The Resentment That Never Sleeps. Rising anxiety over declining social status tells us a lot about how we got here and where we’re going.

THOMAS EDSALL, NY TIMES


Credit...Joshua Roberts/Reuters


More and more, politics determine which groups are favored and which are denigrated.

Roughly speaking, Trump and the Republican Party have fought to enhance the status of white Christians and white people without college degrees: the white working and middle class. Biden and the Democrats have fought to elevate the standing of previously marginalized groups: women, minorities, the L.G.B.T.Q. community and others.

The ferocity of this politicized status competition can be seen in the anger of white non-college voters over their disparagement by liberal elites, the attempt to flip traditional hierarchies and the emergence of identity politics on both sides of the chasm.

Just over a decade ago, in their paper “Hypotheses on Status Competition,” William C. Wohlforth and David C. Kang, professors of government at Dartmouth and the University of Southern California, wrote that “social status is one of the most important motivators of human behavior” and yet “over the past 35 years, no more than half dozen articles have appeared in top U.S. political science journals building on the proposition that the quest for status will affect patterns of interstate behavior.”

Scholars are now rectifying that omission, with the recognition that in politics, status competition has become increasingly salient, prompting a collection of emotions including envy, jealousy and resentment that have spurred ever more intractable conflicts between left and right, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives.

Hierarchal ranking, the status classification of different groups — the well-educated and the less-well educated, white people and Black people, the straight and L.G.B.T.Q. communities — has the effect of consolidating and seeming to legitimize existing inequalities in resources and power. Diminished status has become a source of rage on both the left and right, sharpened by divisions over economic security and insecurity, geography and, ultimately, values.

The stakes of status competition are real. Cecilia L. Ridgeway, a professor at Stanford, described the costs and benefits in her 2013 presidential address at the American Sociological Association.

Understanding “the effects of status — inequality based on differences in esteem and respect” is crucial for those seeking to comprehend “the mechanisms behind obdurate, durable patterns of inequality in society,” Ridgeway argued:


Failing to understand the independent force of status processes has limited our ability to explain the persistence of such patterns of inequality in the face of remarkable socioeconomic change.

“As a basis for social inequality, status is a bit different from resources and power. It is based on cultural beliefs rather than directly on material arrangements,” Ridgeway said:


We need to appreciate that status, like resources and power, is a basic source of human motivation that powerfully shapes the struggle for precedence out of which inequality emerges.

Ridgeway elaborated on this argument in an essay, “Why Status Matters for Inequality”:


Status is as significant as money and power. At a macro level, status stabilizes resource and power inequality by transforming it into cultural status beliefs about group differences regarding who is “better” (esteemed and competent).

In an email, Ridgeway made the case that “status is definitely important in contemporary political dynamics here and in Europe,” adding that


Status has always been part of American politics, but right now a variety of social changes have threatened the status of working class and rural whites who used to feel they had a secure, middle status position in American society — not the glitzy top, but respectable, ‘Main Street’ core of America. The reduction of working-class wages and job security, growing demographic diversity, and increasing urbanization of the population have greatly undercut that sense and fueled political reaction.

The political consequences cut across classes.

Editors’ Picks
Best Movies of 2020
Meryl Streep Isn’t on Our List of Greatest Actors. Here’s Why.
For John Lennon, Isolation Had a Silver Lining

ImageCredit...Jeff Swinger/Associated Press


Peter Hall, a professor of government at Harvard, wrote by email that he and a colleague, Noam Gidron, a professor of political science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, have found that

across the developed democracies, the lower people feel their social status is, the more inclined they are to vote for anti-establishment parties or candidates on the radical right or radical left.

Those drawn to the left, Hall wrote in an email, come from the top and bottom of the social order:

People who start out near the bottom of the social ladder seem to gravitate toward the radical left, perhaps because its program offers them the most obvious economic redress; and people near the top of the social ladder often also embrace the radical left, perhaps because they share its values.

In contrast, Hall continued,

The people most often drawn to the appeals of right-wing populist politicians, such as Trump, tend to be those who sit several rungs up the socioeconomic ladder in terms of their income or occupation. My conjecture is that it is people in this kind of social position who are most susceptible to what Barbara Ehrenreich called a “fear of falling” — namely, anxiety, in the face of an economic or cultural shock, that they might fall further down the social ladder,” a phenomenon often described as “last place aversion.

