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      Glenn Youngkin Is Playing a Dangerous Game

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      It’s obvious. Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia, wants to be president.Within months of taking office, Youngkin had already established two political organizations, Spirit of Virginia and America’s Spirit, meant to raise his profile in national Republican politics with donations and assistance to candidates both in his home state and across the country. In July, he met privately with major conservative donors in New York City, underlining the sense that his ambitions run larger than his term in Richmond.Youngkin, a former private equity executive, is on a tour of the country, speaking and raising money for Republican candidates in key presidential swing states. And as he crisscrosses the United States in support of the Republican Party, Youngkin is neither avoiding Donald Trump nor scorning his acolytes; he’s embracing them.In Nevada last week, Youngkin stumped for Joe Lombardo, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who acknowledges that President Biden won the election but says he is worried about the “sanctity of the voting system.” In Michigan, Youngkin stumped for Tudor Dixon, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who has repeatedly challenged the integrity of the 2020 presidential election. And later this month, in Arizona, Youngkin will stump for Kari Lake, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who accused Democrats of fraud in the state and says that unlike Gov. Doug Ducey, she “would not have certified” the 2020 election results.Whether Youngkin agrees with any of this himself is an open question. In the 2021 Virginia Republican primary, he flirted with election denialism but never fully committed. What matters, for our purposes, is that Youngkin believes he needs to cater to and actually support election questioners and deniers to have a shot at leading the Republican Party.You can sense, in conversations about the present and future of the Republican Party, a hope that there is some way to force the party off its current, anti-democratic path. You could see it in the outrage over Democratic Party “meddling” in Republican primaries. As the conservative columnist Henry Olsen wrote for The Washington Post in July, “True friends of democracy would seek to build new alliances that cross old partisan boundaries.”What Youngkin — a more polished and ostensibly moderate Republican politician — aptly demonstrates is that this is false. The issue is that Republican voters want MAGA candidates, and ambitious Republicans see no path to power that doesn’t treat election deniers and their supporters as partners in arms.There is an analogy to make here to the midcentury Democratic Party, which was torn between a liberal, Northern, pro-civil rights faction and a reactionary, Southern, segregationist faction. The analogy is useful, not because the outcome of the struggle is instructive in this case, but because the reason the liberal faction prevailed helps illustrate why anti-MAGA Republicans are fighting a losing battle.In 1948, the mayor of Minneapolis — 37-year-old Hubert Humphrey — called on the hundreds of delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia to add a strong civil rights plank to the party’s national platform. “To those who say we are rushing this issue of civil rights,” Humphrey said, “I say to them we are 172 years late.”“The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights,” Humphrey added.As the historian Michael Kazin notes in “What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party,” both “the speech and the ebullient, and quite spontaneous, floor demonstration that followed helped convince a majority of delegates — and President Truman, reluctantly — to include the civil rights pledge in the platform.”But there were dissenters. A small number of Southern delegates left the convention in protest. Calling themselves the States’ Rights Democratic Party, they organized a challenge to Truman with Gov. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina at the top of their ticket.These “Dixiecrats” were anti-civil rights and, for good measure, anti-labor. “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race, the constitutional right to choose one’s associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to earn one’s living in any lawful way,” reads the States’ Rights Democratic platform, unanimously adopted at their convention in Oklahoma City the next month. We favor, they continued, “home-rule, local self-government and a minimum of interference with individual rights.”Of course, this meant the maintenance of Jim Crow, the subversion of the constitutional guarantees embedded in the 14th and 15th Amendments, and the continued domination of Black Americans by a tyrannical planter-industrial elite.From its inception in the late 1820s as the movement to elect Andrew Jackson president, the Democratic Party relied on the Solid South to win national elections. Now it had a choice. Democrats could reject their new civil rights plank, accommodate the Dixiecrats and fight with a unified front against a hungry and energetic Republican Party, shut out of power since Herbert Hoover’s defeat in 1932. Or they could scorn the so-called States’ Rights Democrats and run as a liberal party committed to equal rights and opportunity for all Americans.They chose the latter and changed American politics forever. And while much of this choice was born of sincere belief, we also should not ignore the powerful force of demographic change.From 1915 to 1965, more than six million Black Americans left their homes in the agrarian South to settle in the cities of the industrial North, from New York and Chicago to Philadelphia and Detroit and beyond.Their arrival marked the beginning of a tectonic shift in American political life. “The difference in laws between the North and the South created a political coming-of-age for Black migrants,” the political scientist Keneshia N. Grant writes in “The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century.” “Seeing political participation as a badge of honor and hallmark of success in northern life, migrants registered to vote in large numbers. Northern parties and candidates worked to gain Black support through their election campaigns, and the parties expected Black voters to turn out to vote for their nominees on Election Day.”For a Democratic Party whose national fortunes rested on control of urban machines, Black voters could mean the difference between four years in power and four years in the wilderness. With the rise of Franklin Roosevelt, who won an appreciable share of the Black vote in the 1932 presidential election, Northern Democratic politicians began to pay real attention to the interests of Black Americans in cities across the region.By 1948, most Black Americans who could vote were reliable partners in the New Deal coalition, which gave liberals in the Democratic Party some of the political space they needed to buck Jim Crow. Yes, the Dixiecrats would withdraw their support. But for every white vote Harry Truman might lose in Alabama and Mississippi, there was a Black vote he might gain in Ohio and California, the two states that ultimately gave him his victory over the fearsome former prosecutor (and New York governor) Thomas Dewey.Not only did the Dixiecrat rebellion fail; it also demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that Democrats could win national elections without the Solid South. The segregationists were weaker than they looked, and over the next 20 years the Democratic Party would cast them aside. (And even then, with the Dixiecrat exodus, Truman still won most of the states of the former Confederacy.)There is no equivalent to northern Black voters in the Trumpified Republican Party. Put differently, there is no large and pivotal group of Republicans who can exert cross-pressure on MAGA voters. Instead, the further the Republican Party goes down the rabbit hole of “stop the steal” and other conspiracy theories, the more it loses voters who could serve to apply that pressure.In a normal, more majoritarian political system, this dynamic would eventually fix the issue of the MAGA Republican Party. Parties want to win, and they will almost always shift gears when it’s clear they can’t with their existing platform, positions and leadership.The problem is that the American political system, in its current configuration, gives much of its power to the party with the most supporters in all the right places. Republicans may have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, but key features in the system — equal state representation in the Senate, malapportionment in the House of Representatives and winner-take-all distribution of votes in the Electoral College (Nebraska and Maine notwithstanding) — gives them a powerful advantage on the playing field of national politics.To put it in simple terms, Joe Biden won the national popular vote by seven million ballots in the 2020 presidential election, but if not for roughly 120,000 votes across four states — Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Donald Trump would still be president.Which is all to say that someone like Glenn Youngkin is only doing what makes sense. To make MAGA politics weak among Republican politicians, you have to make MAGA voters irrelevant in national elections. But that will take a different political system — or a vastly different political landscape — than the one we have now.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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      When It Comes to Eating Away at Democracy, Trump Is a Winner

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      Donald Trump’s drive to undermine American democracy has proved strikingly successful.Take the most recent analysis by Varieties of Democracy, better known as V-Dem, an international organization founded in 2014 to track trends in democratization:While the United States remains a liberal democracy, V-Dem data shows that it is only a fraction away from losing this status after substantial autocratization. The U.S. Liberal Democratic Index score dropped from 0.85 in 2015 to 0.72 in 2020, driven by weakening constraints on the executive under the Trump administration.Of 179 countries surveyed, V-Dem found that the United States was one of 33 to have moved substantially toward “autocratization.” From 2016, when Trump won the presidency, to 2021, when he involuntarily left office, the United States fell from 17th to 29th in the global V-Dem democracy rankings:Liberal democracy remains significantly lower than before Trump came to power. Government misinformation declined last year but did not return to previous levels. Toxic levels of polarization continue to increase. Democracy survives in the United States, but it remains under threat. Of all the forces undermining democratic traditions in elections and policymaking — Donald Trump’s big lie, the politicization of ballot counting by Republican state legislatures, the attempt to disenfranchise segments of the population — one that has devastating potential is operating under the radar: the growing cynicism of younger voters.Daron Acemoglu, a professor of economics at M.I.T., contends that the decline in popular support for democracy is greater in the United States than elsewhere, especially among the young:“In our data younger people are less supportive of democracy,” Acemoglu wrote in an email. “In the U.S., this age gradient is particularly visible. Moreover, in the U.S., you see a large, across-the-board decline in support for democracy between 2011 and 2017. Is that the financial crisis? The beginning of Trumpism? Not sure.”In other respects, the adverse trends in the United States, Acemoglu points out, “are not unique to Trump. Look at it from an international perspective, Trumpism is no exception. You see similar dynamics in Brazil, Turkey, the Philippines, Hungary, Russia and somewhat less successfully in the U.K., France, Chile and Colombia. Trump is a particularly mendacious and noxious version, but he is not unique.”The United States does stand out, however, among developed countries with established democracies. Acemoglu added that “Other developed economies show some weakness, but the U.S., is distinctive in the degree to which its democracy has become weaker.”Why the United States?In his email Acemoglu suggested thatBoth center-right and center-left politicians promised huge gains from globalization and technology for everybody and aspirations rose. And many groups were disappointed and frustrated with either slow or sometimes no economic progress. In many cases, they also felt completely unheard and ignored by technocratic-sounding politicians using globalist language and proclaiming values that did not jibe so well with their preoccupations. All of these have been lived much more strongly in the U.S., where workers without a college degree have seen their real earnings fall significantly and their communities depressed. They have also come to believe that center-left and center-right governing parties were pushing different values than theirs and not listening to their concerns. The financial crisis much amplified these worries and of course the economic tensions.The widespread acceptance among Republican voters of Trump’s claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen is, in Acemoglu’s view,a “signal.” You are signaling to the rest of the population and especially to the media that you are highly discontented, and you are distinct from the well-educated elites benefiting from the current system. If so, the more outrageous this signal sounds, the more effective it may be to some of the people who are trying to send the signal.Acemoglu acknowledged that thisis just a hypothesis, but if it were true, it would imply that demonizing Trump supporters would make things worse for Democrats. It may not be so much that they are completely delusional, but they are angry and feel outside of the mainstream. If so, finding ways of broadening the mainstream coalition may be a much more effective response.Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, noted in an email that the United States stands apart from most other developed nations in ways that may make this country especially vulnerable in the universe of democratic states to authoritarian appeals and democratic backsliding:There are two unique American afflictions on which Trump could thrive and that are not shared by any other advanced Western O.E.C.D. country: the legacy of slavery and racism, and the presence of fundamentalist Evangelicalism, magnifying racial and class divisions. There is no social organization in America that is as segregated as churches.In this context, Kitschelt wrote,a critical element of Trumpist support is trying to establish in all of the United States a geographical generalization of what prevailed in the American South until the 1960s Civil Rights movement: a white Evangelical oligarchy with repression — jailtime, physical violence and death — inflicted on those who will not succumb to this oligarchy. It’s a form of clero-fascism. A declining minority — defined in economic and religious terms — is fighting tooth and nail to assert its supremacy.Underlying the racial motivations, in Kitschelt’s view, arechanges in political economy and family structure, strongly related also to a decline of religion and religiosity. Religions, for the most part, are ideological codifications of traditional paternalist family kinship structures. Postindustrial libertarianism and intellectualism oppose those paternalisms. This explains why right-wing populists around the world draw on religion as their ultimate ideological defense, even if their religious doctrines are seemingly different: Trump (white Protestant Evangelicalism and Catholic ultramontanism), Putin (Orthodoxy), Modi (Hinduism), Erdogan (Islam), Xi (Confucianism).Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., takes a different, but not necessarily contradictory approach. She is co-author of the forthcoming book, “The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy,” with John Sides and Chris Tausanovitch, political scientists at Vanderbilt and U.C.L.A.In an email, Vavreck wrote that in their book,We describe the current state of American politics as ‘calcified’ — calcification, like in the human body, makes politics rigid. It is born of four factors: 1) Increasing distance between the parties (we are farther apart than ever ideologically); 2) Increasing homogeneity across issue positions within each party (we are more like our fellow partisans than ever); 3) The displacement of the “New Deal” dimension of conflict (size and role of government, tax rates) with a new dimension of conflict based on identity-inflected issues; 4) Partisan parity within the electorate (there is near balance between people who call themselves Ds and Rs right now).These four things make politics feel stuck and explosive. Here’s why: The stakes of election outcomes are very high because the other side is farther away than ever and victory is always within reach for both sides (due to the balance). The balance also means that instead of going back to the drawing board to rethink how they campaigned or what they offered, when one side loses, they don’t revamp their packages or strategies (they almost won!!), instead they try to change the rules of the game to advantage their side. This is the ultimate challenge to democracy — preventing parties from changing the rules to erode democratic principles.From a different vantage point, Vavreck observes, another “part of democracy — the representational part, so to speak — seems quite healthy at the moment.” The partiesare unique and offer two very different visions of the world to voters. Voters see and understand those differences. More voters see important differences between the parties today than have at any point since the 1950s! Nearly everyone — 9 out of 10 people — say they see important differences between the two parties. That is remarkable.For all of its faults, contemporary American democracy does perform the essential function of offering voters a choice, Vavreck continued:People know what kind of world they want to live in — and they can match that to the party offerings to figure out where they belong (and who to vote for). That there is no confusion about which party is on which side isn’t normatively bad or problematic — in fact, it makes democracy work better if it assists people in voting for candidates who align with their preferences.But the cost can be high, in Vavreck’s view, perhaps higher than the benefits:When parties attempt to erode democratic institutions like voting, election certification, or election administration; or to bully elected leaders to change legitimate outcomes, we obviously have challenges to democracy, but the clarity with which voters see these parties and understand how to choose between them should not be overlooked as a strong element of democracy in America at the moment.If polarization is a crucial aspect of democratic atrophy, all indications are that partisan hostility is entrenched in the social order.In their May 2022 paper, “Learning to Dislike Your Opponents: Political Socialization in the Era of Polarization,” Matthew Tyler and Shanto Iyengar, political scientists at Stanford, find that polarization, including a strong dislike of members of the opposition party, has been growing rapidly among adolescents, a constituency previously more neutral in its political views:We find that adolescents who identify as Republican or Democrat have become just as polarized as adults. The increased level of polarization in the youth sample occurs not because partisans became more positive in their evaluations of their own party but primarily because their distrust of the opposing party increased dramatically.Today, Tyler and Iyengar write,high levels of in-group favoritism and out-group distrust are in place well before early adulthood. In fact, the absence of age differences in our 2019 results suggests that the learning curve for polarization plateaus by the age of 11. This is very unlike the developmental pattern that held in the 1970s and 1980s, when early childhood was characterized by blanket positivity toward political leaders and partisanship gradually intruded into the political attitudes of adolescents before peaking in adulthood.What are the consequences of this shift among the young?“Fifty years ago,” Tyler and Iyengar report, “political socialization was thought to play a stabilizing role important to the perpetuation of democratic norms and institutions. In particular, children’s adoption of uncritical attitudes toward political leaders helped to legitimize the entire democratic regime.”“In the current era, the two authors note pointedly,it seems questionable whether the early acquisition of out-party animus fosters democratic norms and civic attitudes. Extreme polarization is now associated with rampant misinformation and, as indicated by the events that occurred in the aftermath of the 2020 election, with willingness to reject the outcome of free and fair electoral procedures.In fact, there has been a steady falloff in key measures of the vitality and strength of American democracy.Nicholas Valentino, a political scientist at the University of Michigan and a principal investigator on the American National Election Studies 2024 project, wrote by email thatWe do have some long-term trends in the ANES data that are troubling. Principal among these is a steady decline in the public’s trust in government in general, and in many specific institutions that are considered pillars of democratic legitimacy.This development includes an increase from 48 percent in 2002 to 64 percent in 2020 of people who say government operates “for the benefit of a few big interests” and a decline over the same period from 51 to 16 percent of people who say government operates “for the benefit of all.” Over the same 18-year period, a “trust in government” measure fell from 43 to 17 percent.Such downward trendlines are particularly worrisome, according to Valentino, because “the cornerstone of democratic stability lies in strong institutional legitimacy among the governed, regardless of which party is in charge.”Two types of events in upcoming elections, Valentino writes, “indicate that the U.S. has broken from mainstream democratic systems”:First, widespread refusal among losing candidates and members of their party to accept their losses in these elections; and second, state officials in certain states refusing to certify elections where candidates of their own party lose. Note these types of threats are significantly more serious to democracy even than the myriad changes to election laws that make it harder for citizens to vote, even when those laws disproportionately affect some groups more than others. This would be voter nullification after the fact.In their 2021 paper, “The Majoritarian Threat to Liberal Democracy,” Guy Grossman, Dorothy Kronick, Matthew Levendusky and Marc Meredith, political scientists at the University of Pennsylvania, argue that “many voters are majoritarian, in that they view popularly elected leaders’ actions as inherently democratic — even when those actions undermine liberal democracy.”The willingness of majoritarians “to give wide latitude to elected officials is an important but understudied threat to liberal democracy in the United States,” Grossman and his co-authors write.What liberal democrats see as backsliding, the four authors continue, “majoritarians see as consistent with democracy, which mutes the public backlash against power grabs.”Why?Many voters grant tremendous license to elected incumbents, perceiving incumbent behavior as ‘consistent with democracy’ — even if it undermines checks and balances or other aspects of liberal democracy.Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, stresses economic forces in his analysis of declining support for democracy.