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      Stay Woke. The Right Can Be Illiberal, Too.

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      Those of us who sustainedly criticize the excesses of the Great Awokening are often told that we’re making a mountain out of a molehill. That the real problem is censorship not from the left but from the right. That censorship from the left is largely a matter of pile-ons by anonymous Twitter denizens or college kids expressing themselves, while censorship from the right involves menacing officials dedicated to eliminating, for instance, discussion of race in schools.The characterization of the problem on the left strikes me as somewhere between uninformed and willfully blind. Yes, left-leaning students might demonstrate their free-speech intolerance within the cozy confines of their campuses, but one day they graduate into the real world and take that rehearsed intolerance with them. Superprogressive views may predominate in certain settings, but the presumption, held by too many, that their woke outlook doesn’t even warrant intellectual challenge in the public square is an extension of the broader “dis-enlightenment” I described back in October.That said, I’m genuinely open to the idea that censorship from the right is more of a problem than I have acknowledged. The truth may be, as it so often is, in the middle, and a legal case from the past week has made me think about it.Making sense of things requires synthesis, identifying what explains a lot rather than perceiving a buzzing chaos of people suddenly crazed, which is an implausible and even effort-light approach to things. In that vein, our problem today is illiberalism on both sides.We will salute, then, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker, who last week ruled, in a 74-page opinion, in favor of six professors at the University of Florida who were barred by school officials from acting as expert witnesses in cases challenging state policy on issues ranging from restrictive voting laws to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s attempt to withhold funds from schools with mask mandates. (There are also recent reports that U.F. faculty members have been cautioned against using the words “critical” and “race” in the same sentence to describe the curriculums they teach, apparently to head off discussion of critical race theory and its effects on education in a way that might draw a backlash from state legislators or others in the Florida government.)Judge Walker analogized the actions of University of Florida officials to the removal in December of a statue commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre from the campus of the University of Hong Kong. He echoed the plaintiffs’ argument that “in an apparent act of vorauseilender Gehorsam,” or anticipatory obedience, “U.F. has bowed to perceived pressure from Florida’s political leaders and has sanctioned the unconstitutional suppression of ideas out of favor with Florida’s ruling party” — admonishing the defendants in a footnote that “if those in U.F.’s administration find this comparison upsetting, the solution is simple. Stop acting like your contemporaries in Hong Kong.”The judge summed up by noting that “the Supreme Court of the United States has long regarded teachers, from the primary grades to the university level, as critical to a healthy democracy.” He added, “Plaintiffs’ academic inquiry ‘is necessary to informed political debate’ and ‘is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned,’” emphasizing that “when such critical inquiry is stifled, democracy suffers.”Let’s not forget, either, what happened to the schoolteacher Matthew Hawn last summer: He was fired by school administrators in Tennessee for leading classroom discussions with high school juniors and seniors (in a course called Contemporary Studies; it’s not as if this had been a chemistry lab) on concepts such as white privilege and implicit bias, not long after passage in the state of a ban on teaching critical race theory. As I’ve argued, ideas rooted in that theory do, in refracted form, make their way into how some schoolteachers teach, and it’s legitimate to question the extent of this. But that hardly justifies Hawn’s getting canned for things such as assigning a widely read article by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Hawn is pursuing an appeal of his dismissal, and if justice is on his side, he should win it.I’m not doing a 180 here or letting those I term the Elect off the hook. The illiberal tendency on the left is just as oppressive and requires equal pushback: The University of North Texas music professor Timothy Jackson, a founder of his school’s Center for Schenkerian Studies, studies the work of the German Jewish music theorist Heinrich Schenker, whose early-20th-century work figures prominently in music theory. In a 2019 speech to the Society for Music Theory, Philip Ewell, a Black music professor at Hunter College characterized Schenker as a racist and wrote in a 2020 article for Music Theory Online (a publication of the Society for Music Theory) that “Schenker’s racist views infected his music theoretical arguments,” that “there exists a ‘white racial frame’ in music theory that is structural and institutionalized” and that by extension, music theory and even the academic field of musicology are racialized, if not racist.In 2020, Jackson led the publication of an issue of The Journal of Schenkerian Studies dedicated to addressing Ewell’s case, publishing five articles defending Ewell’s case and 10 critiquing it. As The Times reported last year, Jackson was hardly gentle in his pushback, arguing that Ewell’s “denunciation of Schenker and Schenkerians may be seen as part and parcel of the much broader current of Black antisemitism” and partly attributing the dearth of Black classical musicians to fewer Black people who “grow up in homes where classical music is profoundly valued” and that fostering music education in public schools is the proper remedy.The result was, by today’s standards, predictable: Hundreds of students and scholars signed a letter condemning the issue. After an investigation, the university relieved Jackson of his supervision of the journal and, according to Times reporting, didn’t rule out further disciplinary action.The point here is less whether Jackson’s argument and the issue it appeared in were the quintessence of tact on race issues than whether he deserves to lose his career status and reputation because of them. Nor is the point whether Ewell’s argument was enlightened; one is (or should be) free to subscribe to it. Or not. My view is that while the field of musicology is correct, generally, in examining itself for remnants of racist bias, Ewell’s specific take is flawed.No, the point is that the through line between Jackson’s treatment at North Texas and the treatment of the Florida law professors is that instead of their views being addressed as one side of heated, complex debates, their views were squelched as unutterable heresies.Jackson has sued, and if justice is on his side, he should win. I could cite a great many cases similar to his.To many, I suspect, what happened to the University of Florida professors and to Hawn is more frightful than what happened to Jackson. However, that sentiment is a matter of one’s priorities, not a neutral conception of what justice consists of. Too many of us suppose that people should not be allowed to express opinions they deem unpleasant or dangerous and are given to demonizing those who have such opinions as threats to our moral order.On the right, even if you’re wary of critical race theory’s effect on the way many kids are taught, it is both backward and unnecessary to institutionalize the sense that discussing race at all is merely unwelcome pot stirring (and if that’s not what you mean, then you need to make it clear). On the left, illiberalism does not become insight just because some think they are speaking truth to power. Resistance to this kind of perspective is vital, no matter where it comes from on the political spectrum.Have feedback? Send a note to McWhorter-newsletter@nytimes.com.John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He hosts the podcast “Lexicon Valley” and is the author, most recently, of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” More