Gidron and Hall argue in their 2019 paper “Populism as a Problem of Social Integration” that


Much of the discontent fueling support for radical parties is rooted in feelings of social marginalization — namely, in the sense some people have that they have been pushed to the fringes of their national community and deprived of the roles and respect normally accorded full members of it.

In this context, what Gidron and Hall call “the subjective social status of citizens — defined as their beliefs about where they stand relative to others in society” serves as a tool to measure both levels of anomie in a given country, and the potential of radical politicians to find receptive publics because “the more marginal people feel they are to society, the more likely they are to feel alienated from its political system — providing a reservoir of support for radical parties.”

Gidron and Hall continue:

The populist rhetoric of politicians on both the radical right and left is often aimed directly at status concerns. They frequently adopt the plain-spoken language of the common man, self-consciously repudiating the politically correct or technocratic language of the political elites. Radical politicians on the left evoke the virtues of working people, whereas those on the right emphasize themes of national greatness, which have special appeal for people who rely on claims to national membership for a social status they otherwise lack. The “take back control” and “make America great again” slogans of the Brexit and Trump campaigns were perfectly pitched for such purposes.

Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester in the U.K., argued in an email that three factors have heightened the salience of status concerns.

The first, he wrote, is the vacuum created by “the relative decline of class politics.” The second is the influx of immigrants, “not only because different ‘ways of life’ are perceived as threatening to ‘organically grown’ communities, but also because this threat is associated with the notion that elites are complicit in the dilution of such traditional identities.”

The third factor Ford describes as “an asymmetrical increase in the salience of status concerns due to the political repercussions of educational expansion and generational value change,” especially “because of the progressive monopolization of politics by high-status professionals,” creating a constituency of “cultural losers of modernization” who “found themselves without any mainstream political actors willing to represent and defend their ‘ways of life’ ” — a role Trump sought to fill.

In their book, “Cultural Backlash,” Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, political scientists at Harvard and the University of Michigan, describe the constituencies in play here — the “oldest (interwar) generation, non-college graduates, the working class, white Europeans, the more religious, men, and residents of rural communities” that have moved to the right in part in response to threats to their status:


These groups are most likely to feel that they have become estranged from the silent revolution in social and moral values, left behind by cultural changes that they deeply reject. The interwar generation of non-college educated white men — until recently the politically and socially dominant group in Western cultures — has passed a tipping point at which their hegemonic status, power, and privilege are fading.

The emergence of what political scientists call “affective polarization,” in which partisans incorporate their values, their race, their religion — their belief system — into their identity as a Democrat or Republican, together with more traditional “ideological polarization” based on partisan differences in policy stands, has produced heightened levels of partisan animosity and hatred.

Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, describes it this way:

The alignment between partisan and other social identities has generated a rift between Democrats and Republicans that is deeper than any seen in recent American history. Without the crosscutting identities that have traditionally stabilized the American two-party system, partisans in the American electorate are now seeing each other through prejudiced and intolerant eyes.

If polarization has evolved into partisan hatred, status competition serves to calcify the animosity between Democrats and Republicans.

In their July 2020 paper, “Beyond Populism: The Psychology of Status-Seeking and Extreme Political Discontent,” Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen and Alexander Bor, political scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark, contend there are two basic methods of achieving status: the “prestige” approach requiring notable achievement in a field and “dominance” capitalizing on threats and bullying. “Modern democracies,” they write,

are currently experiencing destabilizing events including the emergence of demagogic leaders, the onset of street riots, circulation of misinformation and extremely hostile political engagements on social media.

They go on:

Building on psychological research on status-seeking, we argue that at the core of extreme political discontent are motivations to achieve status via dominance, i.e., through the use of fear and intimidation. Essentially, extreme political behavior reflects discontent with one’s own personal standing and a desire to actively rectify this through aggression.

