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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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      How Educational Differences Are Widening America’s Political Rift

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      College graduates are now a firmly Democratic bloc, and they are shaping the party’s future. Those without degrees, by contrast, have flocked to Republicans.The front lines of America’s cultural clashes have shifted in recent years. A vigorous wave of progressive activism has helped push the country’s culture to the left, inspiring a conservative backlash against everything from “critical race theory” to the purported cancellation of Dr. Seuss.These skirmishes may be different in substance from those that proceeded them, but in the broadest sense they are only the latest manifestation of a half-century trend: the realignment of American politics along cultural and educational lines, and away from the class and income divisions that defined the two parties for much of the 20th century.As they’ve grown in numbers, college graduates have instilled increasingly liberal cultural norms while gaining the power to nudge the Democratic Party to the left. Partly as a result, large portions of the party’s traditional working-class base have defected to the Republicans.Over the longer run, some Republicans even fantasize that the rise of educational polarization might begin to erode the Democratic advantage among voters of color without a college degree. Perhaps a similar phenomenon may help explain how Donald J. Trump, who mobilized racial animus for political gain, nonetheless fared better among voters of color than previous Republicans did, and fared worse among white voters.President Biden won about 60 percent of college-educated voters in 2020, including an outright majority of white college graduates, helping him run up the score in affluent suburbs and putting him over the top in pivotal states.This was a significant voting bloc: Overall, 41 percent of people who cast ballots last year were four-year college graduates, according to census estimates. By contrast, just 5 percent of voters in 1952 were college graduates, according to that year’s American National Elections Study.Yet even as college graduates have surged in numbers and grown increasingly liberal, Democrats are no stronger than they were 10, 30 or even 50 years ago. Instead, rising Democratic strength among college graduates and voters of color has been counteracted by a nearly equal and opposite reaction among white voters without a degree.When the Harvard-educated John F. Kennedy narrowly won the presidency in 1960, he won white voters without a degree but lost white college graduates by a two-to-one margin. The numbers were almost exactly reversed for Mr. Biden, who lost white voters without a degree by a two-to-one margin while winning white college graduates.About 27 percent of Mr. Biden’s supporters in 2020 were white voters without a college degree, according to Pew Research, down from the nearly 60 percent of Bill Clinton’s supporters who were whites without a degree just 28 years earlier. The changing demographic makeup of the Democrats has become a self-fulfilling dynamic, in which the growing power of liberal college graduates helps alienate working-class voters, leaving college graduates as an even larger share of the party.The Democratic advantage among college graduates may be a new phenomenon, but the relative liberalism of college graduates is not. College graduates have been far likelier than voters without a college degree to self-identify as liberal for decades, even when they were likelier to vote Republican.College graduates attribute racial inequality, crime and poverty to complex structural and systemic problems, while voters without a degree tend to focus on individualist and parochial explanations. It is easier for college graduates, with their higher levels of affluence, to vote on their values, not simply on economic self-interest. They are likelier to have high levels of social trust and to be open to new experiences. They are less likely to believe in God.The rise of cultural liberalism is not simply a product of rising college attendance. In fact, there is only equivocal evidence that college attendance makes people vastly more liberal. Far from the indoctrination that conservatives fear, liberal college professors appear to preach to an already liberal choir.But it is hard to imagine the last half-century of liberal cultural change without the role played by universities and academia, which helped inspire everything from the student movements and New Left of the 1960s to the ideas behind today’s fights over “critical race theory.” The concentration of so many left-leaning students and professors on campus helped foster a new liberal culture with more progressive ideas and norms than would have otherwise existed.“If you live in a community which is more liberal, there’s a self-reinforcing ratcheting effect,” said Pippa Norris, a professor and political scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School who believes that the rise of higher education contributed to the rise of social liberalism throughout the postindustrial world.As college graduates increased their share of the electorate, they gradually began to force the Democrats to accommodate their interests and values. They punched above their electoral weight, since they make up a disproportionate number of the journalists, politicians, activists and poll respondents who most directly influence the political process.At the same time, the party’s old industrial working-class base was in decline, as were the unions and machine bosses who once had the power to connect the party’s politicians to its rank and file. The party had little choice but to broaden