men can be conservative on social issues. And consensus among young Democrats could be challenged by events such as campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

Overall, however, generational shifts portend the possibility of decreasing polarization. More

By the end of winter 2024, the return of Donald Trump to the top of the GOP presidential ticket has revealed a surprising trend in the former president’s base of support: his increasing popularity among Black and Latino voters.

Several polls suggest as many as 23% of Black voters and 46% of Latino voters could cast their ballot for Trump.

If the polls are right, these numbers represent a far cry from the 6% of Black and 28% of Latino voters who supported Trump in 2016 and the 8% of Black voters and 32% of Latino voters who voted for Trump in 2020.

Given Trump’s long record of racist and xenophobic comments, the question, then, is why Trump’s support among voters of color has increased over the years.

A ‘racial realignment’?

Two explanations have emerged to explain Trump’s growth in support among voters of color.

The first is based on the faulty assumption, made by some Democratic strategists that the increasing racial and ethnic diversity of the U.S. electorate would automatically benefit Democratic candidates. This assumption rests on the idea that voters of color are inherently progressive on issues such as education, social services, health care and criminal justice reform.

According to this line of thinking, Trump’s polling numbers are mostly the result of poor messaging by the Democrats – a failure to remind voters of color that their interests align with Joe Biden, not Trump.

The second explanation is that voters of color are inherently conservative, particularly working-class Black and Latino men, who identify more closely with the political right on issues such as immigration, law and order and cultural conservativism.

“Many of America’s nonwhite voters have long held much more conservative views than their voting patterns would suggest,” data analyst John Burton-Murdoch argued in the Financial Times in March 2024. “The migration we’re seeing today is not so much natural Democrats becoming disillusioned but natural Republicans realizing they’ve been voting for the wrong party.”

Though few other analysts go as far, Burton-Murdoch concluded that the numbers represent “racial realignment.”

GOP appeals to cultural identities

Both interpretations suffer from the same faulty assumption that politics can be reduced to a simple exercise in consumer branding and retailing.

Polls provide snapshots of how individual voters feel about certain topics at particular points in time. But they cannot capture the complex forces shaping the varied political realities of the estimated 35 million voters of color.

More important in understanding the apparent racial political shifts are the efforts that are made on the ground in local communities, especially by right-wing activists, that are appealing to a sense of isolation, economic precariousness and widespread mistrust in government.

To see those efforts in action, we attended the December 2023 America Fest, an annual conference in Phoenix sponsored by Turning Point USA, a right-wing organization focused on students and young adults. Perhaps half of the 13,000 attendees were under 35, including small but noticeable numbers of people of color.

At the conference, the emphasis of the group’s messaging was on connecting people who say they feel frustrated about contemporary political and cultural life.

These appeals, which attempted to exploit widespread cynicism among young voters, were used in every part of the group’s social media and outreach efforts. Paraphernalia for such efforts are part of the group’s online activism kits that provide posters and buttons emblazoned with slogans such as “Deep in the heart of freedom,” “Womanhood is not a costume,” “Take pride in my country” and “I 2nd that.”

Cultural refrains that mock gay and transgender people and support the Second Amendment right to bear arms are becoming more popular across the right.

During the 2020 campaign, then-U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with Latino supporters in Phoenix.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

On another front, the Libre Initiative, a libertarian organization funded by the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, launched in August 2023 a multistate advertising campaign aimed at Latino voters that blames Biden for the economic precariousness many of them are facing.

With six months remaining in the presidential campaign, these and other GOP efforts appealing to voters of color appear to be working, based on polling thus far.

But the outcome of the election is far from certain.

In our view, what the polls are revealing is the GOP’s attempt to win support of an increasingly diverse electorate – not through appeals to policy or ideological interests but through forging connections often rooted in identity, community and a sense of belonging.

While polls may provide some useful information and cues, it’s important for American voters to remain cautious about using them as the catchall explanations for these complex and ongoing racial dynamics. More

A record number of people will go to polls in 2024 to vote in national elections around the world. People who came of age during the last electoral cycle will have an opportunity to cast their votes for the first time.

In wealthier countries with rapidly ageing populations, such as the US and the UK, there will again be record inter-generational divisions in turnout and political preferences.

In recent elections, a high proportion of people aged 18–24 supported Democratic party candidates and the Labour party. In 2020, 61% voted for Joe Biden (compared to 37% for Donald Trump) in the US, and 62% voted Labour in the UK’s 2019 general election (compared to 19% for the Conservatives).

Ahead of the UK’s upcoming general election, which could take place as late as January 2025, successive polls have placed the Conservatives at 10% or less among young adults.

Nevertheless, the new generation of young voters in the US and the UK are disillusioned with mainstream electoral politics and are unenthusiastic about casting their votes. In fact, turnout rates for young adults (aged 18–30) are around a third lower than for adults of all ages in these countries.

Youth support for main parties in the US and UK national elections since 1990.
James Sloam, CC BY-NC-SA

Overwhelming youth support for the Democrats and Labour masks a desire for a more radical form of politics that addresses young people’s concerns. Opinion polls often do a poor job of explaining youth priorities across broad categories such as the economy and health. But my own research from 2022 with young Londoners reveals clusters of priorities relating to economic, social and environmental issues.