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      What’s Happening on the Left Is No Excuse for What’s Happening on the Right

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      American democracy has often confronted hostile forces from outside the United States; rarely has it been under as much of a threat from forces within the nation. The danger arises from illiberalism on the left and the right. Both sides are chipping away at the foundations of the American Republic; each side seems oblivious to its own defects.Again and again, we have heard conservatives argue that even if you believe that Donald Trump is flawed and the MAGA movement is worrisome, the left is much more dangerous. We disagree. Fears about the left’s increasingly authoritarian, radical tendencies are well grounded; but they have blinded many conservatives to the greater danger posed by the right, which we believe is a threat to our constitutional order and therefore to conservatism itself.We come to our view after writing and warning about the illiberal left for much of our careers. One of us wrote a book nearly 30 years ago criticizing those who would limit free thought by restricting free speech; the other has been sounding alarms about left-wing ideology since his days as an official in the Department of Education during the Reagan years.Since then, the left has grown more radical, more aggressive and less tolerant. With the help of social media and influence in academia — and sometimes in newsrooms and corporate H.R. departments — a small number of die-hard progressives (they make up only about 8 percent of the public, according to one recent survey) exert a hugely disproportionate influence on the culture. Progressives are “often imposing illiberal speech norms on schools, companies and cultural institutions,” the liberal journalist Jonathan Chait writes. There have been many examples of squelching arguments that although controversial deserve full and frank airing in a free society. Universities have attempted to kick off their campuses Christian ministries that require their leaders to be Christian, and we have written in these pages about efforts to weaken protections for religious liberty.Structural racism — the perpetuation of de facto discrimination by ingrained social arrangements and assumptions — is a reality in American life. But the hodgepodge of ideas in the bucket that has come to be known as “critical race theory” includes radical claims that deny the enduring value of concepts like equality of opportunity and objectivity and reject “the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy” as “a vehicle for self-interest, power, and privilege.” The most extreme versions of these ideas might not be taught in high schools (yet), but their influence is undoubtedly being felt.The progressive movement, then, is increasingly under the sway of a totalistic, unfalsifiable and revolutionary ideology that rejects fundamental liberal values like pluralism and free inquiry. And conservatives aren’t hallucinating about its influence. Surveys show that 62 percent of Americans and 68 percent of college students are reluctant to share their true political views for fear of negative social consequences. A Cato Institute study found that nearly a third of Americans — across the political spectrum, not just on the right — say they’re worried about losing a job or job opportunities if they express their true political views. Another study suggested that the level of self-censorship in America may be three times what it was during the McCarthy era.The left is not solely responsible for creating these fears, but it has played the most significant role. Yet even granting all that, the threat from the illiberal right is more immediate and more dangerous. If that wasn’t clear before the last presidential election and the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it should be clear now.Any account of the malignancy of the American right has to begin with Mr. Trump, whose twisted sensibilities continue to define the Republican Party. It was he who attempted what no president had ever tried: overturning an election. He based his effort on a huge campaign of disinformation. Mr. Trump pressured the vice president, governors, secretaries of state, election officials and appointees at the Department of Justice to join him in his efforts. One of his lawyers reportedly proposed a plan to nullify the election. Congress’s Jan. 6 committee will reveal more and possibly worse.The Republican Party, rather than spurning Mr. Trump and his efforts, has embraced them. Around the country, prospective Republican candidates, far from opposing #StopTheSteal lies and conspiracy theories, are running on them in 2022, according to a Washington Post tally. Any prominent Republican today who disputes #StopTheSteal can expect to be targeted by the base, booed at any large gathering of Republicans, censured by party apparatchiks and possibly threatened with physical violence.Dismayingly few Republican leaders stand foursquare against the base’s insistence that any election Mr. Trump and his followers might lose is rigged. The result is that Republicans are shattering faith in the integrity of our elections and abandoning their commitment to the peaceful transfer of power — the minimum commitment required for democracy to work. This is an unforgivable civic sin, but it hardly exhausts the lists of concerns.Many Republicans are now openly hostile to the processes Americans rely on to separate fact from fiction. There’s also the deepening cult of despair that has led some on the right to believe that all means of resistance are appropriate. In fact, catastrophism is quite fashionable on the American right these days. Every election is a “Flight 93” confrontation against an apocalyptic enemy; every effort, no matter how extreme, is justified. That attitude is not merely at odds with reality; it is incompatible with liberal democracy’s foundational requirement that Americans compromise and coexist civilly in order to share the country.Partly as a result, the MAGA movement is drifting toward authoritarianism. The most important media personality on the right, Tucker Carlson of Fox News, released a disingenuous three-part documentary in November suggesting that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a “false flag” operation. He and others in MAGA World, including Mr. Trump, also promote Hungary, which Freedom House said in its 2018 report is “sliding into authoritarian rule,” as a model for the United States. The Republican Party is also drifting ever closer to the open embrace of political violence and martyrdom, not merely excusing but defending actions like Ashli Babbitt’s effort to break into the House’s inner sanctum on Jan. 6 — actions that came within seconds of succeeding.In a recent survey, nearly 40 percent of Republicans said that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.” Around the country, Republican officials who defend the election and count votes honestly have been threatened and have needed to leave their homes or live under guard. Josh Mandel, a Republican running for the open Senate seat in Ohio and leading in the polls, said in the aftermath of President Biden’s vaccine mandate: “Do not comply with the tyranny. When the Gestapo show up at your front door, you know what to do.”Intimidating election officials, lying about elections and storming the Capitol are not actions promoted among mainstream Democrats. And while the progressive left undoubtedly has influence in the Democratic Party, if it exercised the near-total dominance that Republicans claim, Joe Biden would not have won the Democratic nomination. Conservatives certainly have their disagreements with President Biden, but he has not defunded the police, attempted to pack the Supreme Court or promoted the Green New Deal or Medicare for All.But assume that your threat assessment is different from ours; that as a conservative Republican you believe the danger to the nation is greater from the far left than from the MAGA right. You should still speak out against what is happening to your movement and your party for two reasons: The sins of the left do not excuse the sins of the right; and what is happening on the right is wrecking authentic conservatism in ways the