its appeal, and it adopted the views of college-educated voters on nearly every issue, slowly if fitfully alienating its old working-class base.Republicans opened their doors to traditionally Democratic conservative-leaning voters who were aggrieved by the actions and perceived excesses of the new, college-educated left. This G.O.P. push began, and continues in some ways today, with the so-called Southern strategy — leveraging racial divisions and “states’ rights” to appeal to white voters.The reasons for white working-class alienation with the Democrats have shifted from decade to decade. At times, nearly every major issue area — race, religion, war, environmentalism, guns, trade, immigration, sexuality, crime, social welfare programs — has been a source of Democratic woes.What the Democratic Party’s positions on these very different issues have had in common is that they reflected the views of college-educated liberals, even when in conflict with the apparent interests of working-class voters — and that they alienated some number of white voters without a degree. Environmentalists demanded regulations on the coal industry; coal miners bolted from the Democrats. Suburban voters supported an assault gun ban; gun owners shifted to the Republicans. Business interests supported free trade agreements; old manufacturing towns broke for Mr. Trump.A similar process may be beginning to unfold among Hispanic voters. The 2020 election was probably the first presidential contest in which the Democratic candidate fared better among voters of color who graduated from college than among those without a degree. Mr. Trump made large gains among voters of color without degrees, especially Latino ones. The causes of his surge are still being debated, but one leading theory is that he was aided by a backlash against the ideas and language of the college-educated left, including activist calls to “defund the police.”For some Republicans, Mr. Trump’s gains have raised the possibility that it may be easier to appeal to working-class voters of color.“It doesn’t seem quite as big of a bridge to cross as saying, ‘Let’s go back and win white suburbanites,’” said Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster who is writing a book on how the party might build a multiracial coalition.True or not, it’s a view that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy if it leads Republicans to adopt strategies aimed at making it a reality.There is no guarantee that the rising liberalism of the Democratic primary electorate or college graduates will continue. The wave of activism in the 1960s gave way to a relatively conservative generation of college graduates in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Perhaps something similar will happen today.What can be guaranteed is that the college-educated share of the population — and the electorate — will continue to increase for the foreseeable future.In 2016, Massachusetts became the first state where four-year college graduates represented the majority of voters in a presidential contest. In 2020, the state was joined by New York, Colorado and Maryland. Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut and others are not far behind. Nationwide, four-year college graduates might represent a majority of midterm voters at some point over the next decade. More

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      How Strong Is America’s Multiracial Democracy?

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      The issue cutting across every aspect of American politics today is whether — and how — the nation can survive as a multiracial democracy.One key question is what the political impact has been of the decades-long quest to integrate America’s schools.A study published last year, “The Long-Run Effects of School Racial Diversity on Political Identity,” examined how “the end of race-based busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, an event that led to large changes in school racial composition,” affected the partisanship of students as adults.The authors, Stephen Billings, of the University of Colorado, Eric Chyn, of Dartmouth, and Kareem Haggag, of U.C.L.A.’s Anderson School of Management, found that “a 10-percentage point increase in the share of minorities in a student’s assigned school decreased their likelihood of registering as a Republican by 8.8 percent.” The drop was “entirely driven by white students (a 12 percent decrease).”“What mechanisms can explain our results?” the authors asked.Their answer:Intergroup contact is a key potential channel. Several theoretical frameworks provide predictions for how exposure to more minority peers may shape party affiliation. For white students, we focus on the “contact hypothesis,” which posits that meaningful contact with out-group members can reduce prejudice toward them. This theory suggests that exposure to minority peers should reduce the likelihood of registering as a Republican by weakening “racially conservative” attitudes that have been linked to support for the Republican Party.In support of their argument, the authors cite two additional papers, “The Impact of College Diversity on Behavior toward Minorities,” by Scott E. Carrell, Mark Hoekstra and James E. West, economists at the University of California-Davis, Texas A&M and Baylor, which found “that white students who are randomly assigned a Black roommate in their freshman year are more likely to choose a Black roommate in subsequent years,” and “Building social cohesion between Christians and Muslims through soccer in post-ISIS Iraq” by Salma Mousa, a political scientist at Yale, which found “evidence of positive impacts of religious-based and caste-based intergroup contact through sports.”In major respects, the busing of public school students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg in North Carolina