These issues include housing, personal wellbeing and safety, group rights for women or minorities and broader international questions around climate change and the ongoing situation in Gaza. Compared to older generations, young people are also much more comfortable with diversity in society and much less concerned about immigration.

In the US and the UK, these sentiments were effectively articulated by Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn in recent elections.

Sanders and Corbyn were both viewed by young adults as authentic and radical, believing in what they said, and offering meaningful solutions to pressing problems like low wages, unaffordable housing and university tuition fees. In the 2016 US primaries, Sanders received more votes from young Americans (aged 18–30) than Hilary Clinton and Trump (the two final candidates) put together.

Youth electoral participation (or non-participation) is also defined by a country’s electoral system. In countries with proportional representation, the trend towards socially liberal values and greater state intervention has led to increased support for alternative political parties.

For example, the Green party in Germany became the largest political party among those aged 18–24 at the 2021 federal election. It secured the votes of just under a quarter of young adults – almost as much as the two main parties (Social Democrats and Christian Democrats) combined.

A visualisation of the key political issues identified by young Londoners.
James Sloam, CC BY-NC-SA

Division among the young

Young people are, of course, not all the same. There are important divisions within this age group based on gender, socioeconomic status and ethnicity.

In the UK’s 2017 general election, 73% of young women voted Labour compared to only 52% of young men. And in the 2022 US mid-terms, 71% of young women voted Democrat compared to 53% of young men – a difference that was driven by the 2022 Supreme Court ruling allowing individual states to ban abortion.

In response to the ruling, young women registered to vote in record numbers, casting their ballots against Republican candidates who supported the decision.

These differences are reflected in participation in social movements. For example, the 2019 climate strikes were overwhelmingly comprised of young women and girls. The protests of one girl, Greta Thunberg, in a town square in Sweden, quickly spread into a global movement of millions of young people.

Socioeconomic status plays an equally important role. Young people from poorer backgrounds or with low levels of educational attainment are much less likely to turn out in elections than graduates or young people in full-time education.

In the UK, around two-thirds of university students turned out in recent general elections compared to around one-third of young people from the lowest social group. Young people from low-income backgrounds, if they do turn out, are often drawn to populist right-wing causes, such as the candidacies of Trump in the US and Marine Le Pen in France – especially in the case of young, white men.

The latter point illustrates how race or ethnicity shape youth participation. This is particularly true in the US where an estimated 87% of black youth voted for Biden in 2020 against just 10% for Trump.

However, the support of young minoritised ethnic voters for progressive candidates and parties has proved frustrating, as existential economic and security issues have not been addressed. It was the Black Lives Matter movement and citizen-generated evidence, rather than politicians and parties, that shone a spotlight on police brutality and discrimination in the US and many other countries.

Read more:
Black Lives Matter protests are shaping how people understand racial inequality

The forthcoming elections in the UK, the US and many other rich democracies are likely to be defined by inter-generational cleavages. However, it is far from certain if young people will be drawn to the polls.

There is a dilemma for progressive candidates and parties regarding how far they are willing to go to appeal to younger generations given the inter-generational divisions that exist. Yet this is fast becoming a risk worth taking.

Successive generations of young people are entering the electorate with socially liberal views and positive attitudes towards state intervention to address economic, social and environmental challenges: from poor mental health, to the cost of housing, to concerns about pollution and climate change. More

The first week of testimony is winding down in former President Donald Trump’s trial in New York City on charges that he falsified business records to cover up hush money payments to an adult film star, in an effort to avoid reporting the payments as campaign-related spending.

In a discussion that quickly shifted to topics well outside the courtroom itself, The Conversation U.S. spoke with Tim Bakken, a former New York prosecutor and now a legal scholar teaching at West Point, and Karrin Vasby Anderson, a scholar of political communication at Colorado State University, about the week’s events.

Their focus this week was on how Trump and other politicians interact with the U.S. media, and how their interactions relate to democracy itself.

Trump’s approach to the media

Anderson: Testimony in the case so far has indicated that Donald Trump thinks that an appropriate way to control or shape the news cycle is to pay off media professionals. That’s a departure from what politicians typically do, which is to hire media strategists who help them shape their message and their political platform in ways that garner favorable media coverage.

Trump’s approach is much more transactional. When he was president, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that he took the “unprecedented move” of revoking press passes from members of the White House press corps who covered him unfavorably.

And some journalists appear to be taking cues from Trump.

Earlier this week, in a Truth Social post, Trump attributed the following quotation to Fox News host Jesse Watters: “They are catching undercover Liberal Activists lying to the Judge in order to get on the Trump jury.” The New York Times found that Trump embellished the quote: The words “in order to get on the Trump Jury” were not in Watters’ initial report.

It’s not surprising that Trump embellished or changed a quotation. What’s really staggering is that after the fact, Watters posted on X the exact statement Trump had made, which was not what Watters had said on air. Essentially, Watters was allowing Trump to be his editor in his coverage and characterization of this case.

Regardless of how the court decides, I think the average American should be concerned that Trump approaches the free press from a transactional perspective. Trump looks to who he can pay off or threaten or intimidate so they will tell the story he wants.

Trump’s reaction to criticism

Bakken: Trump is saying that the media engages in the same kinds of distortions that he engages in when he says, more loudly, things that verge on falsehoods or are falsehoods.