left never could.In his new book, “We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy,” a Wheaton College historian, Robert Tracy McKenzie, shows that the founders took a deeply conservative view of human nature. They believed that humankind is flawed and fallen, distracted by passions and swayed by parochial interests. Americans, the founders believed, were no exception. Yet they also believed that what John Adams called a “well-ordered Constitution” could go a long way to compensate for human flaws.In classic conservative fashion, they designed the U.S. Constitution, and its attendant institutions and norms, both to constrain us and to help us be our better selves. The MAGA right has no love for those institutions and norms. It inflames ugly passions and warps reality. It is profoundly anticonservative, capable of twisting in any direction for the sake of raw power. It represents a profound break with the American conservative tradition.And so to regard the radical left as a reason to excuse, minimize or ignore the malign movement on the right is an abrogation of conservative duty and principle. If MAGA prevails, conservatism will be gravely injured — and American democracy will be, too.Jonathan Rauch (@jon_rauch) is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.” Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”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 Moral Chasm That Has Opened Up Between Left and Right Is Widening

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      There has been a remarkable erosion in public tolerance of “offensive expression about race, gender and religion,” according to Dennis Chong and Morris Levy, political scientists at the University of Southern California, and Jack Citrin, a political scientist at Berkeley.“Tolerance has declined overall,” they add, particularly “for a category of speech that is considered unworthy of First Amendment protection because it violates the goal of equality.”The three authors cite the 2018 promulgation of new guidelines by the American Civil Liberties Union — which was formerly unequivocal in its defense of free speech — as a reflection of the changing views within a large segment of the liberal community. Under the 2018 guidelines, the A.C.L.U. would now consider several factors that might warrant a refusal to take on certain cases:“Our defense of speech may have a greater or lesser harmful impact on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed” depending onthe potential effect on marginalized communities; the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values; and the structural and power inequalities in the community in which the speech will occur.Chong, Citrin and Levy write:Arguments for censoring hate speech have gained ground alongside the strengthening of the principle of equality in American society. The expansion of equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities, women, L.G.B.T.Q., and other groups that have suffered discrimination has caused a re-evaluation of the harms of slurs and other derogatory expressions in professional and social life. The transformation of social attitudes regarding race, gender, and sexuality has fundamentally changed the tenor of debate over speech controversies.Traditionally, they point out,the main counterargument against free speech has been a concern for maintaining social order in the face of threatening movements and ideas, a classic divide between liberal and conservative values. Now, arguments against allowing hate speech in order to promote equality have changed the considerations underlying political tolerance and divided liberals amongst themselves. The repercussions of this value conflict between the respective norms of equality and free expression have rippled far beyond its epicenter in the universities to the forefront of American politics.In an email, Chong wrote that “the tolerance of white liberals has declined significantly since 1980, and tolerance levels are lowest among the youngest age cohorts.” If, he continued, “we add education to the mix, we find that the most pronounced declines over time have occurred among white, college educated liberals, with the youngest age cohorts again having the lowest tolerance levels.”The Chong-Citrin-Levy paper focuses on the concept of harm in shaping public policy and in the growing determination of large swaths of progressives that a paramount goal of public discourse is to avoid inflicting injury, including verbal injury, on marginalized groups. In this context, harm can be understood as injury to physical and mental health occurring “when stress levels are perpetually elevated by living in a constant state of hyper-vigilance.”Proponents of what is known as moral foundations theory — formulated in 2004 by Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph — argue that across all cultures “several innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of ‘intuitive ethics.’” The five foundations are care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation.One of the central claims of this theory, as described in “Mapping the Moral Domain” — a 2011 paper by Jesse Graham, Brian A. Nosek, Haidt, Ravi Iyer, Spassena Koleva and Peter H. Ditto — is thatLiberal morality would prioritize harm and fairness over the other three foundations because the “individualizing foundations” of harm and fairness are all that are needed to support the individual-focused contractual approaches to society often used in enlightenment ethics, whereas conservative morality would also incorporate in-group, authority, and purity to a substantial degree (because these ‘binding foundations’ are about binding people together into larger groups and institutions).I asked Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, about the role of concerns over ideology and gender in the changing character of liberalism.“I think we need to move beyond a simple ‘gender gap’ story to better understand how conceptualizations of womanhood impact politics,” she replied. “The first way is to think about the gender gap as a ‘feminist gap.’”From this perspective, Wronski continued, men can hold feminist values and women can be anti-feminist, noting that “the attitudes people have about gender roles in society have a bigger impact on political outcomes than simple male/female identification.”Wronski cited a paper, “Partisan Sorting and the Feminist Gap in American Politics” by Leonie Huddy and Johanna Willmann, which argues that feminism “can be distinguished from political ideology when construed as support for women’s political advancement, the equalization of male and female power, the removal of barriers that impede women’s success, and a strengthening of women’s autonomy.” Huddy and Willmann noted that in a “2015 national survey, 60 percent of women and 33 percent of men considered themselves a feminist.”There are substantial differences, however, in how feminist women and men align politically, according to their analysis:We expect women’s feminist loyalty and antipathy to play a greater role in shaping their partisanship than feminist affinity among men because feminist and anti-feminist identities have greater personal relevance for women than men, elicit stronger emotions, and will be more central to women’s political outlook.The authors created a feminism scale based on the respondent’s identification with feminism, their support for female politicians, perception of sex discrimination and gender resentment. Based on survey data from the 2012 and 2016 elections, they found thatMen scored significantly lower than women in both years (men: .55 in 2012, .46 in 2016; women: .60 in 2012, .54 in 2016). Nonetheless, men and women also overlap considerably in their support and opposition to feminism.Personality characteristics play a key role, they found: “Openness to experience consistently boosts feminism.” A predilection for authoritarianism, in contrast, “consistently lowers support for feminism” while “agreeableness promotes feminism,” although its effects are strongest “among white respondents.”So too do demographic differences: “Religiously observant men and women are less supportive of feminism than their nonobservant counterparts. Well-educated respondents, especially well-educated women, are more supportive of feminism.” Single white women are “more