meets the requirements for productive interracial contact posited by Gordon Allport, a professor of psychology at Harvard, in his classic 1954 book “The Nature of Prejudice.”Allport wrote that prejudicemay be reduced by equal status contact between majority and minority groups in the pursuit of common goals. The effect is greatly enhanced if this contact is sanctioned by institutional supports (i.e., by law, custom, or local atmosphere), and provided it is of a sort that leads to the perception of common interests and common humanity between members of the two groups.The Charlotte-Mecklenburg integration program had widespread public support. Education Week reported that after the federal courts in 1971 ordered busing to achieve integration:Charlotte’s political and business leaders moved to support the busing order. Antibusing school-board members were voted out and replaced with supporters of the order. Parents of children scheduled to be bused joined together to seek ways to smooth the logistical problems. No serious protest has erupted since then, and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district is often cited as a successful example of mandatory busing.In that respect, Charlotte-Mecklenburg stood out in a nation where cities like Boston and Detroit experienced divisive and often violent protest.A 2018 study, “Past Place, Present Prejudice,” explored some of the complexities of court-ordered racial integration. The authors, Seth Goldman, a professor of communications at the University of Massachusetts, and Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, report that “if a non-Hispanic white person grew up in a county with no African Americans, we should expect that person’s prejudice to be 2.3 points lower than an otherwise similar respondent growing up in a county that is 18 percent Black.”Goldman and Hopkins described their data as supporting the following conclusion: “Proximity during one’s formative years increases racial prejudice years later.”Chyn, an author of the “School Racial Diversity” paper, and Goldman, an author of the “Past Place” paper, both stressed by email that they were comparing racial and political attitudes under different circumstances.Goldman wrote:I don’t see any contradictions between the findings and those in my and Dan’s paper. It is a common misperception that studies finding a relationship between living in more racially diverse places represented as larger geographic units such as counties and expressing higher levels of racial prejudice contradicts intergroup contact theory. On the contrary, this relationship is due to the lack of sustained interracial contact among most whites in racially diverse areas. The typical situation is one of proximity without contact: whereas merely being in proximity to members of different groups promotes threat responses, sustained contact helps to alleviate prejudice.Chyn said:At least one difference is that our work focuses on intergroup exposure within schools whereas Goldman and Hopkins study the influence of racial context at the broader county level. This distinction matters as it is often thought that sustained and cooperative contact is necessary to reduce prejudice between groups. Schools may be a particularly good setting where such beneficial contact can occur. Goldman and Hopkins’s work may be picking up the effect of having geographic proximity to racial outgroups with no substantive interaction between children growing up in an area.Brian T. Hamel, a political scientist at Louisiana State University, and Bryan Wilcox-Archuleta, a research scientist at Facebook, studied intergroup contact in a context more likely to intensify racial conflict. They reported in their paper “Black Workers in White Places: Daytime Racial Diversity and White Public Opinion” that “voting behavior in presidential and congressional elections, feelings of racial resentment and attitudes on affirmative action” of whites are more conservative in neighborhoods where the share of Black nonresident workers is significantly higher than in places with fewer Black nonresident workers.“Whites respond to just the passing, irregular presence of Blacks who commute into their neighborhood for work,” Hamel elaborated in an email. “The upshot is that Blacks do not have to even live in the same neighborhood as whites to get the kind of racial threat reactions that we see in other work.”David O. Sears, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., contends in his 2014 paper “The American Color Line and Black Exceptionalism” that:People of African descent have an exceptional place in American political life because their history, described by the racial caste prototype of intergroup relations, has been unique among American ethnic minorities.Sears adds that:the one-drop rule applied to blacks is considerably less permeable than is the color line applied to Latinos and Asians, particularly in later generations further removed in time from immigration.The history and experience of Black Americans, compared with other minorities’, are unique, according to Sears:Although Latinos and Asians have certainly faced discrimination and exclusion throughout U.S. history, the majority of contemporary U.S. residents who identify as Latino and Asian are not descendants of the generations who were subjected to second-class citizenship in the 19th or 20th centuries. Instead, most are true immigrants, often not yet citizens, and often do not speak English at home. In contrast, the vast majority of blacks living in the United States are native-born citizens, speak only English in all contexts, and are descendants of generations who were subjected to enslavement.Sears cites data in support of his argument that African Americans have faced different historical contingencies in the story of American integration:“In the 2010 census, the segregation of blacks from whites remained extremely high, with a dissimilarity index of 59,” while the dissimilarity index (a measure of racial or ethnic segregation or isolation) was 48 for Latinos and 41 for Asian Americans.Sears continued:Blacks (25 percent) were almost four times as likely as U.S.