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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

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      How the Storming of the Capitol Became a ‘Normal Tourist Visit’

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      It is no wonder that Republican leaders in the House do not want to convene a truth and reconciliation commission to scrutinize the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The more attention drawn to the events of that day, the more their party has to lose.Immediately after the riot, support for President Donald Trump fell sharply among Republicans, according to surveys conducted by Kevin Arceneaux of Sciences Po Paris and Rory Truex of Princeton.The drop signaled that Republicans would have to pay a price for the Trump-inspired insurrection, the violent spirit of which was captured vividly by Peter Baker and Sabrina Tavernise of The Times:The pure savagery of the mob that rampaged through the Capitol that day was breathtaking, as cataloged by the injuries inflicted on those who tried to guard the nation’s elected lawmakers. One police officer lost an eye, another the tip of his finger. Still another was shocked so many times with a Taser gun that he had a heart attack. They suffered cracked ribs, two smashed spinal disks and multiple concussions. At least 81 members of the Capitol force and 65 members of the Metropolitan Police Department were injured.Republican revulsion toward the riot was, however, short-lived.Arceneaux and Truex, in their paper “Donald Trump and the Lie,” point out that Republican voter identification with Trump had “rebounded to pre-election levels” by Jan. 13. The authors measured identification with Trump by responses to two questions: “When people criticize Donald Trump, it feels like a personal insult,” and “When people praise Donald Trump, it makes me feel good.”The same pattern emerged in the Republican Party’s favorability ratings, which dropped by 13 points between the beginning and the end of January, but gained 11 points back by April, according to NBC/Wall Street Journal surveys.Mitch McConnell himself was outraged. In a Feb. 13 speech on the Senate floor he said:January 6th was a disgrace. American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like. Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the vice president.Memorably, McConnell went on:There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.McConnell’s indignation was also short-lived. Less than two weeks later, on Feb. 25, McConnell told Fox News that if Trump were the nominee in 2024, he would “absolutely” support the former president.Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia nearly matched McConnell’s turn-on-a-dime. As The Washington Post reported on Tuesday,Clyde last week downplayed the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, comparing the mob’s breaching of the building to a “normal tourist visit.” But photos from that day show the congressman, mouth agape, rushing toward the doors to the House gallery and helping barricade them to prevent rioters from entering.McConnell and Clyde’s turnabouts came as no surprise to students of the Senate minority leader or scholars of American politics.Gary Jacobson of the University of California-San Diego wrote in an email that “the public’s reaction to the riot, like everything else these days, is getting assimilated into the existing polarized configuration of political attitudes and opinions.”Jacobson added:Such things as the absurd spectacle (of the vote recount) in Arizona, Trump’s delusory rantings, the antics of the House crackpot caucus, and the downplaying of the riot in the face of what everyone saw on TV, may weigh on the Republican brand, marginally eroding the party’s national stature over time. But never underestimate the power of motivated reasoning, negative partisanship and selective attention to congenial news sources to keep unwelcome realities at bay.Along similar lines, Paul Frymer, a political scientist at Princeton, suggested that voters have developed a form of scandal fatigue:At a certain point, the scandals start to blur together — Democrats have scandals, Republicans have scandals, no one is seemingly above or below such behavior. One of the reason’s President Trump survived all his scandals and shortcomings is because the public had seen so many of these before and has reached the point of a certain amount of immunity to being surprised.While this mass amnesia seem incomprehensible to some, an August 2019 paper, “Tribalism Is Human Nature,” by Cory Jane Clark, executive director the Adversarial Collaboration Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and three fellow psychologists, provides fundamental insight into the evanescing impact of Jan. 6 on the electorate and on Republicans in particular:Selective pressures have consistently sculpted human minds to be “tribal,” and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups. Modern politics is one of the most salient forms of modern coalitional conflict and elicits substantial cognitive biases. Given the common evolutionary history of liberals and conservatives, there is little reason to expect pro-tribe biases to be higher on one side of the political spectrum than the other.The human mind, Clark and her colleagues wrote,was forged by the crucible of coalitional conflict. For many thousands of years, human tribes have competed against each other. Coalitions that were