supportive of feminism than women living with a partner.”Getty ImagesFeminism, in addition, is strongly correlated with opposition to “traditional morality” — defined by disagreement with such statements as “we should be more tolerant of people who live according to their own moral standards” and agreement with such assertions as “the newer lifestyles are contributing to a breakdown in our society.” The correlation grew from minus .41 in 2012 to minus .53 in 2016.During this century, the power of feminism to signal partisanship has steadily increased for men and even more so for women, Huddy and Willman found: “In 2004, a strong feminist woman had a .32 chance of being a strong Democrat. This increased slightly to .35 in 2008 and then increased more substantially to .45 in 2012 and .56 in 2016.” In 2004 and 2008, “there was a .21 chance that a strong feminist male was also a strong Democrat. That increased slightly to .25 in 2012 and more dramatically to .42 in 2016.”In an email, Huddy elaborated on the partisan significance of feminist commitments:It is important to remember that women can be Democrats or Republicans, but feminists are concentrated in the Democratic Party. Appealing to an ethic of care may not attract Republican women if it conflicts with their religious views concerning the family or opposition to expanded government spending. Sending a signal to feminists that the Democratic Party is behind them shores up one of their major constituencies.In a 2018 paper, “Effect of Ideological Identification on the Endorsement of Moral Values Depends on the Target Group,” Jan G. Voelkel, a sociologist at Stanford, and Mark J. Brandt, a professor of psychology at Michigan State, argue that moral foundations theory that places liberals and conservatives in separate camps needs to be modified.Voelkel and Brandt maintain that “ideological differences in moral foundations” are not necessarily the result of differences in moral values per se, but can also be driven by “ingroup-versus-outgroup categorizations.” The authors call this second process “political group conflict hypothesis.”This hypothesis, Voelkel and Brandt contend,has its roots in research that emphasizes that people’s thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors are strongly influenced by the ideological groups they identify with and is consistent with work suggesting that people’s ideological identifications function like a group identification. According to this view, liberals and conservatives may selectively and flexibly endorse moral values depending on the target group of the moral act.Voelkel and Brandt cite as an example the moral foundation of fairness:The strong version of the moral divide account predicts that liberals should be more likely to endorse the fairness foundation no matter the target group. The political group conflict account makes a different prediction: Liberals will condemn unfair treatment of liberal groups and groups stereotyped as liberal more than conservatives. However, conservatives will condemn unfair treatment of conservative groups and groups stereotyped as conservative more than liberals. Such a finding would suggest that the fairness foundation is not unique to liberals, as both groups care about fairness for their own political in-groups.The surveys the authors conducted show thatConsistent with the political group conflict hypothesis, we found that the effect of ideological identification depended on whether moral acts involved liberal or conservative groups. Consistent with the moral divide hypothesis, we found the pattern identified by MFT (liberals score higher on the individualizing foundations and conservatives score higher on the binding foundations) in the moderate target condition.Put another way:We find evidence that both processes may play a part. On one hand, we provide strong evidence that conservatives endorse the binding foundations more than liberals. On the other hand, we have shown that political group conflicts substantively contribute to the relationship between ideological identification and the endorsement of moral values.The debate over moral values and political conflict has engaged new contributors.Richard Hanania, president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology and a former research fellow at Columbia’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, argues thatWomen are having more of a role to play in intellectual life, so we’re moving toward female norms regarding things like tradeoffs between feelings and the search for truth. If these trends started to reverse, we could call it a “masculinization” of the culture I suppose. The male/female divide is not synonymous with right/left, as a previous generation’s leftism was much more masculine, think gender relations in communist countries or the organized labor movement in the U.S. at its peak.The role of gender in politics has been further complicated by a controversial and counterintuitive finding set forth in “The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education” by Gijsbert Stoet and David C. Geary, professors of psychology at Essex University and the University of Missouri.The authors propose that:paradoxically, countries with lower levels of gender equality had relatively more women among STEM graduates than did more gender equal countries. This is a paradox, because gender-equal countries are those that give girls and women more educational and empowerment opportunities, and generally promote girls’ and women’s engagement in STEM fields.Assuming for the moment that this gender equality paradox is real, how does it affect politics and polarization in the United States?In an email, Mohammad Atari, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Southern California and lead author of “Sex differences in moral judgments across 67 countries,” noted that “some would argue that in more gender-egalitarian societies men and women are more free to express their values regardless of external pressures to fit a predefined gender role,” suggesting an easing of tensions.Pivoting from gender to race, however, the nonpartisan Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group this month issued “Racing Apart: Partisan Shifts on Racial Attitudes Over the Last Decade.” The study showed thatDemocrats’ and independents’ attitudes on identity-related topics diverged significantly from Republicans’ between 2011 and 2020 — including their attitudes on racial inequality, police, the Black Lives Matter movement, immigration, and Muslims. Most of this divergence derives from shifts among Democrats, who have grown much more liberal over this period.The murder of George Floyd produced a burst of racial empathy, Robert Griffin, Mayesha Quasem, John Sides and Michael Tesler wrote, but they note that poll data suggests “this shift in attitudes was largely temporary. Weekly surveys from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape project show that any aggregate changes had mostly evaporated by January 2021.”Additional evidence suggests that partisan hostility between Democrats and Republicans is steadily worsening. In their August 2021 paper, “Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polarization,” Levi Boxell and Matthew Gentzkow, both economists at Stanford University, and Jesse M. Shapiro, a professor of political economy at Brown, wrote:In 1978, according to our calculations, the average partisan rated in-party members 27.4 points higher than out-party members on a “feeling thermometer” ranging from 0 to 100. In 2020 the difference was 56.3, implying an increase of 1.08 standard deviations.Their conclusion is that over the past four decades, “the United States experienced the most rapid growth in affective polarization among the 12 O.E.C.D. countries we consider” — the other 11 are France, Sweden, Germany, Britain, Norway, Denmark, Australia, Japan, Canada, New Zealand and Switzerland.In other words, whether we evaluate the current conflict-ridden political climate in terms of moral foundations theory, feminism or the political group conflict hypothesis, the trends are not favorable, especially if the outcome of the 2024 presidential election is close.If the continuing anger, resentment and denial among Republicans in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential contest is a precursor of the next election, current trends, in combination with the politicization of election administration by Republican state legislatures, suggest that the loser in 2024, Republican or Democrat, will not take defeat lying down.The forces fracturing the political system are clearly stronger than the forces pushing for consensus.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 Save Themselves