-born Latinos (7 percent) or Asians (5 percent) to show the highest level of aggrieved group consciousness.55 percent of the blacks, as against 36 percent of the U.S.-born Latinos and 23 percent of the Asians, were at least moderately high in group consciousness.In this regard, economic factors have been instrumental. In “The Color of Disparity: Racialized Income Inequality and Support for Liberal Economic Policies,” Benjamin J. Newman and Bea-Sim Ooi, political scientists at the University of California-Riverside, and Tyler Thomas Reny, of Claremont Graduate University, compared support for liberal economic policies in ZIP codes where very few of the poor were Black with ZIP codes where a high proportion of the poor were Black.“Exposure to local economic inequality is only systematically associated with increased support for liberal economic policies when the respective ‘have-nots’ are not Black,” according to Newman, Ooi and Reny.A 2021 study, “The Activation of Prejudice and Presidential Voting” by Daniel Hopkins — a co-author of the “Past Place, Present Prejudice” — raises a related question:Divisions between whites and Blacks have long influenced voting. Yet given America’s growing Latino population, will whites’ attitudes toward Blacks continue to predict their voting behavior? Might anti-Latino prejudice join or supplant them?Hopkins examined whites’ responses to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, which contained more overt anti-immigrant rhetoric than anti-Black themes. The result nonetheless: “Donald Trump’s candidacy activated anti-Black but not anti-Latino prejudice,” Hopkins writes.Hopkins acknowledges that “people who expressed more restrictionist immigration attitudes in 2008 and 2012 were more likely to shift toward Trump,” but argues that it did not translate into increased bias against Hispanics because it reflected an even deeper-seated racism:Although the 2016 campaign foregrounded issues related to Latino immigrants, our results demonstrate the enduring role of anti-Black prejudice in shaping whites’ vote choices. Even accounting for their 2012 vote choice, partisanship and other demographics, whites’ 2012 anti-Black prejudice proved a robust predictor of supporting G.O.P. nominee Donald Trump in 2016 while anti-Latino prejudice did not.Hopkins speculates that Trump successfully activated anti-Black views because “generations of racialized political issues dividing Blacks and whites have produced developed psychological schema in many whites’ minds, schema that are evoked even by rhetoric targeting other groups.”The long history of Black-white conflict has, Hopkins argues:forged and reinforced durable connections in white Americans’ minds between anti-Black prejudice and vote choice. It is those pathways that appear to have been activated by Trump, even in the presence of substantial rhetoric highlighting other groups alongside Blacks. Once formed, the grooves of public opinion run deep.Against this generally troubling background, there are some noteworthy countervailing trends.In an August 2021 paper, “Race and Income in U.S. Suburbs: Are Diverse Suburbs Disadvantaged?” Ankit Rastogi, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Immigration, challenges “two assumptions: that people of color are concentrated largely in cities and that communities of color are disadvantaged.”Rastogi — using data from the 2019 American Community Survey — finds instead that:By and large, racially diverse suburbs are middle class when comparing their median household income with the national value ($63,000). The most multiracial suburbs host populations with the highest median incomes (mean ~ $85,000). Black and Latinx median household incomes surpass the national value in these diverse suburbs.By 2010, Rastogi points out, majorities of every major demographic group lived in suburbs:51 percent of Black Americans, 62 percent of Asians, 59 percent of Latinx, and 78 percent of whites. Many people of color live in suburbs because they see them as desirable, resource-rich communities with good schools and other public goods.In addition, Rastogi writes:roughly 45 million people of color and 42 million white people lived in suburbs with diversity scores above 50 in 2019. On average, these people live in middle-class contexts, leading us to question stereotypes of race, place and disadvantage.While Rastogi correctly points to some optimistic trends, David Sears presents a less positive view:Blacks’ contemporary situation reveals the force of their distinctive history. African Americans remain the least assimilated ethnic minority in America in the respects most governed by individual choice, such as intermarriage and residential, and therefore, school, integration. By the same criteria, Latinos and Asians are considerably more integrated into the broader society.The key, Sears continues:is America’s nearly impermeable color line. Americans of all racial and ethnic groups alike think about and treat people of African descent as a particularly distinctive, exceptional group — not as just another “people of color.”Sears does not, however, get the last word.In a March 2021 report, “The Growing Diversity of Black America,” the Pew Research Center found some striking changes in recent decades:From 2000 to 2019, the percentage of African Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree rose from 15 to 23 percent, as the share with a master’s degree or higher nearly doubled from 5 to 9 percent.At the same time, the share of African Americans without a high school degree was cut by more