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      Wrestling With Inequality, Some Conservatives Redraw Economic Blueprint

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      A growing number of Republican politicians and theorists are challenging party orthodoxy on pocketbook issues, corporate power and government’s role.More Republicans are coming to the view that economic inequality, or a lack of social mobility, is a problem in the United States — and that more can be done to enable families to attain or regain a middle-class life.Though discussions about inequality tend to be most visible among liberals, about four in 10 Republican or Republican-leaning adults think there is too much economic inequality in the country, according to a Pew Research survey. And among Republicans making less than about $40,000 a year who see too much economic inequality, 63 percent agree that the economic system “requires major changes” to address it.But a growing debate among conservative thinkers, politicians and the party base — online, in books and in public forums — reveals a group divided about how, in practice, to address pocketbook issues and the extent to which the government should be involved.“I don’t think just having a bigger government is a solution to a lot of these problems,” said Inez Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum and a fellow with the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank widely credited with giving Trumpism an intellectual framework. “But I do think that we could stand to think a little bit more on the right about how to make that 1950s middle-class life possible for people.”These yearnings and ideological stirrings have picked up as both whites without college degrees and the broader working class have grown as a share of Republican voters. (Hillary Clinton won college-educated white voters by 17 percentage points in her 2016 race against Donald J. Trump; four years earlier, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, carried that group.)A notable swipe against longtime Republican economic thinking has come from Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative who served as an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal and the opinion editor of The New York Post. The metamorphosis of his worldview is laid out in a recently published book, “Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What to Do About It.”“I was writing editorials preaching the gospel of low taxes, free trade, et cetera,” Mr. Ahmari said in an interview. But Mr. Trump’s election inspired him to research how “American life in general for the lower rungs of the labor market is unbelievably precarious,” he said, and his politics changed.Mr. Ahmari recently endorsed a second term for Mr. Trump, but he has written that “while ferociously conservative on cultural issues,” he is also “increasingly drawn to the economic policies of the left — figures like Senators Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.”In their own ways, Republican presidential primary candidates are jostling for ways to validate the populist energy and financial unease that Mr. Trump tapped into with a mix of pronouncements and policy promises. Some have set out economic goals that, according to many experts, are hard to square with their promises to reduce public debt and taxes and make deep cuts to government programs — especially now that many Republicans have backed away from calls to cut entitlement benefits.In a campaign speech in New Hampshire this summer called “A Declaration of Economic Independence,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican presidential contender, sharply critiqued China, diversity programming, “excessive regulation and excessive taxes” — a familiar set of modern conservative concerns. Yet he also echoed complaints and economic goals often heard from the left.“We want to be a country where you can raise a family on one sole income,” he told the crowd.“We cannot have policy that kowtows to the largest corporations and Wall Street at the expense of small businesses and average Americans,” he added. “There’s a difference between a free-market economy, which we want, and corporatism.”Critics on the left and the right argue that Mr. DeSantis has failed to clearly define how he would achieve those goals. The DeSantis campaign declined to comment for this article, but he has cited pathways to broader prosperity that include bringing industrial jobs back from abroad, increasing work force education and technical training, removing “red tape” faced by small businesses and aiming for annual U.S. economic growth of at least 3 percent.Though the fissures on the right over economic issues were evident when Mr. Trump upended the political scene eight years ago, the realignments are maturing and deepening, causing fresh tensions as factions disagree on the extent to which inequality, globalization and growing corporate power should be seen as problems.Some conservatives remain more concerned with the trajectory of federal spending and unlocking greater overall prosperity, rather than its distribution.Last year, Phil Gramm, a Republican who steered the passage of major tax cuts and deregulation during his time representing Texas in Congress from the 1970s to the early 2000s, published a book with his fellow economists Robert Ekelund and John Early called “The Myth of American Inequality.” The book — filled with alternative tabulations of impoverishment and living standards — argues that inequality is not high and rising as “the mainstream” suggests.It argues that when including welfare transfers, income inequality has been more stable than government figures suggest, and that the share of Americans living in poverty fell from 15 percent in 1967 to only 1.1 percent in 2017.“The point of the book is to get the facts straight,” Mr. Gramm said in an interview, adding that “we’re having these debates” with numbers that are “verifiably false.” (Some scholars have vehemently disagreed with the authors’ analysis.)Scott Lincicome, a vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute, said that he largely agreed with Mr. Gramm’s thesis and that Americans were mostly wrestling with “keeping up with the Joneses,” not a loss of economic traction.“In general, folks at the bottom, up to the median, are doing better,” Mr. Lincicome concluded. “They’re not winning the game, but they’re doing better than the same group was 30-plus years ago.”He added: “You know, economists can debate all day long whether we’re better off, worse off overall or whatever. But when you factor in all the factors, I personally think things are fine.”To the extent that these debates have popular reach, the most public face of the revisionist camp may be Oren Cass, an adviser to Mr. Romney’s 2012 campaign, who has become immersed in a collective project among some right-leaning thinkers to “rebuild capitalism.”Mr. Cass and his allies want to use government spending and power to promote economic mobility with traditionalist goals in mind — like reducing the cost of living for the heads of married, two-parent households.Mr. Cass praised Mr. Ahmari’s book as one that “bravely goes where few conservatives dare tread, to the ideologically fraught realm in which the market appears inherently coercive and capitalism appears in tension with economic freedom.” (Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, is talking at a book event with Mr. Ahmari this month at the National Press Club in Washington.)Many economists and political scientists contend that the ideological realignment on the right is overblown, confused with a broader, hard-to-quantify loyalty to Mr. Trump rather than an explicit ideology giving life to Trumpism.“In a way,” Mr. Ahmari said, his critics — “the people who say, ‘Yeah, sure, you’re just a couple of guys: you, Oren, and a few others at magazines and think tanks’” — are “not wrong institutionally,” as there is little donor support for their efforts.“But they are wrong in terms of voters,” he added.Ms. Stepman of the Claremont Institute says she is personally “more traditional right” than thinkers like Mr. Ahmari but agrees they are tapping into something real.“There is a very underserved part of the political spectrum that is genuinely left of center on economic issues, right of center on cultural issues,” she said, pointing to issues including immigration, gun laws, education, gender norms and more.Gabe Guidarini is one of them.Growing up in Lake Bluff, Ill., in a working-class household where MSNBC often played in the background at night, Mr. Guidarini felt his view that “the status quo in this country is corrupt” was validated by the “anti-establishment” voices of both Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump. But he came to the view that “you can’t get away with” social views that stray from progressive orthodoxy and still be accepted by Democrats. Now, at 19, he is the president of the University of Dayton College Republicans.In 2022, he worked as a campaign intern for J.D. Vance — the author of “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” who aligned himself with Trumpism after his 2016 book was credited for providing a “reference guide” for Mr. Trump’s electoral success. Mr. Vance, an Ohio Republican, was elected to the U.S. Senate.In line with Tucker Carlson and some other conservatives, Mr. Guidarini thinks the party “should be taking policy samples from Viktor Orban in Hungary, and what he’s doing with family policies that aim to increase family creation, increase childbirth and make it easier to live a decent life as a working or middle-class taxpayer,” he said. “That’s what’s going to return the American dream for so many people, because to young people — and I feel like a lot of other people in America today — the American dream feels dead.”Mr. Guidarini, like many on the right, is wary of achieving those goals by increasing taxes on the wealthy. But according to Pew Research, more Republican or Republican-leaning adults support raising tax rates for those with incomes over $400,000 (46 percent) than say those rates should go unchanged (29 percent) or be lowered (24 percent). And more than half of low-income Republicans support higher taxes on the highest earners.For now, though, all economic debates are “tangential,” said Saagar Enjeti, a conservative millennial who is a co-host of two podcasts that often feature competing voices across the right.“‘What are we going to do when the Trump tax cuts expire?’ These are not the fights that are happening,” Mr. Enjeti said. “I wish they were, but they’re not. They’re just not.”With consensus on policy solutions elusive and “the culture wars” in the campaign forefront, Mr. Enjeti said, Republicans will mostly rally around what he believes will be Mr. Trump’s simple economic message: “Make America 2019 Again” — a time when unemployment, inflation and mortgage rates were low and, for all of life’s challenges, at least cultural conservatives were in the White House. More

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      Can Liberalism Save Itself?