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      Normally the political party that loses an election goes through a period of soul-searching and vigorous internal debate, while the winning party embraces a smug certainty about its own inevitable multigenerational dominance. In 2021, though, the roles are reversed.The widespread belief that Donald Trump was, in some sense, the real winner of an election that he lost has succeeded in pre-empting a Republican debate about why the Democrats captured the White House last year. Meanwhile, the Democrats, despite their control of the Congress and the presidency, are increasingly the ones arguing as though they’re already in the wilderness.The Democrats’ angst strikes me as a healthy development for liberalism. One problem with the emergency thinking that Trump inspires in his opponents — and one reason to resist it — is that it occludes real understanding of the political conditions that put him in power, and that might do so again. This is what you saw happen to the Democrats after 2016: The sense of being lightning-struck sent the center-left wandering into a maze of conspiracies, a haunted wood where villains like Vladimir Putin and Mark Zuckerberg loomed larger than the swing voters they had lost and savior figures like Robert Mueller were supposed to unmake Trump’s power for them.Only the party’s left, its Bernie Sanders wing, fully developed a more normal theory of the 2016 defeat, trying to understand Obama-Trump voters in the context of globalization and deindustrialization as well as racism, fascism and Putinist dirty tricks. But this created a fundamental imbalance in the party’s conversation: With the Sanders faction trying to pull the party toward social democracy and the establishment acting as if its major challenges were Russian bots and nefarious Facebook memes, there was hardly anyone left to point out the ways that Democrats might be in danger of moving too far left — and the writers who did so were generally dismissed as dinosaurs.So it was up to Democratic voters to exert a rightward tug on their party — first by saving the party from the likely disaster of nominating the intelligentsia’s candidate, Elizabeth Warren, and ultimately by putting up a nominee, Joe Biden, whose long career as a moderate gave him some distance from the “Great Awokening” that swept liberal institutions in 2020.Now, though, with the increasing awareness that Bidenism is probably not a long-term strategy, we’re finally getting the fuller argument that should have broken out after 2016 — over what the Democrats can do, and whether they can do anything, to win over the working-class and rural voters alienated by the party’s increasingly rigorous progressive litmus tests.A key player in this argument is the pollster and analyst David Shor, whom my colleague Ezra Klein interviewed for a long essay last week, and who has emerged — after a temporary 2020 cancellation — as the leading spokesman for the pragmatic liberal critique of progressive zeal.This critique starts with a diagnosis: Democrats misread the meaning of Barack Obama’s 2012 victory, imagining that it proved that their multiracial coalition could win without downscale and rural white voters, when in fact Obama had beaten Mitt Romney precisely because of his relatively resilient support from those demographics, especially across the industrial Midwest. And this misreading was particularly disastrous because these voters have outsize influence in Senate races and the Electoral College, so losing them — and then beginning to lose culturally conservative minority voters as well — has left the Democrats with a structural disadvantage that will cost them dearly across the next decade absent some kind of clear strategic adjustment.From this diagnosis comes the prescription, so-called popularism, glossed by Klein as follows: “Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.”You will note that this banal-seeming wisdom is not an ideological litmus test: Where left-wing ideas are popular, Shor Thought would have Democrats talk about them more. But where they are unpopular, especially with the kind of voters who hold the key to contested Senate races, Democrats need a way to defuse them or hold them at a distance.Thus a “popularist” candidate might be a thoroughgoing centrist in some cases, and in others a candidate running the way Bernie Sanders did in 2016, stressing the most popular ideas in the social-democratic tool kit. But in both cases such candidates would do everything in their power not to be associated with ideas like, say, police abolition or the suspension of immigration enforcement. Instead they would imitate the way Obama himself, in his first term, tried to finesse issues like immigration and same-sex marriage, sometimes using objectively conservative rhetoric and never getting way out ahead of public opinion.Which is easier said than done. For one thing, the Democratic Party’s activists have a different scale of power in the world of 2021 than the world of 2011, and the hypothetical “popularist” politician can’t make their influence and expectations just go away. For another, as my colleague Nate Cohn points out, Obama in 2011 was trying to keep white working-class voters in the Democratic fold, while the popularist politician in 2022 or 2024 would be trying to win them back from the G.O.P. — a much harder thing to achieve just by soft-pedaling vexatious issues.At the very least a Democratic strategy along these lines would probably need to go further along two dimensions. First, it would need to overtly attack the new progressivism — not on every front but on certain points where the language and ideas of the progressive clerisy are particularly alienated from ordinary life.For instance, popularist Democrats would not merely avoid a term like “Latinx,” which is ubiquitous in official progressive discourse and alien to most U.S. Hispanics; they would need to attack and even mock its use. (Obviously this is somewhat easier for the ideal popularist candidate: an unwoke minority politician in the style of Eric Adams.)Likewise, a popularist candidate — ideally a female candidate — on the stump in a swing state might say something like: I want this to be a party for normal people, and normal people say mother, not “birthing person.”Instead of reducing the salience of progressive jargon, the goal would be to raise its salience in order to be seen to reject it — much as Donald Trump in 2016 brazenly rejected unpopular G.O.P. positions on entitlements that other Republican rivals were trying to merely soft-pedal.But then along with this rhetorical fire directed leftward, popularists would also need go further in addressing the actual policy concerns surrounding the issues they’re trying to defuse. Immigration is a major political problem for Democrats right now, for instance, not just because their activists have taken extreme positions on the issue, but because the border is a major policy problem: The effects of globalized travel and communication make it ever-easier for sudden migrant surges to overwhelm the system, and liberalism’s shift away from tough enforcement — or at least its professed desire to make that shift — creates extra incentives for those surges to happen under Democratic presidents.So in the long run — especially given climate change’s likely effect on mass migration — there is no way for Democrats to have a stable policy that’s pro-immigration under the law without first having a strategy to make the American border much more secure than it’s been under the Biden administration to date. How to do that humanely is a policy challenge, but if you really want to court voters for whom the issue matters, you have to take the challenge seriously — because the problem makes itself salient, and it isn’t going away.It’s worth nothing that even this combination — attack progressive excess, show Obama-Trump voters that you take their issues seriously — is still a somewhat defensive one. As Cohn notes, when Trump reoriented the Republican Party to win more working-class votes, he made a sweeping and dramatic — and yes, demagogic — case that he would be better than Hillary Clinton for their interests and their values. Democrats have specific ideas that poll well with these voters, but it’s not clear that even a sweeping “heartland revival” message could actually reverse the post-Trump shift.But even a strictly defensive strategy, one that just prevents more Hispanic voters from shifting to the Republicans and holds on to some of Biden’s modest Rust Belt gains, would buy crucial time for Democrats — time for a generational turnover that still favors them, and time to seize the opportunities that are always offered, in ways no data scientist can foretell, by unexpected events.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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      One Thing We Can Agree on Is That We’re Becoming a Different Country