more cooperative and cohesive not only survived but also appropriated land and resources from other coalitions and therefore reproduced more prolifically, thus passing their genes (and their loyalty traits) to later generations. Because coalitional coordination and commitment were crucial to group success, tribes punished and ostracized defectors and rewarded loyal members with status and resources (as they continue to do today).In large-scale contemporary studies, the authors continue,liberals and conservatives showed similar levels of partisan bias, and a number of pro-tribe cognitive tendencies often ascribed to conservatives (e.g., intolerance toward dissimilar others) have been found in similar degrees in liberals. We conclude that tribal bias is a natural and nearly ineradicable feature of human cognition, and that no group — not even one’s own — is immune.Within this framework, there are two crucial reasons that politics is “one of the most fertile grounds for bias,” Clark and her co-authors write:Political contests are highly consequential because they determine how society will allocate coveted resources such as wealth, power, and prestige. Winners gain control of cultural narratives and the mechanisms of government and can use them to benefit their coalition, often at the expense of losers ….We call this the evolutionarily plausible null hypothesis, and recent research has supported it.Clark argues further, in an email, that rising influence of “tribalism” in politics results in part from the growing “clarity and homogeneity of the Democrat and Republican coalitions,” with the result that “people are better able to find their people, sort into their ideological bubbles, find their preferred news sources, identify their preferred political elites and follow them, and signal their political allegiance to fellow group members (and attain friends and status that way).”Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University, adds some detail:My sense is that the move by Republican office holders to muddy the waters over what happened at the Capitol (and Trump’s role instigating the events) likely contributes to the waning of G.O.P. voters’ concerns. We heard a burst of these efforts to rewrite the history this past week during the House oversight hearing, but keep in mind that those efforts came on the heels of earlier efforts to downplay the violence, whitewash Trump’s role, and to cast doubt on the identities of the insurrectionists. No doubt, House G.O.P. leaders’ stalling of Democrats’ effort to create a “9/11 type” commission to investigate the events of Jan. 6 has also helped to diffuse G.O.P. interest and to keep the issue out of the headlines. No bipartisan inquiry, no media spotlight to keep the issue alive.In this context, Kevin McCarthy’s announcement on May 18 that the House Republican leadership opposes the creation of a Jan. 6 commission is of a piece with the ouster of Liz Cheney from her position as chair of the House Republican Conference, according to Binder.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAt the end of the day, Binder continued,We probably shouldn’t be surprised that public criticism of the Jan. 6 events only briefly looked bipartisan in the wake of the violence. G.O.P. elites’ decision to make loyalty to Trump a party litmus test (e.g., booting Rep. Cheney from her leadership post) demands that Republicans downplay and whitewash Trump’s role, the violence that day, and the identity of those who stormed the Capitol. Very little of American political life can escape being viewed in a partisan lens.Alexander G. Theodoridis of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst wrote in an email that “the half-life of Jan. 6 memory has proven remarkably short given the objectively shocking nature of what took place at the Capitol that day.” This results in part from the fact thatthere is now seemingly no limit to the ability of partisans to see the world through thick, nearly opaque red and blue colored lenses. In this case, that has Republicans latching onto a narrative that downplays the severity of the Capitol insurrection, attributes blame everywhere but where it belongs, and endorses the Big Lie that stoked the pro-Trump mob that day.A UMass April 21-23 national survey asked voters to identify the person or group “you hold most responsible for the violence that occurred at the Capitol building.” 45 percent identified Trump, 6 percent the Republican Party and 11 percent white nationalists. The surprising finding was the percentage that blamed the left, broadly construed: 16 percent for the Democratic Party, 4 percent for Joe Biden and 11 percent for “antifa,” for a total of 31 percent.The refusal of Republicans to explore the takeover of the Capitol reflects a form of biased reasoning that is not limited to the right or the left, but may be more dangerous on the right.Ariel Malka, a professor at Yeshiva University and an author of “Who is open to authoritarian governance within western democracies?” agreed in an email that both liberals and conservatives “engage in biased reasoning on the basis of partisanship,” but, he argued, there is still a fundamental difference between left and right:There is convincing evidence that cultural conservatives are reliably more open to authoritarian and democracy-degrading action than cultural liberals within Western democracies, including the United States. Because the Democratic Party is the party of American cultural liberals, I believe