“The rise of authoritarian parties is rooted in rising inequality and even more in the loss of social mobility,” he wrote by email, adding thatMore rigid and culturally divided inequality breeds resentment of the elites. And I would say the elites brought this on themselves, by creating meritocratic bubbles that demean those outside, and access to which they increasingly control for their own families. The elites have implemented policies of globalization, meritocracy, and market-driven morals, preaching that these are for the best, while ignoring the widespread harm these policies have done to many millions of their fellow citizens. A bond with an authoritarian leader who is not beholden to these elites makes ordinary people feel stronger, and gives them a sense of importance and justice.In an essay last month, “Trump Was a Symptom, Not the Disease — and It’s Become a Global Pandemic,” Goldstone was sharply critical of economic and political elites, especially liberal elites:It is the actions of liberal elites — well-intended but grievously misguided — that have spawned the populist wave. In a variety of ways, ruling elites promoting globalization and diversity have deprived many groups in their own societies of opportunity, hope, and security.Along similar lines, but with a different emphasis, Elizabeth Suhay, a political scientist at American University, wrote by email that “the rise in authoritarian parties is primarily driven by discontent among the masses.” Scholars have demonstrated this, she continued, “at the individual level (e.g., whether a person is unemployed) and the national level (e.g., the national unemployment rate).”Suhay added a crucial caveat:I would also say that European and U.S. elites are an indirect cause of the rise of authoritarian parties. The neoliberal policies they have championed have led to increased inequality, stagnating wages, and a weaker safety net for most citizens. Economic distress, pessimism, and precarity increase citizens’ interest in radical political candidates and policies, on both sides of the political aisle.Trump, Suhay argues,deserves substantial blame for the recent challenges to democracy in the United States. It is difficult to overstate how unique he is on the American political scene with respect to his genuinely authoritarian tendencies. This said, it is important to recognize that a substantial portion of the electorate was strongly attracted to these very tendencies. In my view, it is due to a combination of factors that have generated deep anxiety about their own lives as well as the state of the nation: economic precarity and pessimism, rapidly increasing racial and ethnic diversity, and declining social capital. In response to these anxieties, a powerful person who promises to turn America’s clock back several decades is very attractive.Acemoglu, the M.I.T. economist, argues that one way to address the discontent with contemporary democracy among so many voters on the right would be to implement traditional center-left economic policies, including many supported by the Biden administration. Acemoglu makes the case that the activist wing of the Democratic Party has undermined the effectiveness of this approach:The tragedy here is that Democrats have the plans to deliver public services and more broad-based economic growth, and this would help many Trump supporters as well. But Republicans have become very united in blocking all such policies, and Democrats themselves appear to work hard to alienate these groups, for example, by appearing more radical than they truly are, or banding around slogans such as defund the police or open borders.There is a strong argument, Acemoglu continued,that not just the United States, but many other countries, need traditional social democratic/labor party type coalitions to support wage growth, worker protection, public service delivery, redistribution, health care and better health services, as well as antimonopoly regulations and policies. But the posturing and noneconomic language that many center-left parties have adopted make the coalition that would support this type of social democratic party much more difficult or even impossible.Given the intransigent, anti-democratic posture of the Republican Party and its leaders, only the Democratic Party, its shortcomings notwithstanding, is equipped to lead a drive to restore democratic norms. To become an effective force for reform, the party must first cease alienating key swing voters.While many voters disagree with the progressive movement, especially in its more cultural and identitarian forms, many more agree with its redistributive agenda: the reduction of inequality through the transfer of income, wealth and opportunity to middle and working class America. The stakes in this struggle could not be higher.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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      Rethinking Joe Manchin

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      Now that Joe Manchin has saved the Democratic agenda, how should liberals think about him?Joe Manchin has spent much of the past year as the villain of liberal America, receiving the kind of criticism that’s usually reserved for Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell or a conservative Supreme Court justice.Activists aggressively protested against Manchin, some in kayaks outside his houseboat in Washington, others surrounding his car and chanting a vulgarity at him. One Democratic House member called him “anti-Black, anti-child, anti-woman and anti-immigrant,” while others called him untrustworthy. Bernie Sanders accused Manchin of “intentionally sabotaging the president’s agenda” and suggested that Manchin’s wealthy donors were the reason. Other critics called him a shill for the energy industry, noting that he personally owns a coal company.And then Manchin made it possible for the Senate to pass the most aggressive climate bill in American history.That bill seems likely to accomplish almost as much greenhouse-gas reduction as President Biden’s original proposal would have. As Paul Krugman, the Times columnist, has written, “Actual experts on energy and the environment are giddy over what has been accomplished.” Tomorrow, the House is expected to pass the same bill — which will also reduce inequities in health care access — and Biden plans to sign it soon afterward.In today’s newsletter, I want to reconsider Manchin’s place in American politics given his ultimate support for the Senate bill. What were his critics right about? What were they wrong about? And what are the larger political lessons?M.V.D.The simplest fact about Manchin is that he is the most electorally successful member of Congress: Nobody else has won a seat as difficult as his.Trump won West Virginia by 39 percentage points in 2020, more than any in other state except Wyoming. Yet Manchin has repeatedly won statewide elections in West Virginia as a Democrat. This chart highlights Manchin’s uniqueness:Senator Party Affiliations More

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      The Dystopian Myths of Red America

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      Desensitization is an amazing thing. At this point most political observers simply accept it as a fact of life that an overwhelming majority of Republicans accept the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen — a claim with nothing to support it, not even plausible anecdotes.What I don’t think is fully appreciated, however, is that the Big Lie is embedded in an even bigger lie: the claim that the Democratic Party is controlled by radical leftists aiming to destroy America as we know it. And this lie in turn derives a lot of its persuasiveness from a grotesquely distorted view of what life is like in blue America.Urban elites are constantly accused of not understanding Real America™. And, to be fair, most big-city residents probably don’t have a good sense of what life is like in rural areas and small towns, although it’s doubtful whether this gap justified the immense number of news reports interviewing Trump voters sitting in diners.But I’d argue that right-wing misperceptions of blue America run far deeper — and are far more dangerous.Let’s start with the politics. The other day The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel, reporting from the campaign trail, noted that many Republican candidates are claiming that Democrats are deliberately undermining the nation and promoting violence against their opponents; some are even claiming that we’re already in a civil war.Some (many?) of these candidates have been winning primaries, suggesting that the G.O.P. base agrees with them. Actually, I’d like to see some surveys along the lines of those showing that most Republicans accept the Big Lie. How many Republicans believe that President Biden and other leading Democrats are left-wing radicals, indeed Marxists?Relatedly, I’d like to know how many Republicans believe that Black Lives Matter demonstrators looted and burned large parts of America’s major cities.Now, the reality is that the modern Democratic Party is a mildly center-left coalition, consisting of what Europeans would call social democrats, and relatively conservative ones at that. To take one measure, I can’t think of any prominent Democrats — actually, any Democratic members of Congress — who have expressed admiration for any authoritarian foreign regime.This is in contrast to widespread conservative admiration for Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who recently denounced other Europeans for “mixing with non-Europeans” and declared that he doesn’t want Hungary to become a “mixed-race” country.On the domestic violence front, a study by the Anti-Defamation League found that 75 percent of extremist-related domestic killings from 2012 to 2021 were perpetrated by the right and only 4 percent by the left.Finally, about B.L.M.: The protests were, in fact, overwhelmingly peaceful. Yes, there was some arson and looting, with total property damage typically estimated at $1 billion to $2 billion. That may sound like a lot, but America is a big country, so it needs to be put in perspective.Here’s one point of comparison. Back in April, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, pulled a political stunt at the border with Mexico, temporarily imposing extra security checks that caused a major slowdown of traffic, disrupting business and leading to a lot of spoiled produce. Total economic losses have been estimated at around $4 billion; that is, a few days of border-security theater appear to have caused more economic damage than a hundred days of mass protests.Yet pointing out these facts probably won’t change many minds. Nor does there seem to be any way to change the perception, also alluded to in that Post article, that a lax attitude toward law enforcement has turned America’s big cities into dangerous hellholes. It’s true that violent crime rose during the pandemic, but it rose about as much in rural America as it did in urban areas. And despite that recent rise, violence in many cities is far lower than it was not long ago.In New York City, homicides so far this year are running a bit below their 2021 level, and in 2021 they were 78 percent lower than they were in 1990 and a quarter lower than they were in 2001. As Bloomberg’s Justin Fox has documented, New York is actually a lot safer than small-town America. Los Angeles has also seen a big long-term drop in homicides, as has California as a whole. Some cities, notably Philadelphia and Chicago, are back to or above early 1990s murder rates, but they’re not representative of the broader picture.But who among the Republican base will acknowledge this reality? Whenever I mention New York’s relative safety, I get a wave of mail saying, in effect, “You can’t really believe that.”The fact is that a large segment of the U.S. electorate has bought into an apocalyptic vision of America that bears no relationship to the reality of how the other half thinks, behaves or lives. We don’t have to speculate about whether this dystopian fantasy might lead to political violence and attempts to overthrow democracy; it already has. And it’s probably going to get worse.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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      We Can’t Even Agree on What Is Tearing Us Apart