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      A highly charged ideological transition reflecting a “massive four-decade-long shift in political values and attitudes among more educated people — a shift from concern with traditional materialist issues like redistribution to a concern for public goods like the environment and diversity” is a driving force in the battle between left and right, according to Richard Florida, an urbanologist at the University of Toronto.This ideological transition has been accompanied by the concentration of liberal elites in urban centers, Florida continued in an email,brought on by the dramatic shift to a knowledge economy, which expresses itself on the left as “wokeness” and on the right as populism. I worry that the middle is dropping out of American politics. This is not just an economic or cultural or political phenomenon, it is inextricably geographic or spatial as different groups pack and cluster into different kinds of communities.Recent decades have witnessed what Dennis Chong, a political scientist at the University of Southern California, describes in an email as “a demographic realignment of political tolerance in the U.S. that first became evident in the late 1980s-early 1990s.”Before that, Chong pointed out, “the college educated, and younger generations, were among the most tolerant groups in the society of all forms of social and political nonconformity.” Since the 1990s, “these groups have become significantly less tolerant of hate speech pertaining to race, gender and social identities.”Chong argued that “the expansion of equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities, women, L.G.B.T.Q. and other groups that have suffered discrimination has caused a re-evaluation of the harms of slurs and other derogatory expressions in professional and social life.”The result?“In a striking reversal,” Chong wrote, “liberals are now consistently less tolerant than conservatives of a wide range of controversial speech about racial, gender and religious identities.”Pippa Norris, a lecturer in comparative politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School — together with Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who died in May — has explored this extraordinary shift from materialist to postmaterialist values in advanced countries, the movement from a focus on survival to a focus on self-expression, which reflects profound changes in a society’s existential conditions, including in the United States.In an Aug. 21 paper, “Cancel Culture: Myth or Reality?” Norris writes, “In postindustrial societies characterized by predominately liberal social cultures, like the U.S., Sweden, and U.K., right-wing scholars were most likely to perceive that they faced an increasingly chilly climate.”Using data from a global survey, World of Political Science, 2019, Norris created a “Cancel Culture Index” based on political scientists’ responses to three questions asking whether “aspects of academic life had got better, no change, or got worse, using the 5-point scale: 1. Respect for open debate from diverse perspectives, 2. Pressures to be ‘politically correct’ and 3. Academic freedom to teach and research.”Using this measure, Norris found that “American scholars on the moderate right and far right report experiencing worsening pressures to be politically correct, limits on academic freedom and a lack of respect for open debate,” compared with the views of moderate and more left-wing scholars:The proportion of those holding traditionally socially conservative values has gradually experienced a tipping point in recent decades, as this group shifts from hegemonic to minority status on college campuses and in society, heightening ideological and partisan polarization. In this regard, the reported experience of a chilly climate in academia among right-wing scholars seems likely to reflect their reactions to broader cultural and structural shifts in postindustrial societies.Inglehart, in his 2018 book, “The Rise of Postmaterialist Values in the West and the World,” described how increasing affluence and economic security, especially for educated elites, have beentransforming the politics and cultural norms of advanced industrial societies. A shift from materialist to postmaterialist value priorities has brought new political issues to the center of the stage and provided much of the impetus for new political movements. It has split existing political parties and given rise to new ones and it is changing the criteria by which people evaluate their subjective sense of well-being.Eric Kaufmann, a political scientist at the University of London and the author of “Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities,” argued in a series of emails that the views of white liberals are shaped by their distinctive set of priorities. In contrast to white conservatives, Kaufmann wrote, “white liberals have low attachment to traditional collective identities (race, nation, religion) but as high attachment to moral values and political beliefs as conservatives. This makes the latter most salient for them.” According to Kaufmann, white liberals “have invested heavily in universalist ethical values.”Matthias Jung/laif, via ReduxIn Kaufmann’s view, a new, assertive ideology has emerged on the left, and the strength of this wing is reflected in its ability to influence the decision making of university administrators:In universities, only 10 percent of social science and humanities faculty support cancellation (firing, suspension or other severe punishments) of those with controversial views on race and gender, with about half opposed and 40 percent neither supporting nor opposed. And yet, this does not appear to cut through to the administrations, who often discipline staff.On Sept. 4, The Economist published a cover story, “The Illiberal Left: How Did American ‘Wokeness’ Jump From Elite Schools to Everyday Life?” that argues that there is:a loose constellation of ideas that is changing the way that mostly white, educated, left-leaning Americans view the world. This credo still lacks a definitive name: it is variously known as left-liberal identity politics, social-justice activism or, simply, wokeness.From another angle, Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard and a former Obama administration official, asks in “The Power of the Normal,” a 2018 paper:Why do we come to see political or other conduct as acceptable, when we had formerly seen it as unacceptable, immoral, or even horrific? Why do shifts occur in the opposite direction? What accounts for the power of “the new normal”?Sunstein is especially concerned with how new norms expand in scope:Once conduct comes to be seen as part of an unacceptable category — abusiveness, racism, lack of patriotism, microaggression, sexual harassment — real or apparent exemplars that are not so egregious, or perhaps not objectionable at all, might be taken as egregious, because they take on the stigma now associated with the category.Sunstein is careful to note, “It is important to say that on strictly normative grounds, the less horrific cases might also be horrific.”A key player in this process is what Sunstein calls “the opprobrium entrepreneur.” The motivations of opprobrium entrepreneurs:may well be altruistic. They might think that certain forms