Uri Berliner, a former editor for NPR, essentially raised the same allegations in a recent online column, concluding that NPR’s coverage is swayed by the personal identities and characteristics of its journalists. In essence, according to Berliner, NPR may distort reality, though in a more subtle way than Trump, by virtue of the journalists it hires, the sources who are quoted by the journalists and the stories the editors decide to cover, to the disadvantage of Trump.

Trump seems to be responding to what he perceives as the media, including NPR and The Washington Post, calling him names, such as “authoritarian,” including by characterizing his speech as action.

As a candidate and as a criminal defendant, Trump can point to verifiable facts that signal possible unfairness. For instance, he’s being tried by a jury selected in a jurisdiction where Democrats outnumber Republicans 9 to 1. And the piece about NPR said 87 NPR editors are registered members of the Democratic party and none are Republicans – though at least some are not members of either party.

Maybe he’s saying it’s as great a threat to democracy to be singled out by the democratic institutions – which are supposed to be seeing both sides – because he’s a dissenter or a communicator who is different from other people.

Anderson: The concern that I’m raising with the Jesse Watters case is not that it was friendly towards Trump. It’s that Watters changed his reporting to fit Trump’s narrative after Trump misquoted him.

Trump tweeted something that was a lie: He said “Jesse Watters said ‘XYZ’” and Watters didn’t – Trump added to Watters’ words. That was going to be a problem for Trump because he would have been caught misquoting Watters. So Watters fixed that by going back and matching Trump’s words.

The bottom line is that Trump has shown a willingness in the course of a campaign and presidency to influence the press in ways that other politicians have not.

Trying to get the media to give you a friendly news framing is politics as usual. Paying people with secret deals, or by intimidating or punishing journalists, that’s an entirely different thing. Regardless of whether Trump is convicted of a crime this time around, I do believe that this case is illustrative of his relationship with the media and how he thinks about it differently than other people who’ve been president of the United States.

Donald Trump speaks to the media briefly upon his arrival at court on April 25, 2024.
Jefferson Siegel/The New York Times via AP, Pool

Fighting back

Bakken: In 1996 I ran as a Democratic candidate for Congress in my home district in Wisconsin. I lost in the primary.

I have some experience in trying to convince somebody in the media to write a favorable article by giving a reporter information.

I don’t see how treating a friendly reporter more favorably than you treat an unfriendly reporter is any different. You’re advantaging a journalist who shares your point of view and disadvantaging a journalist who does not share your point of view.

Through deciding what stories to publish, NPR might be doing the same thing that Fox News is doing, except that we didn’t know it until Berliner spoke up. Both internally and publicly, NPR has rejected Berliner’s criticism, but its listeners may have had concerns. Since 2020, the number of weekly NPR listeners plunged from 60 million to 42 million in March 2024, according to The New York Times.

It seems to me that Trump is fighting back against the press in a way that’s more aggressive than other people’s, but he feels that is his only approach. A lot of people align with him because they feel that disconnection from what they believe are institutions that are no longer fair.

A difference from the past

Anderson: My job as I see it, as somebody who is trained in political communication, is not to stump for either side. But I do simply say: When a presidential candidate misquotes a journalist, and then later the journalist posts a second quote that confirms the candidate’s misinformation, that is dangerous, and we should be worried about it. The misquote, by the way, seems to have been influential in one of the jurors stepping down because she was getting bad feedback.

That’s not normal. It isn’t how most politicians, Republican or Democratic, have dealt with the national media prior to Trump. More

In April 2022, conservative American think tank the Heritage Foundation, working with a broad coalition of 50 conservative organisations, launched Project 2025: a plan for the next conservative president of the United States.

The Project’s flagship publication, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, outlines in plain language and in granular detail, over 900-plus pages, what a second Trump administration (if it occurs) might look like. I’ve read it all, so you don’t have to.

The Mandate’s veneer of exhausting technocratic detail, focused mostly on the federal bureaucracy, sits easily alongside a Trumpian project of revenge and retribution. It is the substance behind the showmanship of the Trump rallies.

Developing transition plans for a presidential candidate is normal practice in the US. What is not normal about Project 2025, with its intertwined domestic and international agenda, are the plans themselves. Those for climate and the global environment, defence and security, the global economic system and the institutions of American democracy more broadly aim for nothing less than the total dismantling and restructure of both American life and the world as we know it.

The unapologetic agenda, according to Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts, is to “defeat the anti-American left – at home and abroad.”

Recommendations include completely abolishing the US Federal Reserve in favour of a system of “free banking”, the total reversal of all the Biden administration’s climate policies, a dramatic increase in fossil fuel extraction and use, ending economic engagement with China, expanding the nuclear arsenal and a “comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of U.S. participation in all international organizations” including the UN and its agencies. And that’s not all.

Australia itself is mentioned just seven times in the substantive text, with vague recommendations that a future administration support “greater spending and collaboration” with regional partners in defence and send a political appointee here as ambassador. But even if only partially implemented, the document’s overarching recommendations would have significant implications for Australia and our region.

Project 2025 is modelled on what the Foundation sees as its greatest historical triumph. The launch of the first Mandate for Leadership coincided with Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981. By the following year, according to the Foundation, “more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy”.

Four decades later, Project 2025 is trying to repeat history.