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      Today, even scholars of polarization are polarized.This was not always the case.In 1964, Philip Converse of the University of Michigan wrote a groundbreaking paper, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” that attempted to determine the size of the share of the electorate that could reasonably be described as having a consistent set of political convictions.Converse, a political scientist, was interested in figuring out how many people have what he called “a belief system, a configuration of ideas and attitudes in which the elements are bound together by some form of constraint or functional interdependence.”For Converse, such a system suggested that if “an individual holds a specified attitude, he holds certain further ideas and attitudes.” For example, “If a person is opposed to the expansion of Social Security, he is probably a conservative and is probably opposed as well to any nationalization of private industries, federal aid to education, sharply progressive income taxation, and so forth.” Converse called voters who fit this description “ideologues.”At the time he was writing, Converse noted, only 3.5 percent of voters could be described as “ideologues,” 12 percent as “near ideologues,” and the remaining 84.5 percent cast their ballots on the basis of whether their group would benefit, the state of the economy or, in Converse’s words, “no issue content.”Now, nearly six decades later, the issue is not the lack of an ideological and partisan electorate but the dominance of polarized elected officials and voters, some driven by conviction, others by a visceral dislike of the opposition, and still others by both.This turbulence has proved to be a gold mine for scholars seeking to find order in the disorder.Take two papers, both published in August 2021: “Constrained Citizens? Ideological Structure and Conflict Extension in the U.S. Electorate, 1980-2016,” by Christopher Hare, a political scientist at the University of California, Davis, and “Moderates” by six political scientists, Anthony Fowler, Seth Hill, Jeff Lewis, Chris Tausanovitch, Lynn Vavreck and Christopher Warshaw.Hare, in his paper, argues that polarization is present throughout the electorate:As among elites, the left-right dimension has come to encompass a wide range of policy, partisan, and value divides in the mass public. Further, these trends hold for voters at all levels of political sophistication. Widespread conflict extension appears to be a defining feature of mass polarization in contemporary U.S. politics.The level of conflict, Hare continued,speaks to a fundamental trade-off in a pluralistic democracy. On the one hand, the presence of reinforcing policy cleavages — particularly those involving emotional, “high heat” social and cultural matters — changes the tenor of democratic deliberation. Political competition becomes Manichaean: less transactional and more messianic. This environment fosters partisan-ideological antipathy, resistance to compromise, and other manifestations of affective polarization.Citizens with low and moderate levels of political sophistication, Hare argues, “are catching up to their highly sophisticated counterparts in terms of ideological constraint,” and thisconflict extension tends to reinforce itself through a positive feedback loop. Overlapping conflicts provide multiple pathways to the same partisan-ideological configuration. Better-sorted voters, in turn, further clarify party differences. Each process feeds into the other, and partisan competition engulfs both a wider set of conflicts and a larger segment of the electorate. Consequently, when the same political opponents repeatedly clash over emotional issues and fundamental values with messianic zeal, it becomes easier to view the other side as evil rather than merely incorrect.In an email, Hare argued that the current trends in partisanship “all seem to contribute to a feedback loop.” The sorting of voters into two camps, Democrats and liberals versus Republicans and conservatives, is notan innocuous form of polarization, especially when the attitudes and attributes on which voters are being sorted are such deep wellsprings of dispute (religion, race, urban vs. rural, core values such as moral traditionalism and egalitarianism, etc.). As these divisions overlap with each other and an increasing number of diverse policy issues (including value-laden issues like abortion, immigration, guns, etc. that also expose cultural fault lines and are much less amenable to compromise and standard political horse trading), it’s little surprise that politics becomes more combustible.Fowler and his co-authors, on the other hand, contest the view that voters are deeply polarized:We find that a large proportion of the American public is neither consistently liberal nor consistently conservative but that this inconsistency is not because their views are simply random or incoherent. Instead, we estimate that many of those who give a mix of liberal and conservative responses hold genuine views in the middle of the same dimension of policy ideology that explains the views of consistent liberals and consistent conservatives.There are, Fowler and his collaborators point out,many genuine moderates in the American electorate. Nearly three in four survey respondents’ issue positions are well-described by a single left-right dimension, and most of those individuals have centrist views. Furthermore, these genuine moderates are a politically important group. They are highly responsive to the ideologies and qualities of political candidates.In an email responding to my inquires, Fowler wrote:Elites are highly polarized, but members of the general public are not. Of course, there is sorting in the sense that liberals are more likely to identify as Democrats and conservatives are more likely to identify as Republican. So there are differences between the opinions of the average Democrat and the average Republican, but unlike for members of Congress, the distribution of ideology in the American public is unimodal, with most people close to the middle.There is a second crucial area of disagreement among scholars over what is known as “affective polarization,” the idea that there has been a steady increase in the level of animosity among voters toward members of the opposite party.Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, described affective polarization in a 2016 paper, “A Cross-Cutting Calm: How Social Sorting Drives Affective Polarization”:In recent decades, a particular type of partisan sorting has been occurring in the American electorate. American partisan identities have grown increasingly linked with a number of other specific social identities. These include religious, racial, and other political group identities, such as the Tea Party.For those whose social identities have become deeply entwined with their partisan identities as Democrats or Republicans, political defeat can produce intense anger. “This anger,” Mason writes, “is driven not simply by dissatisfaction with potential policy consequences, but by a much deeper, more primal psychological reaction to group threat. Partisans are angered by a party loss because it makes them, as individuals, feel like losers too.”In a separate 2018 paper, “Ideologues Without Issues: The Polarizing Consequences of Ideological Identities,” Mason argued that “American identities are better than American opinions at explaining conflict,” noting:Identity-based ideology can drive affective ideological polarization even when individuals are naïve about policy. The passion and prejudice with which we approach politics is driven not only by what we think, but also powerfully by who we think we are.Two political scientists, Lilla V. Orr at Stanford and Gregory Huber at Yale, dispute Mason’s portrayal of affective polarization in their 2019 paper, “The Policy Basis of Measured Partisan Animosity in the United States.” They argue that policy and ideology play a strong role in the level of dislike or hatred between members of opposing parties and that policy agreement can moderate much of the hostility:In a series of survey experiments asking participants to rate the warmth they feel toward people described in vignettes, we find that issue positions influence interpersonal evaluations more than partisanship. Issue effects remain strong even when partisanship is also presented (they decrease by about 12 percent), but the effect of partisanship decreases substantially in this setting (by about 60 percent).Perhaps most striking, Orr and Huber found that “respondents more favorably evaluate out-partisans who hold a shared policy position than co-partisans who disagree on policy.”In an email, Huber wrote that there is “a very simple alternative” to explain growing partisan animosity:People pick which party to be in on the basis of issues, (and) animosity is based in policy disagreement. We know people disagree about stuff, and of course that is the basis of politics. If we all agreed, we wouldn’t need a political system to manage our disagreements. But, disagreement needn’t be elite driven or linked to being in a tribe; it might just be that we have preferences.Huber elaborated:Because the parties are clearly defined ideologically, we tend on average to (correctly) assume that the mass public’s views are also linked to their partisanship. So if I want to understand why people are affectively polarized, it is because they are correct that on average Republicans and Democrats disagree about issues, and not just random issues, but the issues that lead us to pick which party we belong to. I wouldn’t call that tribal — that sounds like issue-based politics.Orr contended in an email:Several experiments have successfully manipulated feelings toward people from the opposing party and found no effects on anti-democratic attitudes or other predicted consequences of affective polarization. These results imply that affective polarization might not be as inherently dangerous as many researchers previously assumed. I don’t mean to downplay the harm caused by partisan-motivated violence or dismiss efforts to combat blind partisan hostility, but a widespread failure to be upset by some of the things our fellow U.S. residents are trying to accomplish through politics can also put people in physical danger.In an effort to clarify the relationship between ideological and affective polarization, I queried a number of political scientists and received some thoughtful responses.Sean Westwood of Dartmouth stressed the importance of “sorting”:Sorting argues that citizens and elites proactively move themselves to parties that best capture their views. By consequence this should reduce the prevalence of misaligned senators like Joe Manchin. Sorting makes the parties more cohesive and moves the party toward more extreme positions on average, increasing ideological polarization. Evidence for sorting among elites is very strong. The best way to think of this, I think, is that sorting causes polarization.What, then, about affective polarization?Affective polarization is more widespread than principled ideological polarization among voters. Even voters entirely ignorant of the policy positions of their party can develop an emotional attachment to co-partisans and a negative view of the opposition.Unfortunately, Westwood continued,We don’t really know where affective polarization comes from or why it is surging. Some argue that it comes from ideological sorting, but this isn’t very satisfying because many people have affective preferences and are simultaneously unable to correctly identify the policy positions of the parties.How do sorting, ideological polarization and affective polarization interact?Sorting among elites makes it less likely for more conservative voices to exist within the Democratic Party and for more liberal voices to exist in the Republican Party. This makes the parties more ideologically cohesive and more likely to adopt more extreme policy positions, increasing ideological polarization. This is magnified by the lack of centrists running for and winning office. Polarization is the consequence of the complementary phenomenon of growing ideological cohesion among the parties and fewer moderates to temper the movement of parties to ideological extremes.At the same time, Westwood argues:Voters are becoming more affectively polarized. The connection between elite ideological polarization and citizen affective polarization seems credible on face value, but evidence to support such a relationship is very hard to come by. This is what makes research on the causes of affective polarization so important and our current understanding so frustrating. I would see ideological polarization and affective polarization as two parallel and related phenomena, but with different antecedents and different effects on behavior.Yphtach Lelkes, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, addressed my queries from a different angle, emphasizing ideological constraint:With the risk of sounding overly academic, researchers sometimes say polarization can be thought of as a loss of dimensionality in the issue space. That is, if I knew your position on abortion, I didn’t necessarily know your position on health care. Among elites, the dimensionality of the issue space has completely collapsed. If I know where a senator stands on abortion, I know where that senator stands on health care, gun rights, immigration, etc.Political scientists, he continued,have long argued that a sign of the disconnect between the mass public and elites is that the mass public’s attitudes are multidimensional (knowing where someone stands on abortion doesn’t necessarily tell me where they stand on health care), while elites’ attitudes are unidimensional.That is changing, Lelkes argued, citing