of mistreatment are as bad as, or nearly as bad as, what are taken to the prototypical cases, and they argue that the underlying concept (abuse, bullying, prejudice), properly conceived, picks up their cases as well. Their goal is to create some kind of cascade, informational or reputational, by which the concept moves in their preferred direction. In the context of abuse, bullying, prejudice, and sexual harassment, both informational and reputational cascades have indeed occurred.Sunstein cites “microaggressions” as an area that “has exploded,” writing:At one point, the University of California at Berkeley signaled its willingness to consider disciplining people for making one of a large number of statements,” including “America is a melting pot,” “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough,” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”Opprobrium entrepreneurs can be found on both sides of the aisle.Jeffrey Adam Sachs, a political scientist at Acadia University, has written about a flood tide of Republican-sponsored bills in state legislatures designed to prohibit teaching of “everything from feminism and racial equity to calls for decolonization.” In an article in February, “The New War On Woke,” Sachs wrote:One of the principal criticisms of today’s left-wing culture is that it suppresses unpopular speech. In response, these bills would make left-wing speech illegal. Conservatives (falsely) call universities ‘brainwashing factories’ and fret about the death of academic freedom. Their solution is to fire professors they don’t like.Sachs’ bottom line: “Once you let government get into the censorship business, no speech is safe.”Zachary Goldberg, a graduate student at Georgia State, has researched “the moral, emotional and technological underpinnings of the ‘Great Awokening’ — the rapid and recent liberalization of racial and immigration attitudes among white liberals and Democrats” for his doctoral thesis.Goldberg has produced data from the 2020 American National Election Studies survey showing that white liberals, in contrast to white moderates and conservatives, rate minorities higher on what political scientists call a thermometer scale than they do whites.One of the less recognized factors underlying efforts by conservatives and liberals to enforce partisan orthodoxy lies in the pressure to maintain party loyalty at a time when the Democrats and Republicans are struggling to manage coalitions composed of voters with an ever-expanding number of diverse commitments — economic, cultural, racial — that often do not cohere.Jonathan Rodden, a Stanford political scientist, elaborated in an email:For issue activists and party leaders in the United States, management of internal party heterogeneity is a central task. In order to get what they want, the core of “true believers” on issue x must develop strategies for managing those with more moderate or even opposing views, who identify with the party primarily because of issue y. One strategy is persuasion on issue x via messaging, from social media to partisan cable television, aimed at wayward co-partisans. Another is to demonize the out-party on issue y in an effort to convince voters that even if they disagree with the in-party on issue x, the costs of allowing the out-party to win are simply too high. A final strategy is to relentlessly enforce norms by shaming and ostracizing nonconformists.I asked William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings who has written extensively about Democratic Party conflicts, what role he sees white liberal elites playing in the enforcement of progressive orthodoxies. He wrote back:You ask specifically about “white liberal elites.” I wonder whether the dominant sentiment is guilt as opposed to (say) fear and ambition. Many participants in these institutions are terrified of being caught behind a rapidly shifting social curve and of being charged with racism. As a result, they bend over backward to use the most up-to-date terminology and to lend public support to policies they may privately oppose. The fear of losing face within, or being expelled from, the community of their peers drives much of their behavior.For some white liberals, Galston continued:adopting cutting-edge policies on race can serve as a way of enhancing status among their peers and for a few, it is a way of exercising power over others. If you know that people within your institution are afraid to speak out, you can get them to go along with policies that they would have opposed in different circumstances.Instead of guilt, Galston argued, “this behavior is just as likely to reflect leadership that lacks purpose and core convictions and that seeks mainly to keep the ship afloat, wherever it may be headed.”“Amidst this sea of analytical uncertainties, I am increasingly confident of one thing: a backlash is building,” Galston wrote.The policies of elite private schools reported on the front page of The New York Times will not command majority support, even among white liberals. As awareness of such policies spreads, their conservative foes will pounce, and many white liberals who went along with them will be unwilling to defend them. The fate of defunding the police is a harbinger of things to come.Jonathan Haidt, a professor at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, contends that a small constituency on the far left is playing an outsize role:Progressive activists make up 8 percent of the U.S. population, and they are the ones who frequently use terms like “white supremacy culture” and “power structures.” This group is the second whitest of all the groups (after the far right), yet they give the coldest “feeling thermometer” ratings to whites and the warmest to Blacks. In this group there does seem to be some true feelings of guilt and shame about being white.Haidt contends that “the animating emotion” for acquiescence to the demands of this type of progressive activist by those with less extreme views:is fear, not guilt or shame. I have heard from dozens of leaders of universities, companies, and other organizations in the last few years about the pressures they are under to enact D.E.I. (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies that are not supported by research, or to say things that they believe are not true. The vast majority of these people are on the left but are not progressive activists. They generally give in to pressure because the alternative is that they and their organization will be called racist, not just within the organization by their younger employees but on social media.How do things look now?“The First Amendment on Campus 2020 Report: College Students’ Views of Free Expression,” a study produced by the Knight Foundation based on a survey of 3,000 students, found strong support for free speech. The report noted that “68 percent regard citizens’ free speech rights as being ‘extremely important’ to democracy” and “that 81 percent support a campus environment where students are exposed to all types of speech, even if they may find it offensive.”At the same time, however, “Most college students believe efforts at diversity and inclusion ‘frequently’ (27 percent) or ‘occasionally’ (49 percent) come into conflict with free speech rights,” and “63 percent of students agree that the climate on their campus deters students from expressing themselves openly, up from 54 percent in 2016.”Similarly, according to the Knight survey, trends on social media from 2016 to 2020 were all negative:Fewer students now (29 percent) than in 2016 (41 percent) say discussion on social media is usually civil. More students than in the past agree that social media can stifle free speech — both because people block those whose views they disagree with (60 percent, up from 48 percent in 2016) and because people are afraid of being attacked or shamed by those who disagree with them (58 percent, up from 49 percent in 2016).It’s not too much to say that the social and cultural changes of the past four decades have been cataclysmic. The signs of it are everywhere. Donald Trump rode the coattails of these issues into office. Could he — or someone else who has been watching closely — do it again?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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      ‘Lean Into It. Lean Into the Culture War.’