The Project is not directly aligned with the Trump campaign: it has in fact attracted some ire from the campaign for presuming too much. Trump is under no obligation to adopt any of its plans should he return to the White House. But the sheer number of former Trump officials and loyalists involved in the Project, and its particular commitment to supporting a Trump return, suggest we should take its plans very seriously.

Much of what is happening now in the US is unprecedented. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, is currently locked in a Manhattan courtroom defending himself from criminal charges. Despite this unedifying spectacle, current polling separates Biden and Trump by a gap of just 2%, according to the latest poll. This year will be an existential test for American democracy.

Read more:
Is America enduring a ‘slow civil war’? Jeff Sharlet visits Trump rallies, a celebrity megachurch and the manosphere to find out

The four pillars

Project 2025’s chosen method for engineering its radical reshaping of that democracy takes a startlingly familiar bureaucratic approach. It aims to create a system where any potential chaos is contained by an administration and bureaucracy united by the same conservative vision. The vision rests on four “pillars”.

Pillar one is the 920-page Mandate – the manifesto for the next conservative president (and the major focus of this analysis).

Pillar two is the foundation’s recruitment program: a kind of conservative LinkedIn that aims to build a database of vetted, loyal conservatives ready to serve in the next administration.

The program is specifically designed to “deconstruct the Administrative State”: code for using Schedule F, a Trump-era executive order (since overturned), that would allow an administration to unilaterally re-categorise, fire and replace tens of thousands of independent federal employees with political loyalists.

Pillar three, the “Presidential Administration Academy”, will train those new recruits and existing amenable officials in the nature and use of power within the American political system, so they can effectively and efficiently implement the president’s agenda.

Pillar four consists of a secret “Playbook” – a resources bank of things like draft executive orders and specific transition plans ready for the first 180 days of a new administration.

The four pillars inform each other. The Mandate, for example, doubles as a recruitment tool that educates aspiring officials in the complex structures of the US federal government.

Current polling separates Biden and Trump by just 2%.
Andy Manis/AAP

A response to Trump’s failures

The Mandate doesn’t specify who the next conservative president might be, but it is clearly written with Trump in mind. As it outlines, “one set of eyes reading these passages will be those of the 47th President of the United States”. What the Mandate can’t acknowledge is that the man aiming to be the 47th president was notorious for not reading his briefs when he occupied the Oval Office.

An unspoken aim of Project 2025 is to inject some ideological coherence into Trumpism. It aims to focus if not the leader, then the movement behind him – something that did not happen in the four years between January 2017 and January 2021. The entire project is a response to the perceived failures and weaknesses of the Trump administration.

Project 2025’s vision rests on almost completely gutting and replacing the bureaucracy that (in the view of its authors) thwarted and undermined the Trump presidency. It aims to remodel and reorganise the “blob” of powerful people who cycle through the landscape of American power between think tanks, government and higher education institutions.

It explicitly welcomes conservatives to this “mission” of assembling “an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State”. “Conservatives”, in this framing, are not those who would defend and protect the institutions and traditions of the state, but rather right-wing radicals who would fundamentally change them.

The choice of language – “mission”, “army” – is also deliberate. The Mandate repeatedly distinguished between “real people” and what it sees as existential enemies. “America is now divided,” it argues, “between two opposing forces”. Those forces are irreconcilable, and because that fight extends abroad, “there is no margin for error”.

This framing of an America and a world engaged in an existential battle is underpinned by granular, bureaucratic detail – right down to recommendations for low-level appointments, budget allocations and regulatory reform. Effective understanding – and use of – the machinery of American power is, the Heritage Foundation believes, essential to victory.

That is why the Mandate is 920 pages from cover to cover, why it has 30 chapters written by “hundreds of contributors” with input from “more than 400 scholars and policy experts” and why it can now claim the support of 100 organisations.

What follows is a broad analysis of the implications of Project 2025 for the world outside the United States.

Drill baby, drill: climate and the environment

In late 2023, Donald Trump was asked by Fox News anchor Sean Hannity if he would be a “dictator”. Trump responded he would not, “except on day one”. In the flurry of coverage that followed, rightly condemning and outlining Trump’s repeated threats to American democracy, the aspiring president’s stated reasons for a day of dictatorship were overshadowed.

But Trump was explicit: “We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling.” While Trump himself may not be across or even aligned with the specific detail of much of Project 2025’s aims, on “drilling, drilling, drilling,” they are very much in sync.

Trump says he will be a dictator on day one.

The Mandate condemns what it describes as a “radical climate agenda” and “Biden’s war on fossil fuels”, recommending an immediate rollback of all Biden administration programs and reinstatement of Trump-era policies.

One of Biden’s signature legislative achievements, the Inflation Reduction Act, attracts a great deal of attention. Unsurprisingly, the broad recommendation is that the Act be repealed in its entirety. But the recommendations are also specific: repeal “credits and tax breaks for green energy companies”, stop “programs providing grants for environmental science activities” and ensure “the rescinding of all funds not already spent by these programs”. This would include removing “federal mandates and subsidies of electric vehicles”.

There is, in all, a great deal to “eliminate” – a word that appears in the Mandate over 250 times. In environmental policy, programs on the elimination list include the Clean Energy Corps, energy efficiency standards for appliances, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations in the Department of Energy, and the entire National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

But this is not all. The elimination of climate-focused programs, legislation, offices and policies would be accompanied by a dramatic increase in fossil fuel extraction and use – a reversal of Biden’s “war”.