the work of Chris Hare in the paper I already mentioned: “Hare (who knows a ton about this stuff) has recently shown that public opinion is now collapsing onto one dimension.”Affective polarization can have substantial real-world consequences.James Druckman, Samara Klar, Yanna Krupnikov, Matthew Levendusky and John Barry Ryan, of Northwestern, the University of Arizona, Stony Brook, the University of Pennsylvania and Stony Brook, studied partisan responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in their 2021 paper, “Affective polarization, local contexts and public opinion in America,” and found:For worry about Covid-19 and support for Covid-19 policies, the marginal effect of animus is significant and negative for Republicans in counties with few cases; the confidence intervals for the other marginal effects overlap with zero. Increases in animus are statistically significant only for Republicans in counties with low cases, suggesting that, for worry and support, partisan gaps are largely a function of Republicans with considerable animus towards Democrats.Gary Jacobson, of the University of California, San Diego, summarized the evolution of polarization in his emailed reply:Over the past four decades, largely in response to the more sharply differentiated alternatives presented by the national parties and their leaders, voters have sorted themselves into increasingly distinct and discordant political camps. As partisan identities, ideological leanings, and policy preferences have moved into closer alignment, individuals’ political attitudes have become more internally consistent and more distinct from those of partisans on the other side, leaving ordinary Republicans and Democrats in disagreement on a growing range of issues.Political cleavages that once split the public in diverse ways, Jacobson continued,now tend to coincide. Affective reactions to parties and candidates have diverged, largely because of partisans’ growing antipathy toward the other party’s adherents and leaders. Widening demographic differences between the parties’ identifiers — differences in race, age, sex, religiosity, education, community and marital status — have also contributed to partisan “tribalism,” as has the increasing partisan homogeneity of the states and districts.Sorting, in Jacobson’s view,is a primary source of affective polarization. If people on the other side are consistently “wrong” on all the important political questions, you’ll find it harder to like or respect them. This is especially the case if some of the issues have a large moral component (abortion, civil rights), where the other side is viewed as not just misguided but immoral, even evil.Demographic sorting by race, education and geography “contributes to affective polarization by clarifying who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them,’” Jacobson wrote: “The more the parties appear to be differentiated by morality and identity, the more intense the partisan conflict and the greater the likelihood of violence.”Jacobson was not sympathetic to the findings in Fowler’s “Moderates” paper:My analysis is orthogonal to the findings of “Moderates.” Fowler et al. find that electorate is largely moderate in ideology, but they have little to say about how their findings relate to the data (like Hare’s) that regularly find that Americans have become increasingly divided along party lines on ideology, issues, and party affect, and so forth.Jacobson stressed that the authors of “Moderates”are all first-rate scholars and their methodological skills far surpass my own, so I take the empirical work seriously. But they haven’t yet related it to the wider literature or explained why so many centrist voters seem unable to elect centrists, or why it is when there is a national tide running against a party, it’s mostly moderates who lose.As a sign of the schisms in the American electorate, Jacobson recalled a defeated congressman “complaining that voters showed their desire for moderating national politics by voting out all the moderates.”There is another key factor underpinning growing polarization and the absence of moderate politicians.“Most legislative polarization is already baking into the set of people who run for office,” Andrew Hall, a political scientist at Stanford, wrote in his book, “Who Wants to Run: How the Devaluing of Political Office Drives Polarization”: “Indeed, when we look at the ideological positions of who runs for the House, we see the set of all candidates — not just incumbents — has polarized markedly since 1980.”This trend results from the fact that since “the winning candidate gets to influence ideological policies” in increasingly polarized legislatures and the Congress, “the ideological payoffs of running for office are not equal across the ideological spectrum.” As a result, “when costs of running for office are high or benefits of holding office are low, more moderate candidates are disproportionately less likely to run.”In other words, polarization has created its own vicious circle, weeding out moderates, fostering extremists and constraining government action even in times of crisis.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 Democrats Can Win the Morality Wars

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      I’m a fan of FiveThirtyEight, a website that looks at policy issues from a data-heavy perspective, but everyone publishes a clunker once in a while. In February, FiveThirtyEight ran a piece called “Why Democrats Keep Losing Culture Wars.” The core assertion was that Republicans prevail because a lot of Americans are ignorant about issues like abortion and school curriculum, and they believe the lies the right feeds them. The essay had a very heavy “deplorables are idiots” vibe.Nate Hochman, writing in the conservative National Review, recognized a hanging curve when he saw one and he walloped the piece. He noted that “all the ‘experts’ that the FiveThirtyEight writers cite in their piece are invested in believing that the progressive worldview is the objective one, and that any deviations from it are the result of irrational or insidious impulses in the electorate.”He added: “All this is a perfect example of why the left’s cultural aggression is alienating to so many voters. Progressive elites are plagued by an inability to understand the nature and function of social issues in American life as anything other than a battle between the forces of truth and justice on one side and those of ignorance and bigotry on the other.”There’s a lot of truth to that. The essence of good citizenship in a democratic society is to spend time with those who disagree with you so you can understand their best arguments.But over the last few decades, as Republicans have been using cultural issues to rally support more and more, Democrats have understood what’s going on less and less. Many progressives have developed an inability to see how good and wise people could be on the other side, a lazy tendency to assume that anybody who’s not a social progressive must be a racist or a misogynist, a tendency to think the culture wars are merely a distraction Republican politicians kick up to divert attention from the real issues, like economics — as if the moral health of society was some trivial sideshow.Even worse, many progressives have been blind to their own cultural power. Liberals dominate the elite cultural institutions — the universities, much of the mainstream news media, entertainment, many of the big nonprofits — and many do not seem to understand how infuriatingly condescending it looks when they describe their opponents as rubes and bigots.The Republican Party capitalizes on this. Some days it seems as if this is the only thing the party does. For example, Republican candidates could probably cruise to victory in this fall’s elections just by talking about inflation. Instead, many are doubling down on the sort of cultural issues that helped propel Glenn Youngkin to the governor’s office in Virginia.They’re doing it because many Americans believe the moral fabric of society is fraying, and the Republican messages on this resonate. In a recent Fox News poll, 60 percent of Hispanic respondents favored laws that would bar teachers from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity with students before the fourth grade. Nearly three-quarters of American voters are very or extremely concerned about “what’s taught in public schools.”Documents this year from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recognized that the Republican culture war issues are “alarmingly potent” and that some battleground state voters think the Democrats are “preachy” and “judgmental.”The fact is the culture wars are not a struggle between the enlightened few and the ignorant and bigoted masses. They are a tension between two legitimate moral traditions. Democrats will never prevail on social issues unless they understand the nature of the struggle.In the hurly-burly of everyday life, very few of us think about systemic moral philosophies. But deep down we are formed by moral ecologies we are raised within or choose, systems of thought and feeling that go back centuries. We may think we are making up our own minds about things, but usually our judgments and moral sentiments are shaped by these long moral traditions.In this essay I’m going to try to offer a respectful version of the two rival moral traditions that undergird our morality wars. I’ll try to summarize the strengths and weaknesses of each. I’ll also try to point to the opportunities Democrats now have to create a governing majority on social and cultural matters.***The phrase “moral freedom” captures a prominent progressive moral tradition. It recognizes the individual conscience as the ultimate authority and holds that in a diverse society, each person should have the right to lead her own authentic life and make up her own mind about moral matters. If a woman decides to get an abortion, then we should respect her freedom of choice. If a teenager concludes they are nonbinary, or decides to transition to another gender, then we should celebrate their efforts to live a life that is authentic to who they really are.In this ethos society would be rich with a great diversity of human types.This ethos has a pretty clear sense of right and wrong. It is wrong to try to impose your morality or your religious faith on others. Society goes wrong when it prevents gay people from marrying who they want, when it restricts the choices women can make, when it demeans transgender people by restricting where they can go to the bathroom and what sports they can play after school.This moral freedom ethos has made modern life better in a variety of ways. There are now fewer restrictions that repress and discriminate against people from marginalized groups. Women have more social freedom to craft their own lives and to be respected for the choices they make. People in the L.G.B.T.Q. communities have greater opportunities to lead open and flourishing lives. There’s less conformity. There’s more tolerance for different lifestyles. There’s less repression and more openness about sex. People have more freedom to discover and express their true selves.However, there are weaknesses. The moral freedom ethos puts tremendous emphasis on individual conscience and freedom of choice. Can a society thrive if there is no shared moral order? The tremendous emphasis on self-fulfillment means that all relationships are voluntary. Marriage is transformed from a permanent covenant to an institution in which two people support each other on their respective journeys to self-fulfillment. What happens when people are free to leave their commitments based on some momentary vision of their own needs?If people find their moral beliefs by turning inward, the philosopher Charles Taylor warned, they may lose contact with what he called the “horizons of significance,” the standards of truth, beauty and moral excellence that are handed down by tradition, history or God.A lot of people will revert to what the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre calls “emotivism”: What is morally right is what feels right to me. Emotivism has a tendency to devolve into a bland mediocrity and self-indulgence. If we’re all creating our own moral criteria based on feelings, we’re probably going to grade ourselves on a forgiving curve.Self-created identities are also fragile. We need to have our identities constantly affirmed by others if we are to feel secure. People who live within this moral ecology are going to be hypersensitive to sleights that they perceive as oppression. Politics devolves into identity wars, as different identities seek recognition over the others.The critics of moral freedom say that while it opens up lifestyle choices, it also devolves into what Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity.” When everybody defines his own values, the basic categories of life turn fluid. You wind up in a world in which a Supreme Court nominee like Ketanji Brown Jackson has to dodge the seemingly basic question of what a woman is. I don’t blame her. I don’t know how to answer that question anymore, either.Under the sway of the moral freedom ethos, the left has generally won the identity wars but lost the cosmology wars. America has moved left on feminist and L.G.B.T.Q. issues and is much more tolerant of diverse lifestyles. But many Americans don’t quite trust Democrats to tend the moral fabric that binds us all together. They worry that the left threatens our national narratives as well as religious institutions and the family, which are the seedbeds of virtue.