it would be far more difficult for a Democratic politician who favors overtly anti-democratic action, like nullifying elections, to have political success.These differences are “transforming the Republican Party into an anti-democratic institution,” according to Malka:What we are seeing in the Republican Party is that mass partisan opinion is making it politically devastating for Republican elites to try to uphold democracy. I think that an underappreciated factor in this is that the Republican Party is the home of cultural conservatives, and cultural conservatives are disproportionately open to authoritarian governance.In the paper, Malka, Yphtach Lelkes, Bert N. Bakker and Eliyahu Spivack, of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Amsterdam and Yeshiva University, ask: “What type of Western citizens would be most inclined to support democracy-degrading actions?”Their answer is twofold.First,Westerners with a broad culturally conservative worldview are especially open to authoritarian governance. For what is likely a variety of reasons, a worldview encompassing traditional sexual morality, religiosity, traditional gender roles, and resistance to multicultural diversity is associated with low or flexible commitment to democracy and amenability to authoritarian alternatives.Second,Westerners who hold a protection-based attitude package — combining a conservative cultural orientation with redistributive and interventionist economic views — are often the most open to authoritarian governance. Notably, it was the English-speaking democracies where this combination of attitudes most consistently predicted openness to authoritarian governance.Julie Wronski of the University of Mississippi replied to my inquiry about Jan. 6 suggesting that Democrats appear to have made a strategic decision against pressing the issue too hard:If voters’ concerns over Jan. 6 are fading, it is because political elites and the media are not making this issue salient. I suspect that Democrats have not made the issue salient recently in order to avoid antagonizing Republicans and exacerbating existing divides. Democrats’ focus seems more on collective action goals related to Covid-19 vaccine rollout and economic infrastructure.Democrats, Wronski continued, appear to have takena pass on the identity-driven zero-sum debate regarding the 2020 election since there is no compromise on this issue — you either believe the truth or you believe the big lie. Once you enter the world of pitting people against each other who believe in different realities of win/lose outcomes, it’s going to be nearly impossible to create bipartisan consensus on sweeping legislative initiatives (like HR1 and infrastructure bills).In a twist, Wronski suggests that it may be to Democrats’ advantage to stay out of the Jan. 6 debate in order to let it fester within Republican ranks:Not all Republican identifiers are strong partisans. Some people may align with the party for specific issue, policy reasons. Their identity is not as tied up in partisanship that an electoral loss becomes a loss to self-identity. This means there are intraparty fractures in the Republican Party regarding the big lie.Republican leaners “seem to be moving away from the party when hearing about intraparty conflict regarding the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s win,” Wronski wrote, citing a May 14 paper by Katherine Clayton, a graduate student in political science at Stanford.Clayton finds thatthose who call themselves “not very strong Republicans” or who consider themselves political independents that lean closer to the Republican Party demonstrate less favorable opinions of their party, reduced perceptions that the Democratic Party poses a threat, and even become more favorable toward the Democratic Party, as a result of exposure to information about conflict within their party.Wronski writes thatthe implication of these results would be for the Democratic Party to do nothing with regards to their messaging of January 6 and let the internal Republican conflict work to their benefit. In a two-party system, voters who do not espouse the big lie and are anti-Trump would eventually align with the Democratic Party.Jeff Greenfield, writing in Politico, takes an opposing position in his May 12 article, “A G.O.P. Civil War? Don’t Bet On It”:It’s getting harder to detect any serious division among rank-and-file Republicans. In Congress, and at the grass roots, the dominance of Donald Trump over the party is more or less total.More significant, Greenfield continued,History is littered with times that critics on the left, and in the pundit class, were positive the Republican Party was setting itself up for defeat by embracing its extremes, only to watch the party comfortably surge into power.Despite Trump’s overt attempt to subvert the election, Greenfield observes, anddespite his feeding the flames that nearly led to a physical assault of the vice president and speaker of the House, the Republican Party has, after a few complaints and speed bumps, firmly rallied behind Trump’s argument that he was robbed of a second term.The challenge facing Democrats goes beyond winning office. They confront an adversary willing to lie about past election outcomes, setting the stage for Republican legislatures to overturn future election returns; an opponent willing to nurture an insurrection if the wrong people win; a political party moving steadily from democracy to authoritarianism; a party that despite its liabilities is more likely than not to regain control of the House and possibly even the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.The advent of Trump Republicans poses an unprecedented strategic quandary for Democrats, a quandary they have not resolved and that may not lend itself to resolution.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 Marriage Between Republicans and Big Business Is on the Rocks