The chapter on the Department of the Interior, which manages federal lands and natural resources, recommends it “conduct offshore oil and natural gas lease sales to the maximum extent permitted” and restart the coal-leasing program.

This should include returning to the first Trump administration’s plans to further open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil fields development. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should, likewise, “not use environmental issues like climate change as a reason to stop LNG projects”.

The Mandate recommends further opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil fields development.
AAP

Given the size and influence of the US economy, these policies would inevitably have global implications. This is not lost on the Mandate’s authors: the fight against the “radical climate agenda” is both local and global.

The chapter on Treasury, for example, recommends that a conservative administration “withdraw from climate change agreements that are inimical to the prosperity of the United States”. This includes, specifically, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement (which Trump withdrew the United States from in 2020, and Biden rejoined in 2021).

Analysis by the Guardian argues that taken together, these plans for rewinding climate action and accelerating fossil fuel extraction and use would be “even more extreme for the environment” than those of the first Trump administration.

This would not be a straightforward case of the US reverting from being a “good” actor on climate to a “bad” one. While the Biden administration has presided over some of the most significant climate legislation and actions in US history, domestic oil production has also hit a record high under Biden’s leadership. The US is already the second highest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.

Several nations, including Australia, might find it convenient to hide behind the much more explicitly destructive policies of a future conservative US administration.

According to modelling by UK-based Carbon Brief, which does not include the increases in fossil fuel extraction and use outlined by the Mandate, a second Trump administration could result in an increase in emissions “equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the EU and Japan, or the combined annual total of the world’s 140 lowest-emitting countries”.

That would mean, even without accounting for the opening of new oil reserves in places like Alaska, “a second Trump term […] would likely end any global hopes of keeping global warming below 1.5C”.

Project 2025’s authors are, of course, unapologetic. The Mandate demands that the next conservative administration “go on offense” and assert “America’s energy interests […] around the world” – to the point of establishing “full-spectrum strategic energy dominance”, in order to restore the nation’s global primacy.

A world on fire: security and defence

Restoring that global primacy is the focus of Section 2 of the Mandate. This section argues the Departments of Defense and State are “first among equals” with the executive branch, suggesting international relations should be a major focus for the next conservative presidency. It argues the success of such an administration “will be determined in part by whether [Defence and State] can be significantly improved in short order”.

Why is that improvement so important? Because, according to the Mandate, the US is engaged in an existential battle with its enemies, in “a world on fire”. China is, unsurprisingly, the main game: “America’s most dangerous international enemy”.

The Mandate’s overwhelming focus on China and its assessment that the world is in an era of “great power competition” is not radically different from the position of the current administration – nor the rest of the Western world. But the Mandate’s suggested response is different.

“The next conservative President,” the Mandate claims, “has the opportunity to restructure the making and execution of U.S. defense and foreign policy and reset the nation’s role in the world.”

For Defense, this reset means restoring “warfighting as its sole mission” and making its highest priority “defeating the threat of the Chinese Communist Party”. It means dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and bringing its remit under Defense. It then recommends the department help with “aggressively building the border wall system on America’s southern border” and deploy “military personnel and hardware to prevent illegal crossings”.

President Donald Trump tours a section of the southern border wall, 2019.
Evan Vucci/AAP

Along with this expanded, more aggressive role for the Pentagon, the Mandate advocates for a dramatic expansion in defence personnel. A reduced force in Europe would be combined with an increase in “the Army force structure by 50,000 to handle two major regional contingencies simultaneously”.

It’s not quite clear how recruitment would be boosted so quickly. But at one point, the Mandate recommends requiring completion of the military entrance examination “by all students in schools that receive federal funding”. This is one of many lines that hints at a radical reshaping of American life.

The “two major contingencies” the department must prepare for appear to be “threats” from both China and Russia. As the long fight over US funding for Ukraine has demonstrated, however, many Trump-aligned conservatives have an ideological affinity with Putin’s Russia. This radical turnaround in the recent history of US–Russia relations marks a clear tension in conservative politics.

The Mandate acknowledges Russia now “starkly divides conservatives”. But it offers no real resolution, suggesting this would be left up to the president. Inevitable contradictions like this run throughout.

Even on China – one of very few issues that unites conservatives and liberals – the Mandate can contradict itself. One chapter, for example, worries about China blocking market access for the United States. Another advocates complete market decoupling.

Modernise, adapt, expand: on the nuclear arsenal

Trump has repeatedly toyed with the possibility of using nuclear weapons. In 2016, the then-candidate was pressed on why he wouldn’t rule out using them. He responded with his own question: “Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?”

As president, Trump repeatedly bragged about the US nuclear arsenal and weapons development, and allegedly illegally removed classified documents concerning nuclear capabilities from the White House. During his presidency, the US also dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb, nicknamed with characteristic misogyny the “mother of all bombs”, on Afghanistan.

Trump alarmed nuclear experts by talking about America’s nuclear weapons.

The Mandate encourages more weapons development. It argues the Department of Energy should refocus on “developing new nuclear weapons and naval nuclear reactors”. Its recommendation that the United States “expand” its nuclear arsenal in order to “deter Russia and China simultaneously” will especially concern advocates of non-proliferation.

The Mandate also recommends the next administration “end ineffective and counterproductive nonproliferation activities like those involving Iran and the United Nations”.