This extreme political behavior often coincides with the rise of populism, especially right-wing populism, but Petersen, Osmundsen and Bor contend that the behavior is distinct from populism:

The psychology of dominance is likely to underlie current-day forms of extreme political discontent — and associated activism — for two reasons: First, radical discontent is characterized by verbal or physical aggression, thus directly capitalizing on the competences of people pursuing dominance-based strategies. Second, current-day radical activism seems linked to desires for recognition and feelings of ‘losing out’ in a world marked by, on the one hand, traditional gender and race-based hierarchies, which limit the mobility of minority groups and, on the other hand, globalized competition, which puts a premium on human capital.

Extreme discontent, they continue,

is a phenomenon among individuals for whom prestige-based pathways to status are, at least in their own perception, unlikely to be successful. Despite their political differences, this perception may be the psychological commonality of, on the one hand, race- or gender-based grievance movements and, on the other hand, white lower-middle class right-wing voters.

The authors emphasize that the distinction between populism and status-driven dominance is based on populism’s “orientation toward group conformity and equality,” which stands “in stark contrast to dominance motivations. In contrast to conformity, dominance leads to self-promotion. In contrast to equality, dominance leads to support for steep hierarchies.”

Thomas Kurer, a political scientist at the University of Zurich, contends that status competition is a political tool deployed overwhelmingly by the right. By email, Kurer wrote:

It is almost exclusively political actors from the right and the radical right that actively campaign on the status issue. They emphasize implications of changing status hierarchies that might negatively affect the societal standing of their core constituencies and thereby aim to mobilize voters who fear, but have not yet experienced, societal regression. The observation that campaigning on potential status loss is much more widespread and, apparently, more politically worthwhile than campaigning on status gains and makes a lot of sense in light of the long-established finding in social psychology that citizens care much more about a relative loss compared to same-sized gains.

Kurer argued that it is the threat of lost prestige, rather than the actual loss, that is a key factor in status-based political mobilization:

Looking at the basic socio-demographic profile of a Brexiter or a typical supporter of a right-wing populist party in many advanced democracies suggests that we need to be careful with a simplified narrative of a ‘revolt of the left behind’. A good share of these voters can be found in what we might call the lower middle class, which means they might well have decent jobs and decent salaries — but they fear, often for good reasons, that they are not on the winning side of economic modernization.

Kurer noted that in his own April 2020 study, “The Declining Middle: Occupational Change, Social Status, and the Populist Right,” he found

that it is voters who are and remain in jobs susceptible to automation and digitalization, so called routine jobs, who vote for the radical right and not those who actually lose their routine jobs. The latter are much more likely to abstain from politics altogether.

In a separate study of British voters who supported the leave side of Brexit, “The malaise of the squeezed middle: Challenging the narrative of the ‘left behind’ Brexiter,” by Lorenza Antonucci of the University of Birmingham, Laszlo Horvath of the University of Exeter, Yordan Kutiyski of VU University Amsterdam and André Krouwel of the Vrije University of Amsterdam, found that this segment of the electorate

is associated more with intermediate levels of education than with low or absent education, in particular in the presence of a perceived declining economic position. Secondly, we find that Brexiters hold distinct psychosocial features of malaise due to declining economic conditions, rather than anxiety or anger. Thirdly, our exploratory model finds voting Leave associated with self-identification as middle class, rather than with working class. We also find that intermediate levels of income were not more likely to vote for remain than low-income groups.

In an intriguing analysis of the changing role of status in politics, Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, emailed the following argument. In the recent past, he wrote:

One unique thing about working class movements — particularly when infused with Marxism — is that they could dissociate class from social status by constructing an alternative status hierarchy and social theory: Workers may be poor and deprived of skill, but in world-historic perspective they are designated to be the victorious agents of overcoming capitalism in favor of a more humane social order.

Since then, Kitschelt continued, “the downfall of the working class over the last thirty years is not just a question of its numerical shrinkage, its political disorganization and stagnating wages. It also signifies a loss of status.” The political consequences are evident and can be seen in the aftermath of the defeat of President Trump:

Those who cannot adopt or compete in the dominant status order — closely associated with the acquisition of knowledge and the mastery of complex cultural performances — make opposition to this order a badge of pride and recognition. The proliferation of conspiracy theories is an indicator of this process. People make themselves believe in them, because it induces them into an alternative world of status and rank.