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      Liberalism is under siege. It is not just a problem for America’s Democratic Party, which once again may face either losing an election to Donald Trump or claiming victory with a bare majority. Around the world, the entire outlook of political liberalism — with its commitments to limited government, personal freedom and the rule of law — is widely seen to be in trouble.It wasn’t long ago that liberals were proclaiming the “end of history” after their Cold War victory. But for years liberalism has felt perpetually on the brink: challenged by the rise of an authoritarian China, the success of far-right populists and a sense of blockage and stagnation.Why do liberals find themselves in this position so routinely? Because they haven’t left the Cold War behind. It was in that era when liberals reinvented their ideology, which traces its roots to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution — and reinvented it for the worse. Cold War liberalism was preoccupied by the continuity of liberal government and the management of threats that might disrupt it, the same preoccupations liberals have today. To save themselves, they need to undo the Cold War mistakes that led them to their current impasse and rediscover the emancipatory potential in their creed.Before the Cold War, President Franklin Roosevelt had demanded the renovation of liberalism in response to the Great Depression, emphasizing that economic turmoil was at the root of tyranny’s appeal. His administration capped more than a century in which liberalism had been promising to unshackle humanity after millenniums of hierarchy — dismantling feudal structures, creating greater opportunities for economic and social mobility (at least for men) and breaking down barriers based on religion and tradition, even if all of these achievements were haunted by racial disparities. At its most visionary, liberalism implied that government’s duty was to help people overcome oppression for the sake of a better future.Yet just a few years later, Cold War liberalism emerged as a rejection of the optimism that flourished before the mid-20th century’s crises. Having witnessed the agonizing destruction of Germany’s brief interwar experiment with democracy, liberals saw their Communist ally in that battle against fascism converted into a fearful enemy. They responded by reconceptualizing liberalism. Philosophers like the Oxford don Isaiah Berlin emphasized the concept of individual liberty, which was defined as the absence of interference, especially from the state. Gone was the belief that freedom is guaranteed by institutions that empower humanity. Instead of committing to make freedom more credible to more people — for example, by promising a bright future of their own — these liberals prioritized a fight against mortal enemies who might crash the system.This was a liberalism of fear, as another Cold War liberal intellectual, the Harvard professor Judith Shklar, said. In a way, fear was understandable: Liberalism had enemies. In the late 1940s, the Communists took over China, while Eastern Europe fell behind an Iron Curtain. But reorienting liberalism toward the preservation of liberty incurred its own risks. Anyone hostage to fear is likely to exaggerate how dangerous his foes actually are, to overreact to the looming threat they pose and to forsake better choices than fighting. (Ask Robert Oppenheimer, who signed up to beat the Nazis only to see paranoia spoil the country he volunteered to save.)During the Cold War, concern for liberty from tyranny and self-defense against enemies sometimes led not just to the loss of the very freedom liberals were supposed to care about at home, it also prompted violent reigns of terror abroad as liberals backed authoritarians or went to war in the name of fighting Communism. Millions died in the killing fields of this brutal global conflict, many of them at the hands of America and its proxies fighting in the name of “freedom.”Frustratingly, the Soviet Union was making the kinds of promises about freedom and progress that liberals once thought belonged to them. After all, in the 19th century liberals had overthrown aristocrats and kings and promised a world of freedom and equality in their stead. Liberals like the French politician and traveler Alexis de Tocqueville, though concerned about possible excesses of government, imagined democracy as a form of politics that offered startling new opportunities for equal citizenship. And while such liberals placed too much faith in markets both to emancipate and to equalize, they eventually struggled to correct this mistake. Liberals like the English philosopher John Stuart Mill helped invent socialism, too.The Cold War changed all that. It wasn’t just that socialism became a liberal swear word for decades (at least before Senator Bernie Sanders helped revive it). Liberals concluded that the ideological passions that led millions around the world to Communism meant that they should refrain from promising emancipation themselves. “We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes,” the Columbia professor and Cold War liberal Lionel Trilling explained.The Cold War transformation of liberalism wouldn’t matter so profoundly now if liberals had seized the opportunity to rethink their creed in 1989. The haze of their geopolitical triumph made it easy to disregard their own mistakes, in spite of the long-run consequences in our time. Instead, liberals doubled down. After several decades of endless wars against successor enemies and an increasingly “free” economy at home and around the world, American liberals have been shocked by blowback. History didn’t end; in fact, many of liberalism’s beneficiaries in backsliding new democracies and in the United States now find it wanting.A great referendum on liberalism kicked off in 2016, after Mr. Trump’s blindsiding election victory. In books like Patrick Deneen’s best-selling “Why Liberalism Failed,” there was an up-or-down vote on the liberalism of the entire modern age, which Mr. Deneen traced back centuries. In frantic self-defense, liberals responded by invoking abstractions: “freedom,” “democracy” and “truth,” to which the sole alternative is tyranny, while distracting from their own errors and what it would take to correct them. Both sides failed to recognize that, like all traditions, liberalism is not take it or leave it. The very fact that liberals transformed it so radically during the Cold War means that it can be transformed again; liberals can revive their philosophy’s promises only by recommitting to its earlier impulses.Is that likely? Under President Biden’s watch, China and Eastern Europe — the same places where events shocked Cold War liberals into their stance in the first place — have attracted a Cold War posture. Under Mr. Biden, as under Mr. Trump before him, the rhetoric out of Washington increasingly treats China as a civilizational threat. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has once again made Eastern Europe a site of struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of repression. Some like to claim that the war in Ukraine has reminded liberals of their true purpose.But look closer to home and that seems more dubious. Mr. Trump is the likely 2024 Republican presidential nominee (if not the potential winner of the election). Yet liberals seem to be betting their success less on a positive vision for America’s future and more on the ability of courts to protect the nation. Even if one of Mr. Trump’s many prosecutors manages to convict him, this will not rescue American liberalism. The challenge cuts deeper than eliminating the current enemy in the name of our democracy if it is not reimagined.Since his election in 2020, Mr. Biden has been championed by some pundits — and by his administration itself — as the second coming of Franklin Roosevelt. But Roosevelt warned that “too many of those who prate about saving democracy are really only interested in saving things as they were. Democracy should concern itself also with things as they ought to be.”Mr. Biden, despite an ambitious agenda of so-called supply-side liberalism, doesn’t seem to have internalized the message. And for their part, voters do not yet seem fully convinced. A liberalism that survives must resonate with voters who want something to believe in. And liberalism once had it, revolving not around fear of enemies but hope in institutions that lead to what Mill called “experiments in living.” He meant that people everywhere would get the chance from society to choose something new to try in their short time. If their hands are forced — especially by a coercive and unequal economic system — they will lose what is most important, which is the chance to make themselves and the world more interesting.If there is any silver lining in the next phase of American politics, which Mr. Trump continues to define, it is that it provides yet another opportunity for liberals to reinvent themselves. If they double down instead on a stale Cold War ideology, as they did after 1989 and 2016, they will miss it. Only a liberalism that finally makes good on some of its promises of freedom and equality is likely to survive and thrive.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.Samuel Moyn is a professor at Yale and the author of the forthcoming book “Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times.” More

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      It’s Not Your Father’s Democratic Party. But Whose Party Is It?

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      Has the left’s half-century struggle to return the Democratic Party to its working-class roots become an exercise in futility? This is perhaps the most vexing question facing the party of liberal America.It is not an easy one to answer. In recent years, the Democratic electorate has moved in two directions.First: The percentage of Democrats with a college degree has almost doubled, growing to 41 percent in 2019 from 22 percent in 1996.Second: While the percentage of Democrats who are non-Hispanic and white has fallen to 59 percent from 76 percent over the same period, according to Pew Research, nonwhite Democrats — Black, Hispanic, Asian American or members of other minority groups — have grown to 41 percent from 24 percent.In terms of the entire U.S. population (as of July 2022), those described by the census as “white alone, not Hispanic or Latino” made up 58.9 percent of the United States — down from 69.1 percent in 2000 — while the percentage of Black, Hispanic, Asian American and other minorities increased to 41.1 percent from 30.9 percent over the same period.Have American politics reached a tipping point?Eitan Hersh and Sarang Shah, political scientists at Tufts and Berkeley, contended in their Aug. 1 paper, “The Partisan Realignment of American Business,” that both the Democratic and the Republican Parties have undergone radical reorientations:The ongoing development of the Democratic Party as a party not of labor but of socioeconomic elites, and the ongoing development of the Republican Party as a party not of business but of working-class social conservatives, represents a major, perhaps the major, American political development of the 21st century.In an email, Hersh elaborated on their analysis: “This is one of the most important developments in recent American political history because we seem to be in the midst of a realignment, and that doesn’t happen every day or even every decade.”One reflection of this trend, according to Hersh, is the growing common ground that cultural liberals and corporate America are finding on social issues:A company taking a position on L.G.B.T.Q. rights may at first seem like it’s a company not staying in its lane and getting into political questions unrelated to its core business. But if the company needs to take a position in order to satisfy its work force or because potential new hires demand political activism, then the decision is no longer just social; it’s economic.Another example: For a while it looked like the Republican Party could appeal to social conservatives but maintain the economic policy supported by business elites. But now, you start to see real attempts by Republican thought leaders to be more assertive in meeting the economic needs of their constituencies.As a result of this realignment, Hersh argued, a crucial battleground in elections held in the near future will be an intensifying competition for the support of minority voters:Democrats can win with college-educated whites plus nonwhite voters. They can’t win with more defection from nonwhite voters. The Republicans are making the argument that their cultural and economic values are consistent with working-class Americans and that their positions transcend racial categories.If the Republican Party “could move beyond Trump and focus on this vision (which, of course, is impossible with Trump there making everything about Trump), they’d be presenting a set of arguments and policies that will be very compelling to a large number of Americans,” Hersh wrote.Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has long argued that Democrats need to regain support from white voters without college degrees and to stop defections among working-class Black and Hispanic voters, argued that the socioeconomic elite — well-educated, largely white liberals — are imposing damaging policies on the Democratic Party.In a recent essay, “Brahmin Left vs. Populist Right,” Teixeira wrote:The fact is that the cultural left in and around the Democratic Party has managed to associate the party with a series of views on crime, immigration, policing, free speech and, of course, race and gender that are quite far from those of the median working-class voter (including the median nonwhite working-class voter).Instead, Teixeira contended:Democrats continue to be weighed down by those whose tendency is to oppose firm action to control crime or the southern border as concessions to racism, interpret concerns about ideological school curriculums and lowering educational standards as manifestations of white supremacy and generally emphasize the identity politics angle of virtually every issue. With this baggage, rebranding the party — making it more working-class oriented and less Brahmin — is very difficult, since decisive action that might lead to such a rebranding is immediately undercut by a torrent of criticism.I asked Teixeira whether the changing Democratic Party has reached a point of no return on this front, and he emailed back:A good and big question. In the short run it looks very difficult for them to shed much of their cultural radicalism and generally make the party more attractive to normal working-class voters. Over the medium to long term, though, I certainly think it’s possible, if there’s an internal movement and external pressures/market signals consistent with the need for a broader coalition. That is, if enough of the party becomes convinced their coalition is too narrow and therefore some compromises and different approaches are necessary. That may take some time.Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., agreed that “There is no way to define ‘socioeconomic elites’ in which it isn’t obvious that both parties are dominated by socioeconomic elites.” He added that “since the 1970s, both left and right parties now represent different factions within the socioeconomic elites.”In the process, Podhorzer argued, “Labor and working people have been demoted from a seat at the table to a constituency to be appealed to.”The idea that the Democratic Party is a pro-business party, Podhorzer wrote, “is hardly a bulletin. It’s been pro-business since Carter. Deregulation (including Glass-Steagall, holding companies, communications, etc.) as well as trade agreements (NAFTA, China W.T.O., proposed T.P.P., etc.) are all Democratic Party ‘accomplishments.’”Podhorzer, however, took sharp issue with Hersh, Shah and Teixeira. “I find Teixeira’s constant harping on Democratic elites, as well as Hersh’s and others’ use of the term to be playing with fire at this moment,” he told me.The focus on cultural elitism, in Podhorzer’s view, masksbillionaires’ collective influence over the political process or the ways in which their success is responsible for immiseration and what we call inequality. This enables fascist politicians to shift the blame to intellectual and cultural elites, like liberals or people with college degrees, redirecting the inevitable resentments of the losers in the winner-take-all economy.For that reason, Podhorzer continued,centrist commentators and Democratic strategists who have aggressively and continuously diagnosed the party’s capture by a woke elite unwittingly — and without justification — affirm the fascist worldview in which cultural, rather than economic or political, elites are the source of their disappointments.However these disputes are resolved, there is clear evidence of the demographic realignment of the Democratic Party.Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts, writing by email, demonstrated the evolution of the Democratic and Republican electorates by citing data from the Cooperative Election Study, which he oversees:We ask workers what industries they work in, and just between 2014 and 2020 we saw some notable shifts, depending on the category. In 2014, 42 percent of people working in construction identified as Republican, and 38 percent called themselves Democrats, a four-point advantage for Republicans. Just six years later, that group was 49 percent Republican and 29 percent Democratic, a 20-point gap. By contrast, Republicans had a nine-point edge among people who work in finance and insurance in 2014 (48 percent Republican, 39 percent Democratic), but by 2020, Democrats held a three-point edge (45 percent Democratic, 42 percent Republican).The Republican advantage among manufacturing workers has grown to 13 points from seven points over those six years, according to Schaffner, and the four-point Democratic advantage among transportation and warehouse workers has turned into an eight-point Republican edge. Workers in professional, scientific and technical industries were evenly split in 2014, but by 2020, Democrats had gained a 15-point advantage. In the education industry, Democrats increased their advantage from a 14-point gap in 2014 to a 22-point advantage in 2020.Schaffner wrote that “these are pretty sizable shifts in partisanship, which fit the narrative that white-collar workers are shifting more Democratic at the same time that blue-collar industries are becoming more Republican.”There are, however, strong arguments that despite the ascendance of well-educated, relatively comfortable Democrats, the party has retained its commitment to the less well off, as evidenced by the policies enacted by the Biden administration.Most of those who challenged the Hersh-Shah thesis did not dispute the ascendance of the well educated in Democratic ranks; instead they argued that the party has retained its ideological commitments to the bottom half of the income distribution and to organized labor.Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, expressed strong disagreement with the Hersh-Shah paper in an email responding to my inquiry.“There is no question that the class profile of Democratic voters has become U-shaped, with both poorer and higher-income voters siding most strongly with the party,” Hacker wrote, but he went on to say:Even as the Democratic Party has come to rely more heavily on affluent suburban voters, its platform, legislative agenda and national elected representatives’ communications via Twitter have all remained highly focused on economic issues. In fact, the national platform and Democratic agenda have become substantially bolder — that is, bigger in scope, broader in policy instruments (e.g., industrial policy), and generally more redistributive overall.Hacker specifically challenged Hersh and Shah’s claim that corporate America is shifting to the Democratic Party, citing evidence of the Republican tilt of contributions by Fortune 1,500 C.E.O.s, by the Forbes Wealthiest 100 and in the distribution pattern of dark money.Steve Rosenthal, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. who is now a political consultant, agreed with Hacker on the pro-labor commitment of the Biden administration, despite the severe weakening of the labor movement in recent decades. Biden, he wrote by email, “has been the most pro-union, pro-worker president we have had in my lifetime.”Rosenthal acknowledged, however, that the union movement has suffered terrible setbacks in recent years, especially in Midwest battleground states:For decades, we’ve been saying both parties are too accommodating to corporate America. Perhaps the biggest change is not in how the parties operate or what they stand for but the decline in the labor movement. In the mid-90s, between 30 and 40 percent of the electorate in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio came from union households, and they were voting 60 percent-plus Democratic. I used to say even back then that the only white working-class voters who were voting Democratic were in unions.Since then, Rosenthal wrote, “their vote share has decreased precipitously, to a low of now something like 14 percent in Wisconsin to the mid-20 percent in the other states.”Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, contended that the Hersh-Shah paper creates a false dichotomy:The partisan business and labor interests are an either-or scenario. The Democratic Party can be the party of labor and the party of socioeconomic elites. The Republican Party can be the party of business and working-class social conservatives.Democrats can support labor interests, Wronski wrote by email,through initiatives to raise the minimum wage and bolster unions and can support the more progressive social issues of socioeconomic elites that relate to D.E.I. initiatives. Republicans can provide tax breaks and the like to businesses while still firmly espousing socially conservative positions on issues related to racial, religious and gender identity. Republicans can be the party of supporting red state businesses, while Democrats can be the party of supporting blue state businesses.Business, Wronski argued, is not so much realigning with the Democratic Party as it is polarizing into different camps based on “cleavages in how businesses interact with the political realm based upon social issues,” with “partisan polarization of businesses based on social issues and the group identities of the company’s stakeholders, employees and clients.”Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, agreed by email thatthere is definitely a significant change in the party coalitions, though it has occurred slowly rather than in one critical election. The main demographic change is in education among white Americans: College-educated whites are moving toward Democrats, while non-college-educated whites are moving toward Republicans.This has not reversed the traditional class divide of the parties, Grossmann argued, “because high-income, low-education voters are the most Republican and low-income, high-education voters are the most Democratic,” while “nonwhite voters also remain much more Democratic.”Despite these shifts, Grossmann wrote that he does not “see evidence that the Democratic Party has abandoned redistributive politics or changed its positions on business regulation. Instead, they are increasingly emphasizing social issues and combining social concerns with their traditional economic concerns.”David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College, is writing a book with Grossmann. Hopkins argued in an email that “we are in the midst of a realignment, in the sense that the education gap between the two parties (separating degree-holding Democrats from degree-lacking Republicans) is now much larger than the income gap.”But, Hopkins stressed,party change on economic policy is the dog that hasn’t barked here. For all its conspicuously populist style, the Trump presidency’s biggest legislative achievement was a tax reform package that provided most of its benefits to wealthy and corporate taxpayers. And the Democrats show no signs of rethinking their traditional advocacy of an expanded welfare state funded by redistributing wealth downward from rich individuals and businesses — with Biden’s policy agenda ranging from greater education spending to a federal child tax credit to subsidized child care and prescription drug costs.Despite their new source of support among the well-educated affluent, Hopkins continued,Democrats still fundamentally see themselves as the defenders of the interests of the socially underprivileged. And despite their own contemporary popularity among the white working class, Republicans still define themselves as the champions of capitalism and entrepreneurship.Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, cast doubt on Hersh and Shah’s claims in an emailed response to my inquiry: “There are clearly changes in the role of socioeconomic elites in the Democratic Party and the role of the working class in the Republican Party, but the evidence doesn’t show that either party has abandoned its traditional base.”On average, Westwood continued,the Republican Party still maintains a wealthier base than Democrats, and Democrats still capture more support from labor than Republicans. Similarly, Republicans continue to vote for business interests, and Democrats continue to back pro-labor regulation. It is hard to say we are at a turning point in party composition and focus while these things are still true.It is possible, Westwood wrote, that the Hersh-Shah paper “could be prophetic, but a complete picture of American politics suggests it is too early to assess if we have truly seen a major development in American politics.”In the meantime, as the Democratic Party continues to win college-educated white voters by larger and larger numbers, the development of most concern to those determined to maintain the party’s commitment to the less well off is the incremental but steady decline in Democratic support from nonwhite voters.Over the past three presidential elections, according to a detailed Catalist analysis of recent elections, Democratic margins among Black voters without college degrees have steadily fallen: Barack Obama 97 to 3 percent, or a 94-point advantage in 2012; Hillary Clinton 93 to 6 percent, or an 87-point advantage in 2016; and Biden 90 to 8 percent, or an 82-point edge in 2020. The same pattern was true for Hispanic voters without degrees: Obama 70 to 27 percent, or 43 points; Clinton 68 to 27 percent, or 41 points; and Biden 60 to 38 percent, or 22 points.The current Democratic Party may actually be the best coalition that the left can piece together at a time when American politics is notable for contradictory, crosscutting economic, racial and cultural issues. But can the party, with its many factions, outcompete the contemporary Republican Party, a party that has its own enormous liabilities — most notably Donald Trump himself?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      On Anti-Trumpers and the Modern Meritocracy

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      Donald Trump seems to get indicted on a weekly basis. Yet he is utterly dominating his Republican rivals in the polls, and he is tied with Joe Biden in the general election surveys. Trump’s poll numbers are stronger against Biden now than at any time in 2020.What’s going on here? Why is this guy still politically viable, after all he’s done?We anti-Trumpers often tell a story to explain that. It was encapsulated in a quote the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington gave to my colleague Thomas B. Edsall recently: “Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast, and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it.”In this story we anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians. Many Republicans support Trump no matter what, according to this story, because at the end of the day he’s still the bigot in chief, the embodiment of their resentments, and that’s what matters to them most.I partly agree with this story; but it’s also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.So let me try another story on you. I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam, but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston, but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.The ideal that “we’re all in this together” was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here, and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”The meritocracy isn’t only a system of exclusion; it’s an ethos. During his presidency Barack Obama used the word “smart” in the context of his policies over 900 times. The implication was that anybody who disagreed with his policies (and perhaps didn’t go to Harvard Law) must be stupid.Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.Writing in Compact magazine, Michael Lind observes that the upper-middle-class job market looks like a candelabrum: “Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities in their youth can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation.”Or, as Markovits puts it, “Elite graduates monopolize the best jobs and at the same time invent new technologies that privilege superskilled workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse.”Members of our class also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas: San Francisco, D.C., Austin and so on. In 2020, Biden won only 500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71 percent of the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties, responsible for only 29 percent. Once we find our cliques, we don’t get out much. In the book “Social Class in the 21st Century,” sociologist Mike Savage and his co-researchers found that the members of the highly educated class tend to be the most insular, measured by how often we have contact with those who have jobs unlike our own.Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York TimesArmed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx and intersectional is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells, because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules, so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.We also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside of marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and then had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that. As Adrian Wooldridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, “The Aristocracy of Talent,” “Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10 percent to women with a university degree.” That matters, Wooldridge continues, because “The rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.”Does this mean that I think the people in my class are vicious and evil? No, most of us are earnest, kind and public spirited. But we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive. Elite institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject.It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. Trump understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.If distrustful populism is your basic worldview, the Trump indictments seem as just another skirmish on the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them. Of course, the indictments don’t cause Trump supporters to abandon him. They cause them to become more fiercely loyal. That’s the polling story of the last six months.Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not. As a card-carrying member of my class, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice. Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Head Spinning Reality of Venezuela’s Economy

      by

      CARACAS, Venezuela — In the capital, a store sells Prada purses and a 110-inch television for $115,000. Not far away, a Ferrari dealership has opened, while a new restaurant allows well-off diners to enjoy a meal seated atop a giant crane overlooking the city.“When was the last time you did something for the first time?” the restaurant’s host boomed over a microphone to excited customers as they sang along to a Coldplay song.This is not Dubai or Tokyo, but Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, where a socialist revolution once promised equality and an end to the bourgeoisie.Venezuela’s economy imploded nearly a decade ago, prompting a huge outflow of migrants in one of worst crises in modern Latin American history. Now there are signs the country is settling into a new, disorienting normality, with everyday products easily available, poverty starting to lessen — and surprising pockets of wealth arising.That has left the socialist government of the authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro presiding over an improving economy as the opposition is struggling to unite and as the United States has scaled back oil sanctions that helped decimate the country’s finances.A television on sale for over $100,000 at a store in Caracas.A recently opened high-end restaurant in Caracas.Conditions remain dire for a huge portion of the population, and while the hyperinflation that crippled the economy has moderated, prices still triple annually, among the worst rates in the world.But with the government’s ease of restrictions on the use of U.S. dollars to address Venezuela’s economic collapse, business activity is returning to what was once the region’s wealthiest nation.As a result, Venezuela is increasingly a country of haves and have-nots, and one of the world’s most unequal societies, according to Encovi, a respected national poll by the Institute of Economic and Social Research of the Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas.Mr. Maduro has boasted that the economy grew by 15 percent last year over the previous year and that tax collections and exports also rose — though some economists stress that the economy’s growth is misleading because it followed years of huge declines.For the first time in seven years, poverty is decreasing: Half of the nation lives in poverty, down from 65 percent in 2021, according to the Encovi poll.A street vendor selling produce at $1 for each bagged vegetable in a busy downtown market in Caracas.After years of a roller-coaster economy, Venezuela has settled into a new, disorienting normality fueled by U.S. dollars.But the survey also found that the wealthiest Venezuelans were 70 times richer than the poorest, putting the country on par with some countries in Africa that have the highest rates of inequality in the world. And access to U.S. dollars is often limited to people with ties to the government or those involved in illicit businesses. A study last year by Transparency International, an anti-corruption watchdog, found that illegal businesses such as food, diesel, human and gas smuggling represented more than 20 percent of the Venezuelan economy.Though parts of Caracas bustle with residents who can afford a growing array of imported goods, one in three children across Venezuela was suffering from malnutrition as of May 2022, according to the National Academy of Medicine.Up to seven million Venezuelans have simply given up and abandoned their homeland since 2015, according to the United Nations.And despite the Maduro administration’s new slogan — “Venezuela is fixed” — many scrape by on the equivalent of only a few dollars a day, while public-sector employees have taken to the streets to protest low salaries.