“Friends and adversaries” abroad

This ramping up of American militarism should be accompanied, according to the Mandate, by a radical shakeup of American diplomacy. The next administration should

significantly reorient the U.S. government’s posture toward friends and adversaries alike – which will include much more honest assessments about who are friends and who are not. This reorientation could represent the most significant shift in core foreign policy principles and corresponding action since the end of the Cold War.

In a line that inevitably provokes thoughts of regime change, the Mandate suggests “the time may be right to press harder on the Iranian theocracy […] and take other steps to draw Iran into the community of free and modern nations”. It is, of course, silent on how disastrous regime change has proved to be in the conduct of US foreign policy over the past half century.

The Mandate also suggests a return to the Trump administration’s “tough love” approach to US participation in international organisations, ensuring no foreign aid supports reproductive rights or care, and that USAID, the nation’s major aid agency, “rescind all climate policies”.

All of this would mean installing “political ambassadors with strong personal relationships with the President”, especially in “key strategic posts such as Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United Nations, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)”. In the State Department specifically, “No one in a leadership position on the morning of January 20 should hold that position at the end of the day.”

Perhaps most significantly, Roberts argues in the Mandate’s foreword that “Economic engagement with China should be ended, not rethought.” The chapter on the Department of Commerce similarly argues for “strategic decoupling from China”.

The Mandate recommends ‘economic engagement with China should be ended, not rethought’. Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Roman Pilipey/AAP

Given the size and scope of the American and Chinese economies, and smaller nations like Australia’s reliance on stable economic relations with both, such a “decoupling” from China, alongside a ramping up of militarism, would have significant, wide-ranging consequences.

Another recommendation is that the United States “withdraw” from both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and “terminate its financial contribution to both institutions”. The global consequences of even more radical suggestions like a return to the gold standard, or even “abolishing the federal role in money altogether” in favour of a system of “free banking”, are genuinely mind-boggling.

A new, frightening world in the making?

Project 2025 opens a window onto the modern American conservative movement, documenting in minute detail just how much it has reoriented itself around Trump and the ideological incoherence of Trumpism more broadly. The success, or not, of this effort to unify the movement will also have international implications, as those same organisations and individuals cultivate their connections with the far-right globally.

While Trump, as always, is difficult to predict, there are long and deep links between his campaign and supporters and the Project’s supporters and contributors. Nothing is inevitable, but should Trump return to the White House, it is highly likely at least some of Project 2025’s recommendations, policies, authors, and aspiring officials will join him there. These include people like Peter Navarro, a former Trump official, loyalist and Mandate author, who is currently serving a four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress because he refused to comply with a congressional subpoena during the January 6 investigation.

Project 2025’s Mandate is iconoclastic and dystopian, offering a dark vision of a highly militaristic and unapologetically aggressive America ascendant in “a world on fire”. Those who wish to understand Trump and the movement behind him, and the active threat they pose to American democracy, are obliged to take it seriously. More

In August 1982, Ronald Reagan’s father-in-law was dying. Nancy Reagan’s beloved dad, Loyal Davis, was an atheist – a troubling fact to the 40th president. So Reagan penned a private, handwritten note in which he recounted how the prayers of colleagues and friends had cured him of a painful stomach ulcer.

Giving hope for what lay beyond, Reagan entreated the older man, “We’ve been promised this is only a part of life and that a greater life, a greater glory awaits us … and all that is required is that you believe and tell God you put yourself in his hands.”

For decades, some of Reagan’s critics have questioned his religiosity, noting he rarely went to church. But the missive to his father-in-law reveals a deep and heartfelt faith. That faith also factored heavily into his political stands and policies, as I discuss in my book “Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision.”

In recent years, Donald Trump, another former president and the current Republican presidential candidate, has often spoken about his faith, posing for photo ops with right-wing preachers and praising his “favorite book” – the Bible.

The latest such demonstration was a video in which Trump promoted sales of a pricey US$59.99 version of the Bible. “Let’s make America pray again,” he urged viewers. “As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless the USA Bible.”

While Reagan and Trump – two of the most media-savvy Republican presidents – used religion to advance their political visions, their messages and missions are starkly different.

Why religion plays a part in politics

In my book, I explain that underlying American politics is a religious vision that links citizens to civic values. The most prevalent vision is that God blessed America and tasked its citizens with spreading freedom and democracy. It’s an idea that has undergirded Americans’ patriotism and inspired American domestic and foreign policies for decades.

Reagan telegraphed belief in a God-blessed America by describing the United States as “a shining city on a hill.” Reagan flipped the original meaning of a Biblical phrase from a 17th century Puritan sermon. In Matthew 5:14, Jesus warns that the world will judge whether or not his disciples, a symbolic city on a hill, stick to their ideals. By adding “shining,” Reagan sanctified American exceptionalism and the United States’ role as a global model of freedom.

Reagan described the U.S. as a ‘shining city on a hill,’ signaling American exceptionalism.
J. David Ake J./AFP via Getty Images

Once elected, Reagan sought practical ways to apply his faith in freedom, which, like many evangelicals, he believed came from God. By cutting taxes, ending industry regulations and privatizing government functions, he hoped to give individuals more economic and political freedom.