than half over the same period, from 28 to 13 percent.Median Black household income has grown only modestly in inflation-adjusted dollars, from $43,581 in 2000 to $44,000 in 2019, but there were improvements in the distribution of income, with the share earning more than $50,000 growing.In 2000, 31 percent of Black households made $25,000 or less (in 2019 U.S. dollar adjusted value), 25 percent made $25,000 to $49,999, 28 percent made $50,000 to less than $99,999, and 16 percent made $100,000 or more.In 2019, 29 percent of Black households made less than $25,000, a quarter earned $25,000 to $49,999, 17 percent made $50,000 to $74,999, 10 percent earned $75,000 to $99,999, and 18 percent earned more than $100,000.Evidence of extraordinary Black progress has been underreported — indeed minimized — in recent years. That reality notwithstanding, there has been consistent and considerable achievement. Given the historical treatment of African Americans in school and in society, perhaps the most striking accomplishment has been in the rising levels of educational attainment. The economic gains have been more incremental. But neither set of gains can or should be ignored.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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      Census Shows a Nation That Resembles Its Future More Than Its Past

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      For Democrats, there was much to cheer in the growth of cities and suburbs. But Republicans, imperiled by the falling white population, are still well positioned for redistricting.At first blush, Thursday’s release of census data held great news for Democrats. It painted a portrait of a considerably more urban and metropolitan nation, with increasingly Democratic metropolitan areas bustling with new arrivals and the rural, Republican heartland steadily losing residents. It is a much less white nation, too, with the white non-Hispanic population for the first time dropping in absolute numbers, a plunge that exceeded most experts’ estimates, and the growth in the Latino population slightly exceeding forecasts.But the census paints a picture of America as it is. And as it is, America is not very Democratic.Besides the census, the other great source of data on American politics is the result of the 2020 election, which revealed a deeply and narrowly divided nation. Despite nearly the full decade of demographic shifts shown by the census, Joe Biden won the national vote by the same four-point margin that he won by as Barack Obama’s running mate eight years earlier — and with fewer votes in the Electoral College.Democrats face great challenges in translating favorable demographic trends into electoral success, and the new census data may prove to be only the latest example. While the census shows that Democratic-leaning groups represent a growing share of the population, much of the population growth occurred in the Sun Belt, where Republicans still control the redistricting process. That gives them yet another chance to preserve their political power in the face of unfavorable demographic trends. And they are well prepared to do so.The new data will be used by state legislatures and commissions to redraw electoral maps, with the potential to determine control of Congress and state legislatures across the country in next year’s midterm election.Thursday’s release, the most detailed yet from the 2020 census, depicted a nation that increasingly seems to resemble its future more than its past. The non-Hispanic white share of the population fell to 57.8 percentage points, nearly two points lower than expected, as more Americans identified as multiracial. Vast swaths of the rural United States, including an outright majority of its counties, saw their populations shrink.“Democrats have reason to be happy with this census data set,” said Dave Wasserman, House editor of the Cook Political Report, who cited the higher-than-expected population tallies in New York and Chicago and the steady growth of the nation’s Hispanic population.Many Democrats had feared that Latino and urban voters would be badly undercounted amid the coronavirus pandemic and the Trump administration’s effort to ask about citizenship status.It is still possible that the census undercounted Hispanics, but the results did not leave any obvious evidence that the count had gone awry. The Hispanic share of the population was in line with projections. New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic, showed unexpectedly strong population growth.The surprising decline in the white and rural population is likely to bolster Democratic hopes that demographic shifts might help progressives secure a significant electoral advantage.But the possibility that demographic changes would doom conservatives has loomed over American politics for more than a decade, helping to exacerbate conservative fears of immigration and even to motivate a wave of new laws intended to restrict access to voting. Tucker Carlson, the Fox News television show host, has repeatedly stoked racist fears of “white replacement,” warning his viewers that it is a Democratic electoral strategy.Yet despite the seemingly favorable demographic portrait for Democrats depicted by the 2020 census, the 2020 election returned another closely divided result: a 50-50 Senate, one of the closest presidential elections in history, and a House majority so slender that it might be undone by the very data that Democrats were celebrating on Thursday.The nation’s electoral system — which rewards flipping states and districts — has tended to mute the effect of demographic change. Many Democratic gains in vote margins have come in metropolitan areas, where Democratic candidates were already winning races, or in red states like Texas, where Democrats have made huge gains in presidential elections but