“I have to do back flips,” said María Rodríguez, 34, a medical lab analyst in Cumaná, a small city 250 miles east of the capital, explaining that, to pay for food and her daughter’s school tuition, she relied on two jobs, a side business selling beauty products and money from her relatives.Yrelys Jiménez, a preschool teacher in San Diego de los Altos, a half-hour drive south of Caracas, joked that her $10 monthly salary meant “food for today and hunger for tomorrow.” (The restaurant that allows diners to eat 150 feet above the ground charges $140 a meal.)Yrelys Jiménez with her son and daughter in their shared bedroom.Ms. Jiménez during the long walk home with her children from her job as a teacher.Despite such hardship, Mr. Maduro, whose administration did not respond to requests for comment, has focused on promoting the country’s rising economic indicators.“It seems that the sick person recovers, stops, walks and runs,” he said in a recent speech, comparing Venezuela with a suddenly cured hospital patient.The United States’ shifting strategy toward Venezuela has in part benefited his administration.In November, after the Maduro administration agreed to restart talks with the opposition, the Biden administration issued Chevron an extendable six-month license to pump oil in Venezuela. The deal stipulates that the profits be used to pay off debts owed to Chevron by the Venezuelan government.And while the United States still bans purchases from the state oil company, the country has increased black-market oil sales to China through Iran, energy experts said.A ceiling of floating sculptures in a luxury department store in Caracas.The Venezuelan government’s easing of restrictions on dollars has made it easier for some people to use money sent from abroad.Mr. Maduro is also emerging from isolation in Latin America as a regional shift to the left has led to a thaw in relations. Colombia and Brazil, both led by recently elected leftist leaders, have restored diplomatic relations. Colombia’s new president, Gustavo Petro, has been particularly warm to Mr. Maduro, meeting with him repeatedly and agreeing to a deal to import Venezuelan gas.With presidential elections planned next year and the opposition’s parallel government having recently disbanded, Mr. Maduro seems increasingly confident about his political future.Last year’s inflation rate of 234 percent ranks Venezuela second in the world, behind Sudan, but it pales in comparison to the hyperinflation seen in 2019, when the rate ballooned to 300,000 percent, according to the World Bank.With production and prices up, Venezuela has also started to see an increase in revenues from oil, its key export. The country’s production of nearly 700,000 barrels a day is higher than last year’s, though it was twice as high in 2018 and four times as high in 2013, said Francisco J. Monaldi, a Latin America energy policy fellow at Rice University.The Venezuelan government’s loosening of restrictions on dollars has made it easier for some people to use money sent from abroad. In many cases, no cash is actually exchanged. Venezuelans with means increasingly use digital apps like Zelle to use dollars in accounts outside the country to pay for goods and services.Friends celebrating a birthday at a trendy restaurant in Caracas.A survey found that the wealthiest Venezuelans were 70 times richer than the poorest residents.Still, U.S. officials call Venezuela’s economic picture somewhat illusory.“They were able to adjust to a lot of their problems after sanctions were implemented through dollarization,” according to Mark A. Wells, a deputy assistant secretary of state, “and so it starts to look over time that they are able to reach a status that basically helps the elites there, but the poor are still very, very poor.’’“So, it’s not that everything is more stable and better there,” Mr. Wells added.Mr. Maduro took office nearly 10 years ago and was last elected in 2018 in a vote that was widely considered a sham and was disavowed by much of the international community.The widespread belief that Mr. Maduro won fraudulently led the National Assembly to deem the presidency vacant and use a provision in the Constitution to name a new leader, Juan Guaidó, a former student leader. He was recognized by dozens of countries, including the United States, as Venezuela’s legitimate ruler.But as the figurehead of a parallel government that had oversight over frozen international financial accounts, he had no power within the country.Juan Guaidó led a parallel government that was recognized by the United States but held no power.Scavenging a large garbage bin at a street market in Caracas. Half of the nation lives in poverty, down from 65 percent in 2021.In December, the National Assembly ousted Mr. Guaidó and scrapped the interim government, a move some observers considered a boost to Mr. Maduro. A number of opposition figures have announced that they will run in a primary scheduled for October, even though many political analysts are skeptical that Mr. Maduro will allow a credible vote.“What Maduro does have today is an opposition that is disjointed and dispersed,” Mr. Guaidó said in an interview. “He also has a majority of the people against him. He continues being a dictator without popular support, a destroyed economy, which was his own fault, with professors, nurses, older people and workers protesting right now as we speak.”Even people like Eugenia Monsalves, who owns a medical supply company in Caracas and sends her two daughters to private schools, is frustrated with the country’s direction.Though she is upper middle class, she said she still had to watch how she spends her money.She goes out to eat occasionally and has visited some of the city’s new luxury stores, but without buying anything.“The vast majority of Venezuelans live in a complicated situation, very complicated,” she said.Ms. Monsalves believes the Maduro administration needs to go, but she worries that the best candidates were forced into exile or disqualified. The opposition, she said, has not coalesced around what it most needs: a leader who can energize the electorate.“That’s what I most want, like many other Venezuelans,” she said. “But the truth is that without a clear vision from the opposition, a clear platform from a single candidate, I think it’s going to be hard.”An upscale restaurant built inside a recently renovated hotel in Caracas.Nayrobis Rodríguez contributed reporting from Sucre, Venezuela, and More

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      Ferrari, Prada y hambre en Venezuela

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      CARACAS, Venezuela — En la capital, una tienda vende bolsos de Prada y un televisor de 110 pulgadas por 115.000 dólares. No muy lejos, un concesionario de Ferrari ha abierto, y un nuevo restaurante permite que los comensales acomodados disfruten de una comida sentados encima de una grúa gigantesca con vistas a la ciudad.“¿Cuándo fue la última vez que hicieron algo por primera vez?”, gritaba por el micrófono el anfitrión del restaurante a los clientes emocionados, mientras cantaban una canción de Coldplay.Esto no es Dubái ni Tokio, sino Caracas, la capital de Venezuela, donde una revolución socialista prometió igualdad y el fin de la burguesía.La economía de Venezuela colapsó hace casi una década, lo que provocó un enorme flujo de emigrantes en una de las peores crisis de la historia moderna de América Latina. Ahora hay indicios de que el país se está asentando en una nueva y rara normalidad, con productos cotidianos fácilmente disponibles, una pobreza que empieza a disminuir y asombrosas áreas de opulencia.Esto ha dejado al gobierno socialista del presidente autoritario de Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, liderando un país en el que la economía está mejorando, la oposición batalla por unirse y Estados Unidos ha comenzado a reducir las sanciones petroleras que habían contribuído a obstaculizar las finanzas.Un televisor en venta a un precio superior a 100.000 dólares en una tienda de CaracasUn restaurante costoso que abrió recientemente en Caracas.Las condiciones siguen siendo terribles para una gran parte de la población, y aunque la hiperinflación que paralizó la economía se ha moderado, los precios siguen triplicándose anualmente, una de las peores tasas del mundo.Pero con la relajación por parte del gobierno de las restricciones al uso de dólares estadounidenses para hacer frente al colapso económico de Venezuela, la actividad empresarial está volviendo al que fue el país más rico de la región.Como resultado, Venezuela es cada vez más un país de ricos y pobres, y una de las sociedades más desiguales del mundo, según Encovi, una respetada encuesta nacional realizada por el Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales de la Universidad Católica Andrés Bello.Maduro se ha jactado de que la economía creció un 15 por ciento el año pasado, con respecto al anterior, y de que la recaudación de impuestos y las exportaciones también aumentaron, aunque algunos economistas subrayan que el crecimiento de la economía es engañoso porque se produjo tras años de enormes caídas.Por primera vez en siete años, la pobreza está disminuyendo: la mitad del país vive en la pobreza, frente al 65 por ciento en 2021, según la encuesta de Encovi.Un puesto vende verduras a un dólar por pieza en bolsa en un mercado ajetreado en el centro de Caracas.Luego de años de un subibaja económico, Venezuela se ha instalado en una nueva y desconcertante normalidad impulsada por los dólares estadounidenses.Pero la encuesta también reveló que los venezolanos más ricos eran 70 veces más ricos que los más pobres, lo que pone al país a la par con algunos países de África que tienen las tasas más altas de desigualdad en el mundo.Y el acceso a los dólares estadounidenses está limitado a personas con vínculos al gobierno o a quienes están involucrados en negocios ilícitos. Un estudio del año pasado de Transparencia Internacional, una organización anticorrupción, halló que negocios ilegales como el contrabando de comida, gasolina, personas y gas representaban más del 20 por ciento de la economía venezolana.Aunque algunas zonas de Caracas están llenas de residentes que pueden adquirir una creciente variedad de productos importados, uno de cada tres niños en toda Venezuela sufría desnutrición en mayo de 2022, según la Academia Nacional de Medicina.Alrededor de siete millones de personas se han dado por vencidas y han huido de su patria desde 2015, según las Naciones Unidas.A pesar del nuevo mensaje del gobierno de Maduro —“Venezuela se arregló”—, muchos sobreviven con el equivalente a solo unos pocos dólares al día, y los empleados del sector público han salido a la calle para protestar por los bajos salarios.