***The conservative moral tradition has a very different conception of human nature, the world and how the good society is formed. I’ll call it “you are not your own,” after the recent book by the English professor and Christian author Alan Noble.People who subscribe to this worldview believe that individuals are embedded in a larger and pre-existing moral order in which there is objective moral truth, independent of the knower. As Charles Taylor summarizes the ethos, “independent of my will there is something noble, courageous and hence significant in giving shape to my own life.”In this ethos, ultimate authority is outside the self. For many people who share this worldview, the ultimate source of authority is God’s truth, as revealed in Scripture. For others, the ultimate moral authority is the community and its traditions.We’re in a different moral world here, with emphasis on obedience, dependence, deference and supplication. This moral tradition has a loftier vision of perfect good, but it takes a dimmer view of human nature: Left to their own devices, people will tend to be selfish and shortsighted. They will rebel against the established order and seek autonomy. If a person does not submit to the moral order of the universe — or the community — he may become self-destructive, a slave to his own passions.The healthier life is one lived within limits — limits imposed by God’s commandments, by the customs and sacred truths of a culture and its institutions. These limits on choice root you so you have a secure identity and secure attachments. They enforce habits that slowly turn into virtues.In the “moral freedom” world you have to be free to realize your highest moral potential.In the “you are not your own” world you must be morally formed by institutions before you are capable of handling freedom. In this world there are certain fixed categories. Male and female are essential categories of personhood. In this ethos there are limits on freedom of choice. You don’t get to choose to abort your fetus, because that fetus is not just cells that belong to you. That fetus belongs to that which brings forth life.Researchers Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt and Brian Nosek found that liberals are powerfully moved to heal pain and prevent cruelty. Conservatives, they discovered, are more attuned than liberals to the moral foundations that preserve a stable social order. They highly value loyalty and are sensitive to betrayal. They value authority and are sensitive to subversion.The strengths of this moral tradition are pretty obvious. It gives people unconditional attachments and a series of rituals and practices that morally form individuals.The weaknesses of this tradition are pretty obvious, too. It can lead to rigid moral codes that people with power use to justify systems of oppression. This ethos leads to a lot of othering — people not in our moral order are inferior and can be conquered and oppressed.But the big problem today with the “you are not your own” ethos is that fewer and fewer people believe in it. Fewer and fewer people in the United States believe in God. And more Americans of all stripes have abandoned the submissive, surrendering, dependent concept of the self.This is the ultimate crisis on the right. Many conservatives say there is an objective moral order that demands obedience, but they’ve been formed by America’s prevailing autonomy culture, just like everybody else. In practice, they don’t actually want to surrender obediently to a force outside themselves; they want to make up their own minds. The autonomous self has triumphed across the political spectrum, on the left where it makes sense, and also on the right, where it doesn’t.***Both of these moral traditions have deep intellectual and historical roots. Both have a place in any pluralistic society. Right now, the conservative world looks politically strong, but it is existentially in crisis. Republicans will probably do extremely well in the 2022 midterms. But conservatism, especially Christian conservatism, is coming apart.Conservative Christians feel they are under massive assault from progressive cultural elites. Small-town traditionalists feel their entire way of life is being threatened by globalism and much else. They perceive that they are losing power as a cultural force. Many in the younger generations have little use for their god, their traditional rooted communities and their values.This has produced a moral panic. Consumed by the passion of the culture wars, many traditionalists and conservative Christians have adopted a hypermasculine warrior ethos diametrically opposed to the Sermon on the Mount moral order they claim as their guide. Unable to get people to embrace their moral order through suasion, they now seek to impose their moral order through politics. A movement that claims to make God their god now makes politics god. What was once a faith is now mostly a tribe.This moral panic has divided the traditionalist world, especially the Christian part of it, a division that has, for example, been described in different ways by me, by my Times colleague Ruth Graham and by Tim Alberta in The Atlantic. Millions of Americans who subscribe to the “you are not your own” ethos are appalled by what the Republican Party has become.So is there room in the Democratic Party for people who don’t subscribe to the progressive moral tradition but are appalled by what conservatism has become?First, will Democrats allow people to practice their faith even if some tenets of that faith conflict with progressive principles? For example, two bills in Congress demonstrate that clash. They both would amend federal civil rights law to require fair treatment of L.G.B.T.Q. people in housing, employment and other realms of life. One, the Fairness for All Act, would allow for substantial exceptions for religious institutions. A Catholic hospital, say, wouldn’t be compelled to offer gender transition surgeries. The other, the Equality Act, would override existing law that prevents the federal government from substantially burdening individuals’ exercise of religion without a compelling government interest.Right now, Democrats generally support the latter bill and oppose the former. But supporting the Fairness for All Act, which seeks to fight discrimination while leaving space for religious freedom, would send a strong signal to millions of wavering believers, and it would be good for America.Second, will Democrats stand up to the more radical cultural elements in their own coalition? Jonathan Rauch was an early champion of gay and lesbian rights. In an article in American Purpose, he notes that one wing of the movement saw gay rights as not a left-wing issue but a matter of human dignity. A more radical wing celebrated cultural transgression and disdained bourgeois morality. Ultimately, the gay rights movement triumphed in the court of public opinion when the nonradicals won and it became attached to the two essential bourgeois institutions — marriage and the military.Rauch argues that, similarly, the transgender rights movement has become entangled with ideas that are extraneous to the cause of transgender rights. Ideas like: Both gender and sex are chosen identities and denying or disputing that belief amounts is violence. Democrats would make great strides if they could champion transgender rights while not insisting upon these extraneous moral assertions that many people reject.The third question is, will Democrats realize that both moral traditions need each other? As usual, politics is a competition between partial truths. The moral freedom ethos, like liberalism generally, is wonderful in many respects, but liberal societies need nonliberal institutions if they are to thrive.America needs institutions built on the “you are not your own” ethos to create social bonds that are more permanent than individual choice. It needs that ethos to counter the me-centric, narcissistic tendencies in our culture. It needs that ethos to preserve a sense of the sacred, the idea that there are some truths so transcendentally right that they are absolutely true in all circumstances. It needs that ethos in order to pass along the sort of moral sensibilities that one finds in, say, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address — that people and nations have to pay for the wages of sin, that charity toward all is the right posture, that firmness in keeping with the right always has to be accompanied by humility about how much we can ever see of the right.Finally, we need this ethos, because morality is not only an individual thing; it’s something between people that binds us together. Even individualistic progressives say it takes a village to raise a child, but the village needs to have a shared moral sense of how to raise it.I’ll end on a personal note. I was raised in Lower Manhattan and was shaped by the progressive moral values that prevailed in the late 1960s and the 1970s. But as I’ve grown older I’ve come to see more and more wisdom in the “you are not your own” tradition.Is there room for people like us in the Democratic Party? Most days I think yes. Some days I’m not sure.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 Wrong Side of the Gender Gap

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      The deepening gender gap in American voting, with men favoring the Republican Party and women favoring the Democrats, is well known, if not well understood. So what explains the presence of millions of men in the Democratic Party and millions of women in the Republican Party? What distinguishes these two constituencies, whose partisanship runs against the grain?I asked Heather L. Ondercin, a political scientist at Appalachian State University who has written extensively on gender issues, including in “Marching to the Ballot Box: Sex and Voting in the 2020 Election Cycle,” for her thoughts on these questions. She emailed back:Regardless of identification as a man or a woman, more stereotypically “masculine” individuals (male and female) — aggressive, assertive, defends beliefs, dominant, forceful, leadership ability, independent, strong personality, willing to take a stand, and willing to take risks — tend to identify with the Republican Party. Individuals (men and women) who are more stereotypically “feminine” — affectionate, compassionate, eager to soothe hurt feelings, gentle, loves children, sensitive to the needs of others, sympathetic, tender, understanding, and warm — tend to identify with the Democratic Party.In a case study of what Ondercin describes, Melissa Deckman, a political scientist at Washington College who is also chairman of the board of the Public Religion Research Institute, and Erin Cassese, a political scientist at the University of Delaware, published research into “gendered nationalism” in 2019 that sought to identify who is most “likely to believe that American society has grown ‘too soft and feminine.’”Deckman and Cassese found a large gender gap: “56 percent of men agreed that the United States has grown too soft and feminine compared to only 34 percent of women.”But the overall gender gap paled in comparison with the gap between Democratic men and Republican men. Some 41 percent of Democratic men without college degrees agreed that American society had become too soft and feminine compared with 80 percent of Republican men without degrees, a 39-point difference. Among those with college degrees, the spread grew to 62 points: Democratic men at 9 percent, Republican men at 73 percent.The gap between Democratic and Republican women was very large, but less pronounced: 28 percent of Democratic women without degrees agreed that the country had become too soft and feminine compared with 57 percent of non-college Republican women, while 4 percent of Democratic women with degrees agreed, compared with 57 percent of college-educated Republican women.The data described by Deckman and Cassese illuminate two key aspects of contemporary American politics. First, despite the enormous gaps between men and women in their voting behavior, partisanship is far more important than gender in determining how people vote; so too is the crucial role of psychological orientation — either empathic or authoritarian, for example — in shaping allegiance to the Democratic or Republican parties.The Deckman-Cassese study is part of a large body of work that seeks to answer a basic question: Who are the men who align with the Democratic Party and who are the women who identify as Republicans?