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      But the internal contradictions of “woke capitalism” are a mixed blessing for the Democratic Party.“Woke capitalism” has been a steadily growing phenomenon over the past decade. The muscle of the movement was evident as early as 2015 in Indiana and 2016 in North Carolina, when corporate opposition forced Republicans to back off anti-gay and anti-transgender legislation.Much to the dismay of the right — a recent Fox News headline read “Corporations fear woke left minority more than silent majority” — the movement has been gaining momentum, obscuring classic partisan allegiances in corporate America.This drive has a fast-growing list of backers from the ranks of the Fortune 500, prepared to challenge Republican legislators across the nation.Right now, the focus of chief executives who are attempting to burnish their progressive credentials is on blocking legislation in 24 states that curtails access to the ballot box for racial and ethnic minorities — legislation that, among other things, reduces the number of days for advance voting, that requires photo ID to accompany absentee ballots and that limits or eliminates ballot drop boxes.Perhaps most threatening to Republicans, key corporate strategists attempting to woo liberal consumers have come to believe that their support for progressive initiatives will generate sufficient revenue to counter retaliation by hostile white voters and the Republican politicians who represent them.The corporate embrace of these strategies has generally received favorable press, but there are some doubters.Adam Serwer, a staff writer at The Atlantic, argued in “‘Woke Capital’ Doesn’t Exist” on April 6 that capital “pursues its financial interests in whatever political or social context it finds itself.”As Serwer puts it,For big firms, talk is very cheap. Similarly, the actions of Major League Baseball, Coca-Cola, and Delta reflect the political landscape in Georgia and its interaction with their bottom line, not the result of a deep ideological commitment to racial equality.Similarly, Matthew Walther argued in an August 2017 article in The Week, thatWe should not be looking to corporate America for moral instruction or making exemplars of its leaders or heaping approbation upon their bland, cynical consultant-designed utterances.Apple’s Tim Cook, Walther continued, “tells us that he is against racism. I believe it. Good on him.” As commendable as Cook may be for his antiracism, Walther writes, heis the C.E.O. of a corporation that has made profits on a scale hitherto unimaginable in human history by exploiting cheap labor in a poor country ruled by tyrants whose authority is perpetuated in no small part thanks to Apple’s own compliance in its silencing of dissent and hiring the smartest lawyers in the world to make their tax burden negligible.Companies leading the charge against laws promoted by Republican state legislators include Delta Air Lines, Coca-Cola, Merck & Co., Dell Technologies, Mars Inc., Nestlé USA, Unilever PLC and American Airlines.And just two days ago, 30 chief executives of Michigan’s largest companies, including Ford, General Motors and Quicken Loans, declared their opposition to similar changes in voting rules pending before the legislature.The headline on an April 10 Wall Street Journal story sums up the situation: “With Georgia Voting Law, the Business of Business Becomes Politics.” The law was described by USA Today on April 10 as one “that includes restrictions some activists say haven’t been seen since the Jim Crow era.”Last week, executives from over 100 companies held a video conference call to explore ways to voice their opposition to pending and enacted election legislation.For many Republicans, the future of their party’s dominance in such states as Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia rides on their ability to hold back the rising tide of minority voters.While Republicans are convinced of the effectiveness their legislative strategies, poll data from the 2020 election suggests they may be mistaken. Republicans made inroads last year among Black and Hispanic voters, the constituencies they would now suppress, while losing ground among white voters, their traditional base of support.Growing numbers of Republicans are refusing to buckle under pressure from the corporate establishment.For Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, who rejected Donald Trump’s pleas to overturn the state’s presidential election results, the controversy offers the opportunity to claim populist credentials and perhaps to win back the support of Trump loyalists.“I will not be backing down from this fight,” Kemp declared at an April 3 news conference:This is a call to everyone, not only in Georgia but all across the country to wake up and get in the fight and help us in that fight. Because they are coming for you next.In Texas, where American Airlines, Dell Technologies, Microsoft and Southwest Airlines have opposed laws under consideration by Republican state legislators, Republicans have been quick to go on the attack.