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      Should responsibility for the rampant polarization that characterizes American politics today be laid at the feet of liberals or conservatives? I posed that question to my friend Bill Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings and a columnist at The Wall Street Journal.He emailed me his reply:It is fair to say that the proponents of cultural change have been mostly on offense since Brown v. the Board of Education, while the defenders of the status quo have been on defense.Once the conflict enters the political arena, though, other factors come into play, Galston argues:Intensity makes a huge difference, and on many of the cultural issues, including guns and immigration, the right is more intense than the left.Galston put it like this:When being “right” on a cultural controversy becomes a threshold issue for an intense minority, it can drive the party much farther to the left or right than its median voter.Along with intensity, another driving force in escalating polarization, in Galston’s view, is elite behavior:Newt Gingrich believed that the brand of politics Bob Michel practiced had contributed to House Republicans’ 40-year sojourn in the political desert. Gingrich decided to change this, starting with Republicans’ vocabulary and tactics. This proved effective, but at the cost of rising incivility and declining cooperation between the political parties. Once the use of terms such as “corruption,” “disgrace” and “traitor” becomes routine in Congress, the intense personal antipathy these words express is bound to trickle down to rank-and-file party identifiers.The race and gender issues that have come to play such a central role in American politics are rooted in the enormous changes in society from the 1950s to the 1970s, Galston wrote:The United States in the early 1950s resembled the country as it had been for decades. By the early 1970s, everything had changed, stunning Americans who had grown up in what seemed to them to be a stable, traditional society and setting the stage for a conservative reaction. Half a century after the Scopes trial, evangelical Protestantism re-entered the public square and soon became an important build-block of the coalition that brought Ronald Reagan to power.One of the biggest changes in the country in the wake of the civil rights and immigration reforms of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s has been in the demographic makeup of the nation. Seventy years ago, the country was 89.5 percent white, according to the census. By 2019, the white share of the population fell to 60.1 percent. In 2019, Pew Research reported:Nonwhites are about twice as likely as whites to say having a majority nonwhite population will be good for the country: 51 percent of all nonwhite adults — including 53 percent of blacks and 55 percent of Hispanics — say this, compared with 26 percent of whites.In many ways, this transformation posed a challenge to customary social expectations. “How would the progressive cultural program deal with traditionalist dissent?” Galston asked:One option was to defuse a portion of the dissent by carving out exceptions to religious and conscience-based objections. The other was to use law to bring the objectors to heel. Regrettably, the latter course prevailed, generating conflicts over abortion with the Little Sisters of the Poor, with a baker over a cake for a same-sex wedding, among others, and with Catholic social service providers over same-sex adoptions.Recently two columnists who are hardly sympathetic to Trump or Trumpism — far from it — raised questions about whether the right or the left deserves blame or responsibility for the kind of conflicts that now roil elections. Kevin Drum, in “If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals,” and Damon Linker, in “The myth of asymmetric polarization,” make the case that the left has been the aggressor in the culture wars.“It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle. It is liberals. And this shouldn’t come as a surprise,” Drum wrote. “Almost by definition, liberals are the ones pushing for change while conservatives are merely responding to whatever liberals do.” Linker took this a step further, arguing that progressives do not want to acknowledge that “on certain issues wrapped up with the culture war, Democrats have moved further and faster to the left than Republicans have moved to the right,” because to do so “would require that they cede some of the moral high ground in their battles with conservatives, since it would undermine the preferred progressive narrative according to which the right is motivated entirely by bad faith and pure malice.”Drum and Linker were quickly followed by other commentators, including Peggy Noonan, a conservative columnist for The Wall Street Journal, who wrote a piece that was summed up nicely by its headline: “The Culture War Is a Leftist Offensive.”I asked Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, for his assessment of the Drum and Linker arguments, and he wrote back:It strains credulity to argue that Democrats have been pushing culture-war issues more than Republicans. It’s mostly Republican elites who have accentuated these issues to attract more and more working-class white voters even as they pursue a plutocratic economic agenda that’s unpopular among those voters. Certainly, Biden has not focused much on cultural issues since entering office — his key agenda items are all bread-and-butter economic policies. Meanwhile, we have Republicans making critical race theory and transgender sports into big political issues (neither of which, so far as I can tell, hardly mattered to voters at all before they were elevated by right-wing media and the G.O.P.).Hacker provided me with a graphic of ideological trends from 1969 to 2020 in House and Senate voting by party that clearly shows much more movement to the right among Republicans than movement to the left among Democrats.There is substantial evidence in support of Hacker’s argument that Republican politicians and strategists have led the charge in raising hot-button issues. On June 24, for example, Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, chairman of the Republican Study Committee — a group of conservative members of the House — sent out a memo telling colleagues:We are in a culture war. On one side, Republicans are working to renew American patriotism and rebuild our country. On the other, Democrats have embraced and given a platform to a radical element who want to tear America down.The letter ends: “My encouragement to you is lean into it. Lean into the culture war.”At the state legislative level, The Associated Press — in an April story, “In G.O.P. strongholds, a big push on ‘culture war’ legislation” — cited a surge in legislation restricting transgender surgery and banning the teaching of critical race theory.In this view, the left may start culture war conflicts, but the right is far more aggressive in politicizing them, both in legislative chambers and in political campaigns.Conversely, Andrew Sullivan, in “What Happened to You? The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism,” makes the case that the extreme left has created a hostile environment not only for conservatives but also for traditional liberals:Look how far the left’s war on liberalism has gone. Due process? If you’re a male on campus, gone. Privacy? Stripped away — by anonymous rape accusations, exposure of private emails, violence against people’s private homes, screaming at folks in restaurants, sordid exposés of sexual encounters, eagerly published by woke mags. Nonviolence? Exceptions are available if you want to “punch a fascist.” Free speech? Only if you don’t mind being fired and ostracized as a righteous consequence. Free association? You’ve got to be kidding. Religious freedom? Illegitimate bigotry. Equality? Only group equity counts now, and individuals of the wrong identity can and must be discriminated against. Colorblindness? Another word for racism. Mercy? Not for oppressors. Intent? Irrelevant. Objectivity? A racist lie. Science? A manifestation of white supremacy. Biological sex? Replaced by socially constructed gender so that women have penises and men have periods. The rule of law? Not for migrants or looters. Borders? Racist. Viewpoint diversity? A form of violence against the oppressed.Drum and Linker base much of their argument on Pew Research data (illustrated by the graphic below) to prove that the Democratic Party has shifted much farther to the left than the Republican Party has shifted to the right. On a zero (very liberal) to 10 (very conservative) scale, Drum wrote, “between 1994 and 2017, Democrats had gotten three points more liberal while Republicans had gotten about half a point more conservative.”A Nation DividedDemocrats and Republicans have drifted further apart over the years, as measured by a 10-point scale of political values. More

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      The Gavin Newsom Recall Is a Farce

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      After a slow start, California ranks 10th in the nation for coronavirus vaccinations. It’s down to about three cases per 100,000 residents. Its economy is booming. According to Bloomberg, the state “has no peers among developed economies for expanding G.D.P., creating jobs, raising household income, manufacturing growth, investment in innovation, producing clean energy and unprecedented wealth through its stocks and bonds.” State coffers are flush: The governor’s office estimates a $76 billion budget surplus. The Legislative Analyst’s Office puts it at $38 billion. (The difference turns on the definition of the word “surplus.”) More

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      How Did a Socialist Triumph in Buffalo?

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      On Tuesday night, just after the polls closed, The Buffalo News ran an update about the city’s Democratic mayoral primary, which pit the four-term incumbent mayor, Byron Brown, against a socialist challenger, India Walton. “Those handicapping the race are not betting whether Brown will win, but by how much,” the paper said. “Will a 10-point landslide suffice? Or could he post a larger tally?” More