“Gender and the Authoritarian Dynamic: An Analysis of Social Identity in the Partisanship of White Americans,” a 2021 doctoral dissertation by Bradley DiMariano at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, found patterns similar to those in the Deckman-Cassese study.Among white Democratic men, an overwhelming majority, 70.7 percent, were classified in the DiMariano study as either non-authoritarian (50.71 percent) or “weak authoritarian” (19.96 percent), while less than a third, 29.3 percent, were either authoritarian (10.59 percent) or “somewhat authoritarian” (18.74 percent). In contrast, among white Republican men, less than half, 48.3 percent, were non-authoritarian or weak authoritarian, while 51.7 percent were authoritarian or somewhat authoritarian.The partisan divisions among white women were almost identical: Democratic women, 68.3 percent non- or weak authoritarian and 31.7 percent authoritarian or somewhat authoritarian; Republican women, 45.6 percent non- or weak authoritarian and 54.4 percent authoritarian or weak authoritarian.When researchers examine the stands people take on specific issues, things become more complex.Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts and a co-director of the Cooperative Election Study, provided The Times with data on levels of support and opposition on a wide range of issues for Democratic men, Democratic women, Republican men and Republican women.“One thing that strikes me is that Democratic men and women have very similar issue positions, but Republican women are consistently less conservative on the issues compared to Republican men,” Schaffner wrote by email. “Sometimes the gap between Republican men and women is actually quite large, for example on issues like equal pay, minimum wage, right to strike and prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity/sexual orientation.”Take, for example, the question of whether workers should have the right to strike. Almost identical percentages of Democratic men (84) and women (85) agreed, but Republican men and women split 42-58. Similarly, 90 percent of Democratic men and 92 percent of Democratic women support reviving Section 5 the Voting Rights Act — which was designed to prohibit discriminatory electoral practices — while 37 percent of Republican men supported that position and 56 percent of Republican women did. On legislation requiring equal pay for men and women, 93 percent of Democratic men and 97 percent of Democratic women were in support, compared with 70 percent of Republican men and 85 percent of Republican women.Natalie Jackson, director of research at P.R.R.I., provided The Times with poll data posing similar questions. Asked if “America is in danger of losing its culture and identity,” the P.R.R.I. survey found that 80 percent of Republican women and 82 percent of Republican men agreed, while 65 percent of Democratic women and 66 percent of Democratic men disagreed. Seventy-six percent of Democratic women and 77 percent of Democratic men agreed that undocumented immigrants living in this country should be allowed “to become citizens provided they meet certain requirements,” while 46 percent of Republican women and 39 percent of Republican men agreed.Conflicting attitudes toward risk also drive partisanship. In “Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White Male Effect in Risk Perception,” a 2007 paper by Dan M. Kahan of Yale Law School, Donald Braman of George Washington University Law School, John Gastil of Penn State, Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon and C.K. Mertz of Decision Research, studied the attitudes toward risks posed by guns and by environmental dangers. Drawing on a survey of 1,844 Americans, their key finding was:Individuals selectively credit and dismiss asserted dangers in a manner supportive of their preferred form of social organization. This dynamic, it is hypothesized, drives the “white male effect,” which reflects the risk skepticism that hierarchical and individualistic white males display when activities integral to their cultural identities are challenged as harmful.The authors reported that conservative white Republican men (“persons who held relative hierarchical and individualistic outlooks — and particularly both simultaneously”) are the “least concerned about environmental risks and gun risks.” People “who held relatively egalitarian and communitarian views” — predominantly Democrats — “were most concerned.”On environmental risk, the people who were most risk tolerant were white men, followed by white women, then minority-group men and, the most risk averse, minority-group women. The order was slightly different in the case of risk associated with guns: White men demonstrated the least risk aversion followed by minority-group men, then white women and finally minority-group women.Kahan and his collaborators went on: “Increasing hierarchical and individualistic worldviews induce greater risk-skepticism in white males than in either white women or male or female nonwhites.”In other words, those who rank high in communitarian and egalitarian values, including liberal white men, are high in risk aversion. Among those at the opposite end of the scale — low in communitarianism and egalitarianism but high in individualism and in support for hierarchy — conservative white men are markedly more willing to tolerate risk than other constituencies.In the case of guns and gun control, the authors write:Persons of hierarchical and individualistic orientations should be expected to worry more about being rendered defenseless because of the association of guns with hierarchical social roles (hunter, protector, father) and with hierarchical and individualistic virtues (courage, honor, chivalry, self-reliance, prowess). Relatively egalitarian and communitarian respondents should worry more about gun violence because of the association of guns with patriarchy and racism and with distrust of and indifference to the well-being of strangers.A paper published in 2000, “Gender, race, and perceived risk: the ‘white male effect,’” by Melissa Finucane, a senior scientist at the RAND Corporation, Slovic, Mertz, James Flynn of Decision Research and Theresa A. Satterfield of the University of British Columbia, tested responses to 25 hazards and found that “white males’ risk perception ratings were consistently much lower” than those of white women, minority-group women and minority-group men.The white male effect, they continued “seemed to be caused by about 30 percent of the white male sample” who were “better educated, had higher household incomes, and were politically more conservative. They also held very different attitudes, characterized by trust in institutions and authorities and by anti-egalitarianism” — in other words, they tended to be Republicans.While opinions on egalitarianism and communitarianism help explain why a minority of white men are Democrats, the motivation of white women who support Republicans is less clear. Cassese and Tiffany D. Barnes, a political scientist at the University of Kentucky, address this question in their 2018 paper “Reconciling Sexism and Women’s Support for Republican Candidates: A Look at Gender, Class, and Whiteness in the 2012 and 2016 Presidential Races.”Cassese and Barnes found that in the 2016 election, social class and education played a stronger role in the voting decisions of women than of men:Among Trump voters, women were much more likely to be in the lower income category compared to men, a difference of 13 points in the full sample and 14 points for white respondents only. By contrast, the proportion of male, upper-income Trump supporters is greater than the proportion of female, upper-income Trump supporters by about 9 percentage points in the full sample and among white voters only. These findings challenge a dominant narrative surrounding the election — rather than attracting downwardly-mobile white men, Trump’s campaign disproportionately attracted and mobilized economically marginal white women.Cassese and Barnes pose the question: “Why were a majority of white women willing to tolerate Trump’s sexism?” To answer, the authors examined polling responses to three questions: “Do women demanding equality seek special favors?” “Do women complaining about discrimination cause more problems than they solve?” and “How much discrimination do women face in the United States?” Cassese and Barnes describe the first two questions as measures of “hostile sexism,” which they define as “negative views toward individuals who violate traditional gender roles.”They found that “hostile sexism” and “denial of discrimination against women are strong predictors of white women’s vote choice in 2016,” but these factors were “not predictive of voting for Romney in 2012.” Put another way, “white women who display hostile sexist attitudes and who perceive low levels of gender discrimination in society are more likely to support Trump.”In conclusion, Cassese and Barnes write:Our results also address analysts’ incorrect expectations about women voters defecting from the G.O.P. in response to Trump’s campaign. We explain this discrepancy by illustrating that some white women — particularly those without a college education — endorse hostile sexism and have weaker perceptions of systemic gender discrimination. These beliefs are associated with an increased likelihood of voting for Trump — even when controlling for partisanship and ideology.An additional variable predicting Republican partisanship is “social dominance orientation,” briefly defined as a preference for group-based hierarchy and inequality. Arnold Ho is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and lead author of the 2015 paper “The Nature of Social Dominance Orientation: Theorizing and Measuring Preferences for Intergroup Inequality Using the New SDO7 Scale.” He wrote that he and his colleagues found “consistent gender differences across all samples, with men having higher levels of social dominance orientation than women” and that there are “moderate to strong correlations between SDO and political conservatism across all samples, such that greater conservatism is associated with higher levels of SDO.”Ho measured conservatism on the basis of political affiliation — Democratic liberal, Republican conservative and self-identification as a social and economic liberal or conservative.A 2011 paper by I-Ching Lee of the National Taiwan University and Felicia Pratto and Blair T. Johnson of the University of Connecticut — “Intergroup Consensus/Disagreement in Support of Group-Based Hierarchy: An Examination of Socio-Structural and Psycho-Cultural Factors ” — makes the case that… in societies in which unequal groups are segregated into separate roles or living spaces, they may not compare their situations to those of other groups and may be relatively satisfied. In such cases, we would expect dominants and subordinates to be more similar in their attitude toward group-based hierarchy.On the other hand, they continued:… in societies in which people purport to value equality, subordinates may come to expect and feel entitled to equality. The evidence and signs they observe of inequality would then mean that reality is falling short of their ideal standards. This condition may lead them to reassert their opposition to group-based hierarchy and to differentiate from dominants.It may be, then, that the association of the Democratic Party with values linked more closely to women than men is a factor in the party’s loss of support among Hispanic and Black men. As my colleague Charles Blow wrote in “Democrats Continue to Struggle With Men