“Tengo que hacer maromas”, dijo María Rodríguez, de 34 años, analista de laboratorio médico en Cumaná, una pequeña ciudad ubicada a 400 kilómetros al este de la capital. Rodríguez dice que, para pagar la comida y la matrícula escolar de su hija, dependía de dos trabajos, un negocio paralelo de venta de productos de belleza y el dinero de sus familiares.Yrelys Jiménez, profesora de preescolar con estudios universitarios en San Diego de los Altos, una localidad ubicada a media hora en coche al sur de Caracas, bromeaba diciendo que su salario mensual de 10 dólares significaba “pan para hoy y hambre para mañana”. (El restaurante que permite que los comensales coman a 45 metros sobre el suelo cobra 140 dólares por comida).Yrelys Jiménez con sus hijos en la habitación que comparten.Jiménez en su larga caminata a casa con sus hijos, al volver de su trabajo como maestra.A pesar de estas penurias, Maduro, cuyo gobierno no respondió a las solicitudes de comentarios, se ha centrado en promover los crecientes indicadores económicos del país.“Parece que el enfermo se recupera, se para, camina y corre”, dijo Maduro en un discurso reciente, comparando a Venezuela con un paciente de hospital que se cura repentinamente.El cambio de estrategia de Estados Unidos hacia Venezuela ha beneficiado en parte a su gobierno.En noviembre, después de que el gobierno de Maduro accediera a reanudar las conversaciones con la oposición, el gobierno de Biden concedió a Chevron una licencia de seis meses, prorrogable, para extraer petróleo en Venezuela. El acuerdo estipula que los beneficios se utilicen para pagar las deudas que el gobierno venezolano tiene con Chevron.Y, mientras Estados Unidos sigue prohibiendo las compras a la petrolera estatal, el país ha aumentado las ventas de petróleo en el mercado negro a China a través de Irán, según los expertos en energía.Esculturas flotantes en una tienda departamental de lujo en CaracasLa flexibilización de las restricciones sobre los dólares por parte del gobierno venezolano ha facilitado que algunas personas gasten el dinero enviado desde el extranjero.Maduro también está saliendo del aislamiento de sus vecinos latinoamericanos porque un giro regional hacia la izquierda ha provocado el deshielo de las relaciones. Colombia y Brasil, ambos dirigidos por líderes de izquierda recientemente elegidos, han restablecido las relaciones diplomáticas. El nuevo presidente de Colombia, Gustavo Petro, ha sido particularmente cálido con Maduro, reuniéndose con él en repetidas ocasiones y acordando un acuerdo para importar gas venezolano.Con las elecciones presidenciales previstas para el próximo año y la reciente disolución del gobierno paralelo de la oposición, Maduro parece cada vez más confiado en su futuro político.La tasa de inflación del año pasado, del 234 por ciento, sitúa a Venezuela en el segundo lugar del mundo, por detrás de Sudán, pero palidece en comparación con la hiperinflación registrada en 2019, cuando la tasa se disparó hasta el 300.000 por ciento, según el Banco Mundial.Con la producción y los precios del crudo al alza, Venezuela también ha empezado a experimentar un aumento de los ingresos procedentes del petróleo, su exportación clave. La producción del país, de casi 700.000 barriles al día, es superior a la del año pasado, aunque fue dos veces mayor en 2018 y cuatro veces mayor en 2013, dijo Francisco J. Monaldi, investigador de política energética de América Latina en la Universidad Rice.La flexibilización por parte del gobierno venezolano de las restricciones sobre los dólares ha facilitado que algunas personas puedan usar el dinero enviado desde el extranjero. En muchos casos, no se intercambia dinero en efectivo. Los venezolanos con medios utilizan cada vez más aplicaciones digitales como Zelle para usar dólares en cuentas del extranjero para pagar bienes y servicios.Amigas celebran un cumpleaños en un restaurante de moda en Caracas.Una encuesta halló que los venezolanos más adinerados eran 70 veces más ricos que los más pobres.Aun así, los funcionarios estadounidenses califican el panorama económico de Venezuela de ilusorio de alguna manera.“Fueron capaces de ajustarse a muchos de sus problemas tras la aplicación de las sanciones a través de la dolarización”, según Mark A. Wells, subsecretario de Estado adjunto, “por lo que con el tiempo empieza a parecer que son capaces de alcanzar un estatus que básicamente ayuda a las élites de allí, pero los pobres siguen siendo muy, muy pobres”.“Por lo tanto, no es que todo sea más estable y mejor ahí”, agregó Wells.Maduro asumió el cargo hace casi 10 años y fue reelegido en 2018 en unos comicios ampliamente considerados como una farsa y que fueron repudiados por gran parte de la comunidad internacional.La creencia generalizada de que Maduro ganó fraudulentamente llevó a la Asamblea Nacional elegida democráticamente a declarar vacante la presidencia en 2019 y utilizar una disposición de la Constitución para nombrar a un nuevo líder, Juan Guaidó, un exdirigente estudiantil. Fue reconocido por decenas de países, incluido Estados Unidos, como gobernante legítimo de Venezuela.Pero como figura principal de un gobierno paralelo que supervisaba las cuentas financieras internacionales congeladas, carecía de poder dentro del país.Juan Guaidó lideró un gobierno reconocido por Estados Unidos pero que no tenía poder dentro del país.Rebuscando en un gran contenedor de basura en un mercado callejero de Caracas. La mitad del país vive en la pobreza, menos que el 65 por ciento que vivía en esa situación en 2021.En diciembre, la Asamblea Nacional destituyó a Guaidó y eliminó el gobierno interino, una medida que algunos observadores consideraron como un impulso a Maduro. Varias figuras de la oposición han anunciado que se presentarán a las primarias previstas para finales de octubre, a pesar de que muchos analistas políticos son escépticos de que Maduro permita una votación creíble.“Lo que Maduro tiene hoy es una oposición desarticulada y dispersa”, dijo Guaidó en una entrevista telefónica. “También tiene a la mayoría del pueblo en su contra. Sigue siendo un dictador sin apoyo popular, una economía destruida por su propia culpa, con profesores, enfermeras, ancianos y trabajadores protestando ahora mismo mientras hablamos”.Incluso gente como Eugenia Monsalves, propietaria de una empresa de suministros médicos en Caracas y que envía a sus dos hijas a colegios privados, está frustrada con el rumbo del país.Aunque es de clase media alta, dice que tiene que cuidar cómo gasta su dinero.Sale a comer de vez en cuando y ha visitado algunas de las nuevas tiendas de lujo de la ciudad, pero sin comprar nada.“La gran mayoría de los venezolanos viven una situación complicada, muy complicada”, dijo.Monsalves cree que el gobierno de Maduro debe irse, pero le preocupa que los mejores candidatos hayan sido forzados al exilio o descalificados. La oposición, dijo, no se ha unido en torno a lo que más necesita: un líder que pueda energizar al electorado.“Eso es lo que yo más quisiera, así como muchísimos otros venezolanos”, dijo. “Pero la verdad es que de esta manera, y sin un panorama claro de la oposición, una propuesta clara de un candidato, lo veo muy difícil”.Un restaurante de lujo en un hotel recién remodelado en Caracas.Nayrobis Rodríguez colaboró con reporteo desde Sucre, Venezuela, y More

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      The Forces Tearing Us Apart Aren’t Quite What They Seem

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      A toxic combination of racial resentment and the sharp regional disparity in economic growth between urban and rural America is driving the class upheaval in American partisanship, with the Republican Party dominant in working class House districts and the Democratic Party winning a decisive majority of upscale House seats.Studies from across the left-right spectrum reveal these and other patterns: a nation politically divided by levels of diversity; the emergence of an ideologically consistent liberal Democratic Party matching the consistent conservatism of the Republican Party, for the first time in recent history; and a striking discrepancy in the median household income of white majority House districts held by Democrats and Republicans.Four scholars and political analysts have produced these studies: Michael Podhorzer, former political director of the AFL-CIO, in “The Congressional Class Reversal,” “Socioeconomic Polarization” and “Education Polarization”; Oscar Pocasangre and Lee Drutman, of New America, in “Understanding the Partisan Divide: How Demographics and Policy Views Shape Party Coalitions”; and Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory, in “Both White and Nonwhite Democrats are Moving Left.”Podhorzer’s analyses produce provocative conclusions.“Throughout the first half of the 20th century,” he writes in his class reversal essay, “Democrats were solidly the party of the bottom of the income distribution and Republicans were solidly the party of the top half of the income distribution.” In 1958, Podhorzer points out, “more than half of the members of the Democratic caucus represented the two least affluent quintiles of districts. Today, that is nearly the case for members of the Republican caucus.”The result? “In terms of income,” Podhorzer writes. “the respective caucuses have become mirror images of each other and of who they were from Reconstruction into the 1960s.”The shift is especially glaring when looking at majority-white congressional districts:From 1994 through 2008, Democrats did about equally well with each income group. But, beginning with the 2010 election, Democrats began doing much better with the top two quintiles and much worse with the bottom two quintiles. In 2020, the gap between the top two and the bottom two quintiles was 50 points. Since 2016, Democrats have been doing worse than average with the middle quintile as well.The income shift coincided with a deepening of the urban-rural partisan schism.“As recently as 2008,” Podhorzer writes, “40 percent of the Democratic caucus represented either rural or sparse suburban districts, and about a fifth of the Republican caucus represented majority-minority, urban or dense suburban districts. Now, the caucuses are sorted nearly perfectly.”As if that were not enough, divergent economic trends are compounding the urban-rural split.In his socioeconomic polarization essay, Podhorzer shows how median household income in white majority districts has changed.From 1996 to 2008, in majority white districts, there was virtually no difference in household income between districts represented by Republicans and Democrats. Since then, the two have diverged sharply, with median household income rising to $80,725 in 2020 in majority white districts represented by Democrats, well above the $62,163 in districts represented by Republicans.Podhorzer ranks congressional districts on five measures:1) Districts in the lowest or second lowest quintile (the bottom 40 percent) of both income and education; 2) districts in the lowest or second lowest quintile of income but in the middle quintile or better for education; 3) districts that are not in the other four measures; 4) districts that are either in the fourth quintile on both dimensions or are in the fourth for one and the fifth for the other; and 5) districts that are in the fifth quintile for both dimensions.Using this classification system, how have majority white districts changed over the past three decades?