haven’t yet won many additional electoral votes.But Democrats haven’t fared much better over the past decade, as one would have expected based on favorable demographic trends alone. It’s not clear they’ve improved at all. Barack Obama and Joe Biden each won the national popular vote by four percentage points in 2012 and 2020. Demographic shifts, thus far, have been canceled out by Republican gains among nonwhite and especially Latino voters, who supported Mr. Trump in unexpectedly large numbers in 2020 and helped deny Democrats victory in Florida.The new census data confirms that the nation’s political center of gravity continues to shift to the Republican Sun Belt, where demographic shifts have helped Democrats make huge inroads over the past decade. Georgia and Arizona turned blue in 2020. Texas, where Hispanic residents now roughly equal non-Hispanic whites, is on the cusp of becoming a true battleground state.Phoenix vaulted ahead of Philadelphia to become the fifth most populated city in the United States since the last census.Juan Arredondo for The New York TimesJust 50.1 percent of Georgians were non-Hispanic whites, according to the new census data, raising the possibility that whites already represent a minority of the state’s population by now.But despite Democratic gains in the Sun Belt, Republicans continue to control the redistricting process in most of the fast-growing states that picked up seats through reapportionment.The relatively robust number of Latino and metropolitan voters will make it more difficult for Republicans to redraw some maps to their advantage, by requiring them to draw more voters from rural Republican areas to dilute urban and metropolitan concentrations of Democratic-leaning voters. It may also help Democrats redraw maps to their favor in Illinois and New York, where they do control the redistricting process.But there are few limits on gerrymandering, and even today’s relatively favorable data for Democrats are unlikely to be enough to overcome the expected Republican advantages in states where they enjoy full control over the redistricting process.The Democrats may be relying on the Republicans’ growing bashful about gerrymandering, said Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida.“What the Republicans will have to do is crack the urban areas, and do it pretty aggressively,” he said. “It’s just one of those things we’ll have to see — how aggressive Republicans can be.”Nick Corasaniti More

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      J.D. Vance Converted to Trumpism. Will Ohio Republicans Buy It?

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      As the “Hillbilly Elegy” author runs for Senate in Ohio, he has walked back previous criticism of Donald Trump and reversed arguments that the white working class bears responsibility for its problems.Before he was a celebrity supporter of Donald J. Trump’s, J.D. Vance was one of his most celebrated critics.“Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance’s searing 2016 memoir of growing up poor in Ohio and Kentucky, offered perplexed and alarmed Democrats, and not a few Republicans, an explanation for Mr. Trump’s appeal to an angry core of white, working-class Americans.A conservative author, venture capitalist and graduate of Yale Law School, Mr. Vance presented himself as a teller of hard truths, writing personally about the toll of drugs and violence, a bias against education, and a dependence on welfare. Rather than blaming outsiders, he scolded his community. “There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself,” he wrote.In interviews, he called Mr. Trump “cultural heroin” and a demagogue leading “the white working class to a very dark place.”Today, as Mr. Vance pursues the Republican nomination for an open Senate seat in Ohio, he has performed a whiplash-inducing conversion to Trumpism, in which he no longer emphasizes that white working-class problems are self-inflicted. Adopting the grievances of the former president, he denounces “elites and the ruling class” for “robbing us blind,” as he said in his announcement speech last month.Now championing the hard-right messages that animate the Make America Great Again base, Mr. Vance has deleted inconvenient tweets, renounced his old views about immigration and trade, and gone from a regular guest on CNN to a regular on “Tucker Carlson,” echoing the Fox News host’s racially charged insults of immigrants as “dirty.”When working-class Americans “dare to complain about the southern border,” Mr. Vance said on Mr. Carlson’s show last month, “or about jobs getting shipped overseas, what do they get called? They get called racists, they get called bigots, xenophobes or idiots.”“I love that,” Mr. Carlson replied.Whether Ohio Republicans do, too, is the big question for Mr. Vance — who will crucially benefit from a $10 million super PAC funded by the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a Trump supporter who once employed Mr. Vance.His G.O.P. rivals in the state have had a field day. Josh Mandel, a former treasurer of Ohio who is the early front-runner in the five-candidate field, called Mr. Vance a “RINO just like Romney and Liz Cheney,” referring to the Utah senator and the Wyoming congresswoman who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for inciting the Capitol riot.Liberals and some conservatives have also dismissed Mr. Vance for cynical opportunism. One Never Trump conservative, Tom Nichols, wrote of “the moral collapse of J.D. Vance” in The Atlantic.Mr. Vance, a conservative author and venture capitalist, in 2017. He is running in the Republican primary to fill a Senate seat being vacated by Rob Portman.