of Color” in September: “For one thing, never underestimate the communion among men, regardless of race. Men have privileges in society, and some are drawn to policies that elevate their privileges.”President Biden’s predicament with regard to all this is reflected in the contradictory findings of a March 17-21 AP/NORC poll of 1,082 Americans on views of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.On one hand, 56 percent of those polled described Biden’s response as “not been tough enough” compared with 36 percent “about right” and 6 percent “too tough.” There were sharp partisan divisions on this question: 68 percent of Republicans said Biden’s response to the invasion was not tough enough, and 20 percent said it was about right. Fifty-three percent of Democrats said it was about right, and 43 percent said not tough enough. Independents were closer to Republicans than to Democrats: 64 percent not tough enough, 25 percent just right.Conversely, the AP/NORC survey found that 45 percent of respondents said they were very or extremely “concerned about Russia using nuclear weapons that target the United States,” 30 percent said they were “somewhat concerned,” and 25 percent said they were “not very or not at all concerned.”The potential pitfalls in the American response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine range from provoking Vladimir Putin to further escalation to diminishing the United States in the eyes of Russia and the rest of the world. The specific dangers confronting policymakers stem from serious decisions taken in a crisis climate, but the pressures on those making the decisions are tied to the competing psychological dispositions of Republicans and Democrats described above, and they are tied as well to discrepancies between men and women in toleration of the use of force.In a 2018 paper, “The Suffragist Peace,” Joslyn N. Barnhart, Allan Dafoe, Elizabeth N. Saunders and Robert F. Trager found that “At each stage of the escalatory ladder, women prefer more peaceful options.”“More telling,” the authors write,is to compare how men and women weigh the choice between backing down and conflict. Women are nearly indifferent between an unsuccessful use of force in which nothing is gained, and their country’s leader backs down after threatening force. Men, by contrast, would much rather see force used unsuccessfully than see the country’s reputation endangered through backing down. Approval among men is fully 36 percent higher for a use of force that achieves nothing and in which over 4,000 U.S. soldiers die than when the U.S. president backs down and the same objective outcome is achieved without loss of life.The gender gap on the use of force has deep roots. A 2012 study, “Men and Women’s Support for War: Accounting for the gender gap in public opinion,” found consistently higher support among men than women for military intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, concluding that the evidence shows a “consistent ‘gender gap’ over time and across countries.” According to the study, “it would be rare to find scholarship in which gender differences on the question of using military force are not present.”The author, Ben Clements, cites “psychological differences between women and men, with the former laying greater value on group relationships and the use of cooperation and compromise, rather than aggressive means, to resolve disputes.”It should be self-evident that the last thing this country needs at a time when the world has drawn closer to the possibility of nuclear war than it has been for decades is a leader like Donald Trump, the apotheosis of aggressive, intemperate white manhood, who at the same time unreservedly seeks the admiration of Vladimir Putin and other authoritarians.The difficult task facing Biden is finding the correct balance between restraint and authority, between harm avoidance and belligerent opposition. The situation in Ukraine has the potential to damage Biden’s already weakened political stature or to provide him with an opportunity to regain some of the support he had when first elected.American wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have been costly for incumbent American presidents, and Biden faces an uphill struggle reversing that trend, even as the United States faces the most dangerous set of circumstances in its recent history.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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      in Elections

      Who Believes in Democracy?

      by

      “There is no sense in avoiding or diluting the magnitude of this turn in our story: One major political party no longer accepts democracy.”The author of this sentence is the former Obama White House speechwriter Ben Rhodes, writing recently in The Atlantic, but it could have flowed from the keyboard of a hundred different writers in the post-Trump, post-Jan. 6 era. That conservatism and the Republican Party have turned against government by the people, that only the Democratic Party still stands for democratic rule, is an important organizing thought of political commentary these days.So let’s subject it to some scrutiny — and with it, the current liberal relationship to democracy as well.First, there’s a sense in which conservatism has always had a fraught relationship to mass democracy. The fear of mob rule, of demagogues rallying the masses to destroy a fragile social order, is a common theme in many different right-wing schools of thought, showing up among traditionalist defenders of aristocracy and libertarians alike.To these general tendencies, we can add two specifically American forms of conservative anxiety about the franchise: the fear of corrupt urban-machine politics that runs back through the 1960 presidential election to the age of Tammany Hall and the racist fear of African American political power that stamped the segregation-era South.Because all these influences touch the modern G.O.P., conservative skepticism about mass democracy was a somewhat normal part of American politics long before Trump came along — and some of what’s changed in the Trump era is just an events-driven accentuation of existing tendencies.Republicans have long feared voter fraud and noncitizen voting, for instance, but the fear — and for liberals, the oft-discussed hope — that demographic change could deliver permanent Democratic power have raised the salience of these anxieties. Likewise, Republicans have long been more likely to portray America as a republic, not a democracy, and to defend our system’s countermajoritarian mechanisms. But today this philosophical tendency is increasingly self-interested, because shifts in party coalitions mean that those mechanisms, the Senate and Electoral College especially, advantage Republicans somewhat more than in the recent past.But then things get complicated, because the modern Republican Party is also the heir to a strong pro-democracy impulse, forged in the years when Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon won crushing presidential-level majorities but conservatives felt themselves constantly balked by unelected powers, bureaucrats and judges especially.This experience left the right deeply invested in the idea that it represents the true American majority — moral, silent, what have you — while liberalism stands for elite power, anti-democratic forms of government, the bureaucracy and the juristocracy and the Ivy League.And that idea and self-image has remained a potent aspect of the right-wing imagination even as the old Nixon and Reagan majorities have diminished and disappeared: With every new age of grassroots activism, from the Tea Party to the local-education revolts of today, the right reliably casts itself as small-d democrats, standing boldly athwart liberal technocracy singing “Yankee Doodle.”Against this complicated backdrop, Donald Trump’s stolen-election narratives should be understood as a way to reconcile the two competing tendencies within conservatism, the intellectual right’s skepticism of mass democracy and comfort with countermajoritarian institutions with the populist right’s small-d democratic self-image. In Trump’s toxic dreampolitik there’s actually no tension there: The right-wing coalition is justified in governing from a minoritarian position because it deserves to be a true electoral majority, and would be if only the liberal enemy weren’t so good at cheating.So seen from within the right, the challenge of getting out from under Trump’s deceptions isn’t just a simple matter of reviving a conservative commitment to democracy. Trump has succeeded precisely because he has exploited the right’s more democratic impulses, speaking to them and co-opting them and claiming them for himself. Which means a conservative rival can’t defeat or replace him by simply accusing him of being anti-democratic. Instead the only plausible pitch would argue that his populism is self-limiting, and that a post-Trump G.O.P. could potentially win a more sweeping majority than the one his supporters want to believe he won already — one that would hold up no matter what the liberal enemy gets up to.But if that argument is challenging to make amid the smog of Trumpenkampf, so is the anti-Trump argument that casts American liberalism as the force to which anyone who believes in American democracy must rally. Because however much the right’s populists get wrong about their claim to represent a true American majority, they get this much right: Contemporary liberalism is fundamentally miscast as a defender of popular self-rule.To be clear, the present Democratic Party is absolutely in favor of letting as many people vote as possible. There are no doubts about the mass franchise among liberals, no fears of voter fraud and fewer anxieties than on the right about the pernicious influence of low-information voters.But when it comes to the work of government, the actual decisions that determine law and policy, liberalism is the heir to its own not exactly democratic tradition — the progressive vision of disinterested experts claiming large swaths of policymaking for their own and walling them off from the vagaries of public opinion, the whims of mere majorities.This vision — what my colleague Nate Cohn recently called “undemocratic liberalism” — is a pervasive aspect of establishment politics not only in the United States but across the Western world. On question after controverted question, its answer to “Who votes?” is different from its answer to “Who decides?” In one case, the people; in the other, the credentialed experts, the high-level stakeholders and activist groups, the bureaucratic process.Who should lead pandemic decision making? Obviously Anthony Fauci and the relevant public-health bureaucracies; we can’t have people playing politics with complex scientific matters. Who decides what your local school teaches your kids? Obviously teachers and administrators and education schools; we don’t want parents demanding some sort of veto power over syllabuses. Who decides the future of the European Union? The important stakeholders in Brussels and Berlin, the people who know what they’re doing, not the shortsighted voters in France or Ireland or wherever. Who makes important U.S. foreign policy decisions? Well, you have the interagency process, the permanent regional specialists and the military experts, not the mere whims of the elected president.Or to pick a small but telling example recently featured in this newspaper, who decides whether an upstate New York school district gets to retain the Indian as its high school mascot? The state’s education commissioner, apparently, who’s currently threatening to cut funds to the school board that voted to keep it unless they reverse course.Whereas the recent wave of right-wing populism, even when it doesn’t command governing majorities, still tends to champion the basic idea of popular power — the belief that more areas of Western life should be subject to popular control and fewer removed into the purview of unelected mandarins. And even if this is not a wise idea in every case, it is democratic idea, whose widespread appeal reflects the fact that modern liberalism really does suffer from a democratic deficit.Which is a serious problem, to put it mildly, for a movement that aspires to fight and win a struggle on behalf of democratic values. So just as a conservative alternative to Trump would need to somehow out-populist him, to overcome the dark side of right-wing populism, American liberalism would need to first democratize itself.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