“For the entire period from 1996 through 2008,” Podhorzer writes,none of the white socioeconomic groups was more than 10 points more or less than average, although we can see the highest socioeconomic group trending more Democratic through that period. But everything changed dramatically after 2008, as the two highest socioeconomic groups rapidly became more Democratic while the lowest socioeconomic group became much less Democratic.In 1996, Democrats represented 30 percent of the majority white districts in the most educated and most affluent category; by 2020, they represented 86 percent. At the other end, in 1996, Democrats represented 38 and 42 percent of the districts in the bottom two categories; by 2020, those percentages fell to 12 and 18 percent.In examining these trends, political analysts have cited a growing educational divide, with better educated — and thus more affluent — white voters moving in a liberal Democratic direction, while whites without college have moved toward the right.Podhorzer does not dispute the existence of this trend, but argues strenuously that limiting the analysis to education levels masks the true driving force: racial tolerance and racial resentment. “This factor, racial resentment,” Podhorzer writes in the education polarization essay, “does a much, much better job of explaining our current political divisions than education polarization.”In support of his argument, Podhorzer provides data showing that from 2000 to 2020, the Democratic margin among whites with and without college degrees who score high on racial resentment scales has fallen from minus 26 percent to minus 62 percent for racially resentful non-college whites and from minus 14 percent to minus 53 percent among racially resentful college- educated whites.At the same time, the Democratic margin rose from plus 12 to 70 percent over those twenty years among non-college whites low in racial resentment; and from 50 to 82 percent among college-educated whites low in racial resentment.In other words, in contradiction to the education divide thesis, non-college whites who are not racially resentful have become more Democratic, while college-educated whites who are racially resentful have become more Republican, in contradiction to the education divide thesis.Podhorzer makes the case that “the unequal distribution of recovery after the economy crashed in 2008 has been profoundly overlooked,” interacting with and compounding divisions based on racial attitudes:Educational attainment was among the important characteristics associated with those increasingly prosperous places. Add to that mix, first, the election of a Black president, which sparked a backlash movement of grievance in those places left behind in the recovery, and, second, the election of a racist president, Donald Trump — who stoked those grievances. We are suffering from a polarization which provides an even more comprehensive explanation than the urban-rural divide.Changing racial attitudes are also a crucial element in Abramowitz’s analysis, “Both White and Nonwhite Democrats are Moving Left,” in which he argues that “Democrats are now as ideologically cohesive as Republicans, which is a big change from a decade ago, when Republicans were significantly more cohesive than Democrats.”Damon Winter/The New York TimesIn 1972, on a 1 to 7 scale used by American National Election Studies, Abramowitz writes,Supporters of the two parties were separated by an average of one unit. The mean score for Democratic voters was 3.7, just slightly to the left of center, while the mean score for Republican voters was 4.7, to the right. By 2020, the distance between supporters of the two parties had increased to an average of 2.6 units. The mean score for Democratic voters was 2.8 while the mean score for Republican voters was 5.5.The ideological gulf between Democrats and Republicans reached its highest point in 2020, Abramowitz observes, “since the ANES started asking the ideological identification question.”While the movement to the right among Republican voters has been relatively constant over this period, the Democratic shift in an increasingly liberal direction has been more recent and more rapid.“The divide between supporters of the two parties has increased considerably since 2012 and most of this increase was due to a sharp leftward shift among Democratic voters,” Abramowitz writes. “Between 2012 and 2020, the mean score for Democratic voters went from 3.3 to 2.9 while the mean score for Republican voters went from 5.4 to 5.5.”By far the most important shift to the left among Democrats, according to Abramowitz, was on the question “Should federal spending on aid to Blacks be increased, decreased or kept about the same?” From 2012 to 2020, the percentage of Democrats saying “increased” more than doubled, from 31.3 to 72.2 percent. The surge was higher among white Democrats, at 47.5 points, (from 24.6 to 72.1 percent), than among nonwhite Democrats, at 31.2 points, from 41.1 to 72.3 percent.The growing ideological congruence among Democrats has significant consequences for the strength of the party on Election Day. Abramowitz notes that “For many years, white Democrats have lagged behind nonwhite Democrats in loyalty to Democratic presidential candidates. In 2020, however, this gap almost disappeared with white Democratic identifiers almost as loyal as nonwhite Democratic identifiers.”The increase in loyalty among white Democratic identifiers, he continues, “is due largely to their increased liberalism because defections” to the right “among white Democrats”have been heavily concentrated among those with relatively conservative ideological orientations. This increased loyalty has also been apparent in other types of elections, including those for U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. In 2022, according to data from the American National Election Studies Pilot Survey, 96 percent of Democratic identifiers, including leaning independents, voted for Democratic candidates for U.S. House and U.S. Senate.In their paper, “Understanding the Partisan Divide,” Pocasangre and Drutman of New America focus on race and ethnicity from the vantage point of an analysis of voting patterns based on the level of diversity in a district or community.“Republican districts,” they write,are some of the least ethnically diverse districts. But voters within these districts have diverse policy views, particularly on economic issues. Democratic districts are some of the most ethnically diverse districts. But voters within these districts are mostly in agreement over their views of both social and economic issues.Pocasangre and Drutman’s study reinforces the widespread finding “That Republican districts are predominantly white and, for the most part, less affluent than the national average. In contrast, Democratic districts are less white than the average but tend to be more affluent than average.”Pocasangre and Drutman find that the household income differences between Democratic and Republican-held seats continues to widen. From 2020 to 2022, the income in Democratic districts rose from $95,000 to $100,000 while in Republican districts it grew from $77,000 to $80,000, so that the Democratic advantage rose from $18,000 to $20,000 in just two years.Republican districts, the two authors continue, are “conservative on both social and economic issues, with very few districts below the national average on either dimension.” Democratic districts, in contrast, areprogressive on both policy domains, but have quite a few districts that fall above the average on either the social or economic dimension. In particular, of the 229 Democratic districts in 2020, 14 percent were more conservative than the national average on social issues and 19 percent were more conservative than the national average on economic issues.On average, competitive districts tilt Republican, according to the authors:Very few competitive districts in 2020 were found on the progressive quadrants of social and economic issues. Instead, of the 27 competitive districts in 2020, 70 percent were more conservative than the national average on economic issues and 59 percent were more conservative than the national average on social issues.These battleground districtslean toward the progressive side when it comes to gun control, but they lean toward the conservative side on all the other social issues. Their views on structural discrimination — an index that captures responses to questions of whether Black people just need to try harder to get ahead and whether discrimination keeps them back — are the most conservative, followed by views toward abortion.In addition, a majority of competitive districts, 57 percent, are in Republican-leaning rural-suburban communities, along with another 13 percent in purely rural areas. Democratic districts, in contrast, are 17 percent in purely urban areas and 52 percent in urban-suburban communities, with 31 percent in rural-suburban or purely rural areas.I asked Pocasangre about this tilt, and he emailed back:For now, most swing districts go for Republicans. The challenge for Democrats right now is that most of these swing districts are in suburbs which demographically and ideologically look more like rural areas where Republicans have their strongholds. So, Democrats do face an uphill battle when trying to make inroads in these districts.But, Pocasangre continued, “majorities in Congress are so slim that control of the House could switch based on idiosyncratic factors, like exceptionally bad candidates on the other side, scandals, changes in turnout, etc. Democrats need to get lucky in the suburbs, but for Republicans, they are theirs to lose.”Pocasangre and Drutman classified districts as Democratic, Republican, or competitive, based on the ratings of the Cook Political Report in the 2020 and 2022 elections: “Competitive districts are those classified as toss ups for each cycle while the partisan districts are those rated as solid, likely, or lean Democratic or Republican.”The Cook Report analysis of 2024 House races lists 20 tossup seats, 11 held by Democrats, 9 by Republicans, one of which is held by the serial fabulist George Santos, whose threatened New York seat is classified as “lean Democratic.” Eight of the 11 Democratic toss-ups are in three states, four in North Carolina and two each in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Four of the nine Republican tossups are in New York, along with two in Arizona.The changing composition of both Democratic and Republican electorates and the demographics of the districts they represent is one of the reasons that governing has become so difficult. One result of the changing composition of the parties has been a shift in focus to social and cultural issues. These are issues that government is often not well equipped to address, but that propel political competition and escalate partisan hostility.Perhaps most important, however, is that there now is no economic cohesion holding either party together. Instead, both have conflicting wings. For the Republicans it’s a pro-business elite combined with a working class, largely white, often racially resentful base; for the Democrats, it’s a party dependent on the support of disproportionately low-income minorities, combined with a largely white, college-educated elite.One might question why all these cultural and social issues have come so much to the fore and what it might take for the dam to give.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      How Much Longer Can ‘Vote Blue No Matter Who!’ Last?