Reagan’s love of freedom also fueled his hostility to the Soviet Union. He labeled its communist government “an evil empire,” because it denied its citizens freedom. Casting a geopolitical stance as a cosmic battle between good and evil, Reagan made defeating communism a religious calling.

I argue that Reagan’s evangelical vision was mainstreamed through the media, which reported his interviews and public statements. This vision was not always apparent, but Americans liked his policies even if they missed their religious dimension. In other words, when Reagan proposed allowing the free market to determine the economy, limiting federal power and standing up for democracy worldwide, one didn’t need to be an evangelical to agree.

A new religious vision

Trump saw an opening for a new kind of religiously tinged politics when he ran for president in 2016. But unlike Reagan’s vision of spreading freedom and democracy here and abroad, Trump’s vision sticks closer to home.

I would argue that Trump’s religious vision is rooted in white Christian nationalism, the belief that the white Christians who founded America hoped to spread Protestant beliefs and ideals. According to white Christian nationalists, the founders also wanted to limit the influence of non-Christian immigrants and enslaved Africans.

Likewise, Trump’s rhetoric, mainstreamed by the media, portrays “real” Americans as white Christians. Many of these are men and women fearful that secularists and religious, racial and ethnic minorities want to replace, if not eliminate, them.

By most measures, Trump is not personally religious, although supporters contest that claim. But he has convinced conservative Americans, especially white evangelicals, that he is “God’s instrument on earth.”

When confronted with his financial misconduct, sexual crimes and outrageous lies, backers say that God works through flawed men. And evidence of that work – the U.S. Supreme Court overturning abortion rights, building the border wall and moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – has won him their support.

Trump’s mainstreaming of white Christian nationalism is evident in his latest scheme. The God Bless the USA Bible sports an American flag on its cover. Included with scripture is the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Pledge of Allegiance and the handwritten lyrics to singer Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” A portion of the sales will benefit Trump’s organization.

Christianity and nationalism hand in hand

Former President Donald Trump and his faith.

Trump rejects America’s role as the “shining city on a hill” and its mission to spread freedom and democracy. His goal is to restore what he calls the “founding fathers’ vision.” It’s a vision shared by Americans who think the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation, despite proof to the contrary.

Religion can be a force for good or ill. Reagan believed that his religious vision would promote individual freedom and spread democracy worldwide. Americans may agree or disagree on whether he was successful and at what cost.

But Trump’s religious vision – one that hawks Bibles, disparages democracy and mocks governance – isn’t one that Reagan would recognize. More

If you pay any attention to politics and polling, you have likely heard that your friends and neighbors are not very happy with the direction of the country. You might not be, either.

One ABC News/Ipsos survey in November 2023 showed three-quarters of Americans believed the country was on the “wrong track.” Only 23% believed it was headed in the “right direction.”

And the survey was not an outlier. Poll after poll shows a sizable majority of the nation’s residents disapprove of its course.

Have Americans – long seen as upbeat, can-do optimists – really grown dour about the state of the nation and where it’s headed?

The answer, we think, is yes and no. Or, to be more direct, as the researchers who run the American Communities Project, which explores the differences in 15 different types of community in the United States, we believe the surveys are asking a question with no real meaning in the United States in 2024 – a question that may have outlived its usefulness.

An ‘astonishing finding’

“Do you feel things in the country are generally going in the right direction, or do you feel things have gotten off on the wrong track?”

That question or one very much like it is well known to anyone who has glanced at a poll story or studied the data of a survey in the past 50 years.

Residents of both urban and rural areas said the U.S. was on the wrong track – but for different reasons.
Seahorse Vector/iStock / Getty Images Plus

These public opinion surveys, often sponsored by news organizations, seek to understand where the public stands on the key issues of the day. In essence, they tell the public about itself. Political parties and candidates often conduct their own surveys with a version of the “right direction/wrong track” question to better understand their constituencies and potential voters.

The American Communities Project, based at Michigan State University, uses demographic and socioeconomic measures to break the nation’s 3,100 counties into 15 different types of communities – everything from what we label as “big cities” to “aging farmlands.” In our work with the project, we’ve found a strong reason to be skeptical of the “right direction/wrong track” question. Simply put, the divisions in the country have rendered the question obsolete.

In 2023, we worked with Ipsos to survey more than 5,000 people across the country in all those community types. We asked the survey participants what issues they were concerned about locally and nationally. How did they feel about the Second Amendment? About gender identity? About institutional racism? We found a lot of disagreement on those and other controversial issues.

But there were also a few areas of agreement. One of the big ones: In every community we surveyed, at least 70% said the country was on the “wrong track.” And that is an astonishing finding.

Agreement for different reasons

Why was that response so surprising?

The community types we study are radically different from each other. Some are urban and some are rural. Some are full of people with bachelor’s degrees, while others have few. Racially and ethnically, some look like America as it is projected to be in 30 years – multicultural – and some look like the nation did 50 years ago, very white and non-Hispanic. Some of the communities voted for President Joe Biden by landslide numbers in 2020, while others did the same for Donald Trump.

Given those differences, how could they be in such a high level of agreement on the direction of the country?

To answer that question, we visited two counties in New York state in January that are 3½ hours and several worlds away from each other: New York County, which is labeled a “big city” in our typology and encompasses Manhattan, and Chenango County, labeled “rural middle America” in our work, located in the south-central part of the state.