“Texans are fed up with corporations that don’t share our values trying to dictate public policy,” Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, a Republican, declared in a news release attacking liberalized voting protocols. “The majority of Texans support maintaining the integrity of our elections, which is why I made it a priority this legislative session.”Other Republicans are explicitly warning business that it will pay a price if it goes too far. “Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, declared at an April 5 news conference. “Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex.”In the past, the corporate community has been one of McConnell’s most steadfast allies and its current adversarial stance is a major loss.Alma Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School, and three colleagues, analyzed campaign contributions made by 3,800 individuals who served as chief executive of large companies from 2000 to 2017 in their 2019 paper, “The Politics of C.E.O.s.” They found a decisive Republican tilt: “More than 57 percent of C.E.O.s are Republicans, 19 percent are Democrats and the rest are neutral.”I asked W. Bradford Wilcox, a conservative professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, for his assessment of the conflict between big business and Republicans. His reply suggested that Kemp’s defiant stance will resonate among Republican voters:The decades-long marriage between the G.O.P. and big business is clearly on the rocks. This is especially true because the G.O.P. is increasingly drawn to a pugnacious and populist cultural style that has more appeal to the working class, and Big Business is increasingly inclined to support the progressive cultural agenda popular among the highly educated.Taking on corporate America meshes with the goal of rebranding the Republican Party — from the party of Wall Street to the party of the working class.The response of the white working-class to the leftward shift on social issues by American businesses remains unpredictable.Democracy Corps, a liberal group, conducted focus groups of white Republicans in March and reached the conclusion that conservative voters are cross-pressured:The Trump loyalists and Trump-aligned were angry, but also despondent, feeling powerless and uncertain they will become more involved in politics.While anger is a powerful motivator of political engagement, despondency and the feeling of powerlessness often depress turnout and foster the belief that political participation is futile.Opinion on the motives of corporate leaders diverges widely among those who study the political evolution of American business.Scholars and strategists differ among themselves over how much the growth of activism is driven by market forces, by public opinion, by conviction and by the growing strength of Black and Hispanic Americans as consumers, employees and increasingly as corporate executives.James Davison Hunter, professor of religion, culture and social theory at the University of Virginia, is interested in the psychology of those in the executive suite:At least on the surface, corporate America has accommodated progressive interests on these issues and others, including the larger agenda of Critical Race Theory, the Me-too movement, the gay and transgender rights, etc. There has been a shift leftward.The question he poses is why. His answer is complex:The idea, once held, that what was good for business was good for America is now a distant memory. A reputation, long in the making, for avoiding taxes and opposing unions all in pursuit of profit has done much to undermine the credibility of business as a force for the common good. Embracing the progressive agenda is a way to position itself as a “good” corporate citizen. Corporations gain legitimacy.The fluid ideological commitments of business should be seen in the larger context of American politics and culture, Hunter argues:Over the long haul, conservatives have fought the culture war politically. For them, it was the White House, the Senate and, above all, the Supreme Court that mattered. Political power was pre-eminent.Progressives have struggled in political combat, while in the nation’s cultural disputes, in Hunter’s view, the left has dominated:Even while progressives were losing elections, gay and transgender rights, feminism, Black Lives Matter and critical race perspectives were all gaining credibility — in important cultural institutions including journalism, academia, entertainment, advertising, public education, philanthropy, and elsewhere. Sooner or later, it was bound to influence corporate life, the military, and other so-called conservative institutions not least because there was no credible conservative alternative to these questions; only a defensive rejection.How will this play out?We will continue to see ugly political battles long into the future, but the culture wars are tilting definitively toward a progressive win and not least because they have a new patron in important corporations.Malia Lazu, a lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, argued in an email that the public’s slow but steady shift to the left on racial and social issues is driving corporate decision-making: “Corporations understand consumers want to see their commitment to environmental and social issues.”Lazu cited studies by Cone, a business consulting firm, “showing that 86 percent of Americans would support a brand aligned with their values and 75 percent would refuse to buy a product they saw as contrary to their beliefs.”Lazu contends that “there is a generational shift in America toward increasing justice and collective responsibility” and that as a result, “institutions, including corporations, will make incremental change.”John A. Haigh, co-director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School, does not agree with those who see business motivated solely by potential profits, arguing instead that idealism has become a major force.