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      Over the past four decades, the percentage of white Democrats who identify themselves as liberal has more than doubled, growing at a much faster pace than Black or Hispanic Democrats.In 1984, according to American National Election Studies data, 29.8 percent of white Democrats identified as liberal; by 2020, that percentage grew to 68.5 percent. Over the same period, the percentage of liberals among Black Democrats grew from 19.1 percent to 27.8 percent, and among Hispanic Democrats from 18 percent to 41 percent.This shift raises once again a question that people have been asking since the advent of Reagan Democrats in the 1980s: What does it mean for a party that was once the home of the white working class to become a coalition of relatively comfortable white liberals and less well off minority constituencies?I posed this and other questions to a range of scholars and political strategists, including William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, who recently cited similar (though not identical) trends in Gallup data. In an essay last month, “The Polarization Paradox: Elected Officials and Voters Have Shifted in Opposite Directions,” Galston wrote:In 1994, White, Black and Hispanic Democrats were equally likely to think of themselves as liberal. But during the next three decades, the share of White Democrats who identify as liberal rose by 37 points, from 26 percent to 63 percent, while Black and Hispanic Democrats rose by less than half as much, to 39 percent and 41 percent, respectively.Galston argued in an email that Black Democrats have assumed an unanticipated role in the party:African Americans are now a moderating force within the party. It was no accident that they rallied around the most moderate candidate with a serious chance of winning the nomination in 2020, or that the leader of the pro-Biden forces took the lead in rejecting the “defund the police” slogan.The coalition of upper-middle-class liberals and minority voters, Galston wrote, “has been sustainable because the former believe in the active use of government to fight disadvantage of various kinds and are willing, within limits, to vote against their economic self-interest.”Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, wrote back by email:Underlying the liberal shift among white Democrats is their tendency to hold more liberal racial attitudes. In the Voter Study Group’s Racing Apart report, the percentage of white Democrats that hold the most liberal positions on the standard racial resentment measure has increased over the last decade to such a large extent that their racial resentment views match those of Black Democrats.The Democratic Party, Wronski continued, has becomea coalition of racial minorities (especially Blacks), and whites who are sympathetic to the inequities and challenges faced by minority groups in America. Racial identities and attitudes are the common thread that link wealthier, more educated whites with poorer minority constituencies.The Democrats’ biracial working-class coalition during the mid-20th century, in Wronski’s view, “was successful because racial issues were off the table.” Once those issues moved front and center, the coalition split: “Simply put, the parties are divided in terms of which portion of the working class they support — the white working class or the poorer minority communities.” The level of educational attainment is the line of demarcation between the two groups of white voters.By 2020, the white working class — defined by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis as “whites without four-year college degrees” — voted for Donald Trump over Joe Biden 67-32, according to network exit polls. In the 2022 election, white working-class voters backed Republican House candidates by almost the identical margin, 66-32.The shift of non-college white working class support to the Republican candidates, Wronski wrote,was driven by racial group animus. Trump was particularly able to attract members of the white working class on the basis of racial (and other) group sentiments — with those disliking minority groups being uniquely attracted to Trump, in a continuation of the division of the working class along racial lines.There are those who argue, however, that the contemporary Democratic coalition is more fragile than Wronski suggests. Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, emailed to say, “If you’re a Democrat, you might worry that the coalition is not stable.”Over the long haul, Enos wrote:College-educated whites, especially those with higher incomes, are not clear coalitional partners for anyone — they don’t favor economic policies, such as increasing housing supply or even higher taxes on the rich, that are beneficial to the working class, of any race. And many college-educated whites are motivated by social issues that are also not largely supported by the working class, of any race. It’s not clear that, with their current ideological positions, socially liberal and economically centrist or rightist college-educated whites are natural coalition partners with anybody but themselves.Enos went so far as to challenge the depth of elite support for a liberal agenda:My sense is that much of the college-educated liberal political rhetoric is focused on social signaling to satisfy their own psychological needs and improve their social standing with other college educated liberals, rather than policies that would actually reduce racial gaps in economic well-being, civil rights protections, and other quality of life issues.Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist, is an explicit critic of the left wing of the party. “It is plain to me that the Democrats’ greatest challenge is the progressive left,” Begala wrote in an email:Pew Research shows they are the most liberal, most educated, and most white subgroup in the Democratic coalition. They constitute 12 percent of Democrats and those who lean Democrat — which means 88 percent of us are not on their ideological team.In contrast, Begala continued:Black voters are both the most loyal Democrats and the most sensible, practical, strategic, and moderate voters. This is why it was important, politically and even morally, for President Biden to move the African-American-rich South Carolina primary ahead of overwhelmingly white Iowa and New Hampshire.In the November 2021 study of the composition of the Democratic Party that Begala referred to, Pew Research reported:The Progressive Left makes up a relatively small share of the party, 12 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. However, this group is the most politically engaged segment of the coalition, extremely liberal in every policy domain and, notably, 68 percent White non-Hispanic. In contrast, the three other Democratic-oriented groups are no more than about half White non-Hispanic.This disproportionally white wing of the party, as I have previously discussed, provided crucial support for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley when they ran for Congress in 2018, putting them over the top in their first primary victories over powerful Democratic incumbents.A variety of forces is straining the center-left coalition.Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, replied by email to my inquiries:Many White liberals live in enclaves of affluence, sheltered from the economic and personal insecurity of the low-income communities. They are more strongly motivated by identity issues around gender and race, but are less concerned with poverty or economic insecurity issues than liberals in the sixties.As a result, in Cain’s view:Parts of the Democratic coalition are talking past each other and sometimes clashing. In the case of climate change, white liberals want to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles that most low-income nonwhites cannot afford. During Covid, affluent white liberals could work at home and have food delivered to them by nonwhite workers who left the food packages at their doorstep or who had to go to work and suffer higher rates of illness.When all said and done, “White liberals are still a better deal for nonwhites than the Republican Party,” Cain contended, “but it is revealing that the African Americans in South Carolina preferred Biden to Sanders or Warren.”The liberalism of white Democrats cuts across a wide range of issues. Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts, cited data collected by the Cooperative Election Study:In 2020 white Democrats scored similarly low on racial resentment as Black Democrats. And white Democrats actually have significantly lower levels of sexism than Black or Hispanic Democrats. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Democratic Party was indeed fairly divided on issues of race in particular, but that no longer seems to be the case.Now, Schaffner continued, “white Democrats appear to be the most liberal group in the party on a range of issues, including immigration, climate, crime/policing, abortion, health care, gun control and economic/social welfare.”I asked James Stimson, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, how the meaning of “liberal” changed over the past 40 years. He replied:The term has become infused with racial content. That may be the key to the conversion of educated suburban voters into liberals and Democrats. Trump’s open racism must surely have added greatly to the new meaning of liberalism. Perhaps the L-word has become a way to say, “I am not a bigot.”Along similar lines, Viviana Rivera-Burgos, a political scientist at Baruch College of the City University of New York, pointed out how much the liberal agenda has transformed in a relatively short time:Issues like abortion, same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights, and immigration have become important ideological cleavages in the past 40 years or so. Being a liberal today means you’re most likely pro-choice, pro-same-sex marriage, pro-expansion of LGBTQ+ rights, and anti-restrictive or punitive immigration laws. These issue positions couldn’t be inferred based on someone’s ideology alone 40 years ago.Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group, argued in an email that there is a danger of overemphasizing the liberal tilt of the Democratic electorate:Although the percentage of Democrats calling themselves liberal has grown over the past three decades, it still remains true that only about half of self-described party members identify that way — in contrast to Republican voters, about 80 percent of whom call themselves conservative. So Democrats have long had and continue to have a more ideologically diverse coalition to assemble, with nearly half of the party calling themselves moderate or conservative.Erickson did not hesitate, however, to describe the party’s educated left wing asoverrepresented in the media, on Twitter, and in positions of power. That group is loud and more culturally liberal, though they often purport to speak or act on behalf of communities of color. Meanwhile, the African American and Latino voters who deliver victories to Democratic candidates in nearly every race have remained much more ideologically mixed.“If we continue to let white liberals on Twitter define what it means to be a Democrat,” Erickson warned her fellow Democrats, “we are going to continue to alienate the voters of color who are essential majority makers in our coalition. While the Twitterati wants to ‘Defund the Police,’ communities of color want their neighborhoods to be safe — both from police violence AND violent crime.”To build her case, Erickson cited that role of minority voters in the last New York City mayoral election: “They elected Eric Adams and rejected the far-left candidates whose voting blocs were made up primarily of white liberals,” noting that “Adams outpaced Maya Wiley by 23 points with Black voters and 10 points with Hispanic voters.”In local elections in 2021, Erickson continued, Black voters “rejected a measure in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, to defund the police: According to ward-level data, the predominantly Black Wards 4 and 5 rejected the Minneapolis ballot measure by wide margins (over 60 percent voted no), while predominantly white wards drove the measure’s support.Erickson suggested that the culturally liberal tilt of the party’s left wing was a factor in declining minority support:Case in point: Democrats dropped nine percentage points with non-college voters of color between 2012 and 2020, falling from 84 percent support in 2012 to 75 percent in 2020, according to Catalist. This was most pronounced with non-college men of color who went from 81 percent Democratic in 2012 to 69 percent in 2020.These losses reflect “a divergence in priorities and values,” Erickson wrote, citing poll data showing thatwhile Democratic primary voters say hard work is no guarantee of success, Black voters disagree — saying most people can get ahead in America if they work hard, and that by a two-to-one margin, Black Americans say it is necessary to believe in God to have good morals. Democratic primary voters of all races disagree with that statement by similar margins.While the party is divided on values and priorities, Erickson pointed out that Democrats in Congress have reached general agreement on many issues that were highly divisive in the past:There is only one pro-life Democrat left in Congress, and today’s moderate Democrats are loudly supportive of reproductive rights. There are no more NRA-endorsed Democrats on the Hill, and if gun safety legislation were brought up tomorrow, every single Democrat in federal office would support it. Similarly, every Democrat not only supported the Respect for Marriage Act but would’ve likely gone further to explicitly codify marriage equality into law at the federal level.The major intraparty conflicts that remain, Erickson wrote,are concentrated around two big questions. One is a process question: Do you believe progress is achieved by incremental steps or revolutionary change? The other is a values question: do you believe that, with some basic policy reforms, our economic system can deliver a good life to those who work hard in this country, or rather that it needs to be torn down and fundamentally rebuilt from the ground up?The transition from a partisan division among white voters based on economic class to one based on level of educational attainment has had substantial consequences for the legislative priorities of the Democratic Party.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, pointed out in an email that “the class base of the parties has atrophied” with the result that “the party system in the U.S. simply does not represent that ‘haves’ against the ‘have-nots.’ Both parties represent a mix of haves and have-nots in economic terms.”Because the Democratic Party must hold down “a coalition of upper-income whites and minority constituencies across all income groups,” Lee wrote, party leadersare likely to prioritize issues that do not pit the well-off against the poor very directly, such as the rights agenda (e.g., voting rights, abortion, gays and lesbians) and climate/environment. Democrats in government are unlikely to genuinely prioritize the economic interests of low-income and working-class voters, because those voters simply do not represent a majority of their party’s coalition.As an example, Lee wrote, “Current Democrats are much more concerned about forgiving student loans than about the majority of voters who will not or did not go to college.”What, then, is likely to happen in the Democratic ranks?The reality, as summed up by Ryan Enos, is that for all their problems,The Democrats are clearly the majority party and may be a experiencing an unparalleled period of dominance: since 1992, a period of 30 years, Republicans have only won a majority of popular presidential votes once — in 2004 and that was during the extraordinary time of two overseas wars.For the moment, the Democratic coalition — with all its built-in conflicts between a relatively affluent, well-educated, largely white wing, on the one hand, and an economically precarious, heavily minority, but to some degree ascendant electorate on the other — remains a functional political institution.“In this sense,” Enos told me, “it’s important not to overstate the damage that some perceive liberalism as having done to the Democrats’ electoral fortunes.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More