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesMr. Vance’s adherence to some of the most extreme views of Trump supporters shows how the former president, despite losing the White House and Congress for his party, retains the support of fanatically loyal voters, who echo his resentments and disinformation and force most Republican candidates to bend a knee.Yet Mr. Vance’s flip-flops over policy and over Mr. Trump’s demagogic style may not prove disqualifying with Ohio primary-goers when they vote next spring, according to strategists. Although Mr. Vance’s U-turn might strike some as too convenient in an era when voters quickly sniff out inauthenticity, it is also true that his political arc resembles that of many Republicans who voted grudgingly for Mr. Trump in 2016, but after four years cemented their support. (Mr. Vance has said he voted third-party in 2016.)“Will he be able to overcome his past comments on Trump and square that with the G.O.P. base? Maybe,” said Michael Hartley, a Republican strategist in Ohio who is not working for any of the Senate candidates. He added that Mr. Vance had the lived experience to address policies that lift working-class people “in a way that others cannot.”Mr. Vance, 37, who lives with his wife and two young sons in Cincinnati, has carefully seeded the ground for his candidacy, appearing frequently on podcasts and news shows with far-right influencers of the Trump base, including Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka.In interviews, speeches and on social media, he has become a culture warrior. He threatened to make Big Tech “pay” for putting conservatives “in Facebook jail,” and he mocked Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after the four-star general said he sought to understand “white rage” in the wake of the assault on the Capitol.To Mr. Vance, it is a “big lie” that Jan. 6 was “this big insurrection,” he told Mr. Bannon.In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance credited members of the elite with fewer divorces, longer lives and higher church attendance, adding ruefully, “These people are beating us at our own damned game.” But that was not his message at a recent conservative gathering where he blamed a breakdown in the American family on “the childless left.’’Mr. Carlson, Fox’s highest-rated host, all but endorsed Mr. Vance during the candidate’s appearance last month. Mr. Vance also has the backing of Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, a rising conservative leader in the House. And Charlie Kirk, the founder of the right-wing student group Turning Point USA, who has ties to the Trump family, has endorsed the “Hillbilly Elegy” author.“He has been consistent in being able to diagnose the anxieties of Trump’s base economically almost better than anyone else,” Mr. Kirk said in an interview. Although Mr. Vance once mocked Mr. Trump’s position that a southwest border wall would bring back “all of these steel mill jobs,” today he supports the “America First” agenda that reducing legal immigration will increase blue-collar wages, a link that many economists dispute. “Why let in a large number of desperate newcomers when many of our biggest cities look like this?” Mr. Vance said recently on Twitter over a picture of a homeless encampment in Washington.Mr. Vance’s flip-flops over policy and over Mr. Trump’s demagogic style may not prove disqualifying with Ohio primarygoers when they vote next spring.Jeffrey Dean/Associated PressMr. Trump has met with all five major declared Ohio Republican Senate candidates — who are seeking the open seat of the retiring Senator Rob Portman — but has not signaled a preference. He is not likely to do so any time soon, according to a person briefed on his thinking. Among Democrats, Representative Tim Ryan has the field nearly to himself. Ohio, once a battleground state, has trended rightward in the Trump era.Mr. Vance declined to be interviewed for this article. But an examination of his embrace of Trumpism through the ample record of his writings and remarks, as well as interviews with people close to him, show that it happened the way a Hemingway character famously described how he went bankrupt: “Gradually, and then suddenly.”The year 2018 appears to have been the turning point. That January, Mr. Vance considered a Senate bid in Ohio but ultimately decided not to run, citing family matters, after news reports brought to light his earlier hostile criticism of Mr. Trump.Later that year, the furious opposition on the left to the Supreme Court nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh was a milestone in Mr. Vance’s political shift. Mr. Vance’s wife, Usha, whom he met in law school, had clerked for Justice Kavanaugh. “Trump’s popularity in the Vance household went up substantially during the Kavanaugh fight,” Mr. Vance told a conservative group in 2019.Although Mr. Vance has said that he came to agree with Mr. Trump’s policies on China and immigration, the most important factor in his conversion, he told Mr. Gorka in March, was a “gut” identification with Mr. Trump’s rhetorical war on America’s “elites.”“I was like, ‘Man, you know, when Trump says the elites are fundamentally corrupt, they don’t care about the country that has made them who they are, he was actually telling the truth,’” Mr. Vance said.