“Corporations have an obligation to deliver high performance for their shareholders and other stakeholders — customers, employees, and suppliers,” Haigh wrote in an email. But, he continued, “corporations also have an obligation to do so with high integrity.”In the case of challenges to restrictive voting laws, Haigh believes thatthere is also a possibility that they are behaving with some sense of their moral obligation to society — with integrity. The right to vote could be seen as a pillar of our democratic system, and blatant attempts to suppress votes are offensive to our core values.Haigh says that he does not wantto sound Pollyannish — these are difficult trade-offs within corporations, and it is much more complicated than simply “doing good.” But there are thresholds for moral behavior, and companies do have an obligation to speak up. There is a long history in the U.S. around issues of civil rights and their suppression, and mixed engagement by companies in addressing these issues.Neal Hartman, a senior lecturer who is also at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, argued that in attacking voting rights, Republicans violated a tenet of American democracy important to voters of all stripes.Not only have the restrictive proposals in Georgia and other states awakened “strong levels of activism among many moderate-to-liberal voters,” Hartman wrote by email, butmany people in the United States — including a number of more conservative individuals — believe voting should be as simple and widespread as possible. It is a fundamental principle of our democracy.Corporations, Hartman continued,are responding to calls from the public, their shareholders, and their employees to respond to bills and laws deemed as being unfair.Hartman argues that “voting rights is front and center today,” butnot far behind will be efforts to thwart LGBTQI rights — bills targeting the transgender community are already being introduced and passed — as well as continuing battles regarding abortion and the rights of women to choose.There is some overlap between the thinking of Robert Livingston, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Haigh and Hartman:What we are seeing in Georgia is an affront to people’s basic sense of morality and decency. And people will sometimes subordinate their self-interest to cherished values and beliefs. Many of these companies have credos and core values that are internalized by their leadership and employees, and we see leaders becoming increasingly willing to express their disapproval of the reckless temerity of politically savvy but socially irresponsible politicians.Livingston acknowledges that many companies aremotivated by their own interests as well. Major League Baseball is an organization that depends on people of color. Nike tends to cater to an increasingly youthful and diverse customer base. So, there is something in it for them too.But, he continued, “I’ve worked with a lot of top leaders and can tell you that for many of them, it’s more a question of principle than politics.”Joseph Aldy, a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School, noted in an email that willingness to engage in controversial political issues is most evident in the case of climate change:The climate denial/climate skeptic attitude that characterizes many Republican elected officials is increasingly out of step with the majority of the American public and the American business community.Instead, Alby wrote,the continued focus on cultural issues among Republicans reflects a growing estrangement between the business community and the Republican Party.There are several possible scenarios of how these preoccupations and conflicts will evolve.Insofar as the split between American business and the Republican Party widens and companies begin to cut campaign contributions, the likely loser is Mitch McConnell, the leader of the party’s corporate wing. Any limit on McConnell’s ability to channel business money to campaigns would be a setback.Such a development would further empower the more extreme members of the Republican Party’s Trump wing and would embolden Republican officials to escalate their conflict with corporate America.For example, David Ralston, the speaker of the Georgia House — which has just passed a retaliatory bill penalizing Delta by eliminating a tax break on jet fuel — told reporters: “You don’t feed a dog that bites your hand.”Finally, for Democrats, the leftward shift of business is a mixed blessing.On the plus side, Democrats gain an ally in pressing a liberal agenda on social and racial issues.On the downside, the perception of the party as allied with corporate interests may take root and Democratic officials are very likely to face pressure to make concessions to their new allies on fundamental economic policies — bad for the party, in my view, and bad for the country.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. 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