In 2020, Biden won 86% of the vote in big metropolitan Manhattan, and Trump won 60% in aging, rural Chenango.

When we visited those two counties, we heard a lot of talk of America’s “wrong track” in both places from almost everyone. More important, we heard huge differences in “why” the country was on the wrong track.

“If something don’t change in the next election, we’re going to be done. We’re going to be a socialist country. They’re trying to tell you what you can do and can’t do. That’s dictatorship, isn’t it? Isn’t this a free country?” said James Stone, 75, in Chenango County.

Also in Chenango County, Leon Lamb, 69, is concerned about the next generation.

“I’m worried about them training the kids in school,” he said. “You got kids today who don’t even want to work. They get free handouts … I worked when I was a kid … I couldn’t wait to get out of the house. I wanted to be on my own.”

In New York City, meanwhile, Emily Boggs, 34, a theater artist, bartender and swim instructor, sees things differently as she struggles to make ends meet.

“We’ve been pitched since we were young, that like, America is the best country in the world. Everyone wants to be here, you’re free, and you can do whatever you want,” Boggs said. “And it’s like, well, if you have the money … I’ve got major issues with millionaires and billionaires not having to pay their full share of taxes, just billionaires existing … It’s the inequality.”

A lifelong New York City resident, Harvey Leibovitz, 89, told us: “The country is on the wrong direction completely. But it’s based upon a very extreme but significant minority that has no regard to democracy, and basically, in my opinion, is racist and worried about the color of the population.”

As a stand-alone question, ‘Is the country going in the right direction or on the wrong track’ is not very helpful.
3D_generator/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Opposite views in same answer

To be clear, we are not saying that asking people about the direction of the country is completely worthless. There may be some value in chronicling Americans’ unhappiness with the state of their country, but as a stand-alone question, “right direction/wrong track” is not very helpful. It’s the beginning of a conversation, not a meaningful measure.

It turns out that one person’s idea about the country being on the wrong track may be completely the opposite of another person’s version of America’s wrong direction.

It’s easy to grasp the appeal of one broad question aimed at summarizing people’s thoughts. But in a complicated and deeply fragmented country, a more nuanced view of the public’s perceptions of the nation would help Americans understand more about themselves and their country. More

The division between right and left around the world has rarely felt more polarised. Of course there have always been differences between people on the different ends of the political spectrum, but now it seems they are living in different worlds entirely. This is perhaps related to the tendency for those on the right to focus on the past and to strive for a world that once was and the tendency for those on the left to do the opposite.

Take two of the most famous political slogans of recent times: Barack Obama’s “Yes we can” and Donald Trump’s “Make America great again”. While Obama’s message evokes glimpses of a prosperous future, Trump’s expresses a nostalgic outlook towards the past.

In the UK, the successful Brexit campaign, which was largely led by conservatives, famously called on people to “take back control”, while the Labour party has just launched its local election campaign under the slogan “Britain’s future”.

The pattern is similar around the world. In South Africa, the rightwing Freedom Front Plus has recently carried the slogan “Stop the decay”. For the upcoming presidential elections in Mexico, the leftwing National Regeneration Movement is mobilising voters with “United for the transformation”.

In a recent study, I explored whether, within the general public, people on the right evaluate the past, present, and future differently compared to people on the left. I asked a sample of 1,200 people to judge different periods of history.

They were asked about the period from 1950 to 2000, the present day and the near future (by giving their view on what society would look like in 25 years). I drew participants from the US, UK, Italy, South Africa, Mexico and Poland – countries with different economies, cultures and political regimes.

Labour looks to the future.
Alamy

In every country, rightwingers evaluated the recent past more positively than leftwingers. In the US, Poland and the UK, by contrast, leftwingers were more optimistic about what humanity could achieve in the near future.

Interestingly, the effect on the left did not emerge in Italy, Mexico, and South Africa. Therefore, while the right’s more positive view of the past seems to be shared across countries, the left’s higher optimism does not.

The glorious past

In one experiment for the study, a group of participants was prompted to look more favourably to the past. These participants did not appear to be more open to rightwing opinions after having done so. This suggests that the connection does not run in this direction. Being more nostalgic about the past does not predispose people to endorse rightwing beliefs.

On the other hand, another experiment encouraged a group of participants to freely reflect on their political opinions. Rightwing participants from this group became more nostalgic about the past when given this prompt.

Leftwing participants became less so. This suggests that endorsing rightwing opinions at the start leads people to be more nostalgic, while endorsing leftwing opinions does the opposite.

One last experiment explored nostalgia in more detail. Here I considered two potential forms of nostalgia. Some people may be nostalgic about traditional communities, about the old hierarchical order, about stronger family ties and about traditional culture. Other people may be nostalgic about the state of the economy, hearkening back to a time when governments tended to intervene more.

Is the right nostalgic about tradition, the economy, or both? In my experiment, it was people on the left, not the right, who were more nostalgic about the economy. Those on the right had greater nostalgia for tradition.

The data does also show that the economic nostalgia on the left is not as strong as the nostalgia for tradition on the right, explaining why the right can, overall, be considered more nostalgic than the left.

These findings help explain why it’s so common for rightwing politicians to appeal to voters with promises to take them back to the good old days, and for leftwing slogans to mobilise voters towards building a better future – and perhaps offers lessons to those politicians who’d like to reach across the divide. More