On the left, Kitschelt wrote, the high value accorded to individuality, difference and autonomy creates
a fundamental tension between the demand for egalitarian economic redistribution — and the associated hope for status leveling — and the prerogative awarded to individualist or voluntary group distinction. This is the locus, where identity politics — and the specific form of intersectionality as a mode of signaling multiple facets of distinctiveness — comes in.

In the contest of contemporary politics, status competition serves to exacerbate some of the worst aspects of polarization, Kitschelt wrote:

If polarization is understood as the progressive division of society into clusters of people with political preferences and ways of life that set them further and further apart from each other, status politics is clearly a reinforcement of polarization. This augmentation of social division becomes particularly virulent when it features no longer just a clash between high and low status groups in what is still commonly understood as a unified status order, but if each side produces its own status hierarchies with their own values.

These trends will only worsen as claims of separate “status hierarchies” are buttressed by declining economic opportunities and widespread alienation from the mainstream liberal culture.

Millions of voters, including the core group of Trump supporters — whites without college degrees — face bleak futures, pushed further down the ladder by meritocratic competition that rewards what they don’t have: higher education and high scores on standardized tests. Jockeying for place in a merciless meritocracy feeds into the status wars that are presently poisoning the country, even as exacerbated levels of competition are, theoretically, an indispensable component of contemporary geopolitical and economic reality.

Voters in the bottom half of the income distribution face a level of hypercompetition that has, in turn, served to elevate politicized status anxiety in a world where social and economic mobility has, for many, ground to a halt: 90 percent of the age cohort born in the 1940s looked forward to a better standard of living than their parents’, compared with 50 percent for those born since 1980. Even worse, those in the lower status ranks suffer the most lethal consequences of the current pandemic.

These forces in their totality suggest that Joe Biden faces the toughest challenge of his career in attempting to fulfill his pledge to the electorate: “We can restore the defining American promise, that no matter where you start in life, there’s nothing you can’t achieve. And, in doing so, we can restore the soul of our nation.”

Biden soared among crucial suburban voters. Democrats? Not so much.

NY TIMES, THOMAS EDSALL


Credit...Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times


In battleground congressional and statehouse districts, the same pattern appeared over and over again this year. At the top of the ticket, Joe Biden won, often handily. Further down the ticket, in contests for seats in the House and state legislatures, Democratic candidates repeatedly lost.

The surge of suburban Democratic voting in 2018 for House and state legislative collapsed in 2020, with Republicans gaining 179 state legislative seats and at least 11 seats in the House of Representatives.

Take the 34th State Senate District in the northwest suburbs of Minneapolis. The district has all the earmarks of an ideal Democratic target in the era of Donald Trump. It has a median household income of $101,644, far higher than the $68,703 national median; it is 86.8 percent white but 49.3 percent of residents over 25 have a college degree, compared with 36 percent nationally.

The 34th is just the kind of upscale, well-educated community that has found the Trump presidency repellent.

At the presidential level, that calculation proved dead right. Biden beat Trump there, carrying what had traditionally been a Republican community by a solid 7.6 percentage points.

But at the state legislative level, it was a different story: Bonnie Westlin, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor candidate for the State Senate, lost to Warren Limmer, the Republican incumbent, by just under 2 percentage points. Westlin was not alone.

As more detailed analyses of the 2020 election emerge, one thing is clear: For millions of voters, a vote against Trump did not mean a vote for the Democratic Party.

In 2018, Democratic gains in congressional and legislative races were clearly the result of animosity to Trump that found expression in voting against Republicans not named Trump — because Trump was not on the ballot. With Trump on the ballot this year, however, these same voters discovered that they could voice their disapproval of him by voting against his re-election, while returning to their more conservative instincts by voting Republican in the rest of the races.

A spate of recent news stories illustrates the Democratic conundrum.

The headline “How Democrats Suffered Crushing Down-Ballot Losses Across America,” topped the piece my Times colleague Trip Gabriel published on Nov. 28:

Across the country, suburban voters’ disgust with Mr. Trump — the key to Mr. Biden’s election — did not translate into a wide rebuke of other Republicans, as Democrats had expected after the party made significant gains in suburban areas in the 2018 midterm elections. From the top of the party down to the state level, Democratic officials are awakening to the reality that voters may have delivered a one-time verdict on Mr. Trump that does not equal ongoing support for center-left policies.