(His adoption of Trump-style populism did not inhibit him from flying to the Hamptons last month for a fund-raiser with Republican captains of industry, as reported by Politico.)Mr. Vance’s former employer, Peter Thiel, is supporting him with a $10 million super PAC in the Senate race.Doug Mills/The New York TimesFinally, the influence of Mr. Thiel, a founder of PayPal, whom Mr. Vance has called a “mentor to me,” appears to have been decisive in Mr. Vance’s embrace of Trumpism.An outspoken and somewhat rare conservative in Silicon Valley, Mr. Thiel addressed the 2016 Republican convention and advised the Trump transition team. He is a fierce critic of China and global trade and a supporter of restrictionist immigration policies, and Mr. Vance has moved toward all those positions. Mr. Thiel, who did not respond to an interview request, is also paying for a super PAC for another protege, Blake Masters, in a Senate race in Arizona.In March, Mr. Thiel brokered a meeting between Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s resort in Florida. Mr. Vance made amends for his earlier criticism and asked Mr. Trump to keep an open mind, according to people briefed on the meeting. If Mr. Trump were going to attack Mr. Vance — as he has other Republican 2022 candidates around the country whom he perceives to be disloyal — he probably would have done so already.For now, the former president’s appetite for revenge in Ohio seems to be sated by attacking Representative Anthony Gonzalez, a Republican who voted for impeachment in January. Mr. Trump held a rally in the state in June to back a primary challenger to Mr. Gonzalez. Mr. Vance was on hand, sharing a photo on Twitter to show his support for Mr. Trump. 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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      Trump’s Cult of Animosity Shows No Sign of Letting Up

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      In 2016, Donald Trump recruited voters with the highest levels of animosity toward African Americans, assembling a “schadenfreude” electorate — voters who take pleasure in making the opposition suffer — that continues to dominate the Republican Party, even in the aftermath of the Trump presidency.With all his histrionics and theatrics, Trump brought the dark side of American politics to the fore: the alienated, the distrustful, voters willing to sacrifice democracy for a return to white hegemony. The segregationist segment of the electorate has been a permanent fixture of American politics, shifting between the two major parties.For more than two decades, scholars and analysts have written about the growing partisan antipathy and polarization that have turned America into two warring camps, politically speaking.Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, makes the case via Twitter that Trump has “served as a lightning rod for lots of regular people who hold white Christian supremacist beliefs.” The solidification of their control over the Republican Party “makes it seem like a partisan issue. But this faction has been around longer than our current partisan divide.” In fact, “they are not loyal to a party — they are loyal to white Christian domination.”Trump’s success in transforming the party has radically changed the path to the Republican presidential nomination: the traditional elitist route through state and national party leaders, the Washington lobbying and interest group community and top fund-raisers across the country no longer ensures success, and may, instead, prove a liability.For those seeking to emulate Trump — Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, for example — the basic question is whether Trump’s trajectory is replicable or whether there are unexplored avenues to victory at the 2024 Republican National Convention.When Trump got into the 2016 primary race, “he did not have a clear coalition, nor did he have the things candidates normally have when running for president: political experience, governing experience, or a track record supporting party issues and ideologies,” Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami, wrote in an email. Lacking these traditional credentials, Trump sought out “the underserved market within the Republican electorate by giving those voters what they might have wanted, but weren’t getting from the other mainstream selections.”The objectives of the Trump wing of the Republican Party stand out in other respects, especially in the strength of its hostility to key Democratic minority constituencies.Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi — a co-author, with Mason and John Kane of N.Y.U., of a just published paper, “Activating Animus: The Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support” — put it this way in reply to my emailed query:The Trump coalition is motivated by animosity toward Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims and L.G.B.T. This animosity has no bearing on support for any of the other G.O.P. elites or the party itself. Warmth toward whites and Christians equally predict support for Trump, other G.O.P. elites, and the party itself. The only area where Trump support is different than other G.O.P. support is in regards to harnessing this out-group animus.For as long as Trump remains the standard-bearer of the Republican Party, Wronski continued, “this animosity coalition will define the party.”Animosity toward these four Democratic-aligned minority groups is not limited to Republican voters. Mason, Wronski and Kane created an “animus to Democrat groups” scale, ranked from zero at the least hostile to 1.0 at the most. Kane wrote me thatapproximately 18 percent of Democrats have scores above the midpoint of the scale (which would mean negative feelings/animus). For Independents, this percentage grows to 33 percent. For Republicans, it jumps substantially to 45 percent.The accompanying demographic demonstrates Kane’s point.Trump Support Rises With AnimusA study found that animus towards marginalized, Democratic-linked groups was a good predictor of future support for Trump, regardless of party. More

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      Voter Suppression Must Be the Central Issue

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      The right to vote is everything in a democracy.Without influence over power, you are completely vulnerable to that power. There is no way to access prosperity or ensure personal protection when you live in a society in which people who share your interests are inhibited in their political participation. More