Or take California, which had been a Democratic gold mine in recent decades. Not only did Republicans win back three of the seven House seats the party lost in 2018, but as Ben Christopher wrote on the nonprofit news site Cal Matters, “the blue wave of 2018 yielded to a red riptide.”

Jeremy B. White elaborated at Politico:

The myth of lock step liberal California took a hit this election. Voters in the deep-blue state rejected a progressive push to reinstate affirmative action, sided with technology companies over organized labor and rejected rent control. They are poised to reject a business tax that had been a decades long priority for labor unions and Democratic leaders.

Liberals, White continued, “thought 2020 was their moment to secure long-desired changes: California’s electorate has become steadily more diverse and Democratic in recent decades, relegating its once-mighty Republican Party to the political margins,” but they “miscalculated. There was no bigger example than voters’ decisive rejection of Proposition 16. The ballot measure would have reinstated affirmative action and directly repudiated what liberals consider a racist chapter of California’s recent past.”

In a major win for the tech giants of the gig economy, California voters defied organized labor and liberal interest groups to approve Proposition 22, exempting such firms as Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Instacart from requirements that they treat their workers as employees qualifying for benefits and worker protections, rather than as independent contractors.

In Texas, where Democrats were hoping to further capitalize on 2018 victories, the Texas Tribune reported:

Texas Republicans managed to avoid net losses in the state and U.S. House this election cycle in part because voters in key districts showed a willingness to vote Democratic at the top of the ballot and Republican lower down.

I asked Yphtach Lelkes, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, about the increasing centrality of the suburbs in elections. His reply signaled some of the Democrats’ future problems:

As Democrats and Republicans continue to gather strength in high- and low-density areas, respectively, the swing voters will be found in the suburbs. Democrats will have to respond to the more progressive wings of the party but fend off accusations of socialism that may turn off suburban voters. With Trump out of the White House, and with it, his bombastic rhetoric, I expect Republicans will have an easier time with suburban voters than they had over the past four years.

The ambivalence of suburban voters in 2020 — their clear hostility to Trump combined with their reluctance to support Democrats in down-ballot races — poses a dilemma for Democrats looking for sustained growth in a post-Trump era.

If the 2020 movement in relatively affluent well-educated suburbs away from Democratic voting for legislative and congressional candidates is more than a temporary phenomenon, then maintaining the House majority, as well as having a shot at winning control of the Senate, will prove to be a tough challenge. These jurisdictions are just where Democrats are seeking to strengthen their congressional majority and to win majorities in state legislatures.

Texas provides a case study in the damage suburban defection can inflict on Democrats.

Robert M. Stein, a political scientist at Rice, supplied The Times with data on the top five Republican-held state house districts targeted by Texas Democrats in 2020. The five districts — two in Collin County north of Dallas, two in Tarrant County (Fort Worth) and one in Dallas County — Stein noted, were “predominately white suburban or exurban districts with above average education and income for Texas.”

What happened in these districts on Nov. 3? Biden carried all of them, by an average of 6.5 points, Stein wrote, but all the Democratic challengers for state legislative offices fell short.

The strategic importance to the Democratic Party of converting traditionally Republican voters in the upscale regions of the country at both the federal and state levels is evident in county-level voting data. As the chart below shows, from 2016 to 2020, Democrats continued to hemorrhage votes in low-income, low-education counties, once the base of the party, and to make up for those losses with gains in high-income, high-education counties.

These recent trends are part of a long-term shift in voting patterns. Neil Newhouse, a partner in the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, provided data to The Times showing that in 1980, Republicans won 76 of the 100 counties with the largest share of college degrees. In 2020, Democrats won 84 of these high education counties.

Similarly, in 1980, Republicans won 91 of the 100 counties with the highest median incomes, and Democrats 9. In 2020, Democrats won 57 of the top income counties and Republicans 43.

In part because of the strength of the affluent wing, there is a growing internal conflict within the Democratic Party between an ascendant and assertive left wing that has gained strength by ousting Democratic incumbents in lower income, majority-minority districts, versus those seeking to win in moderate, more upscale districts with Republican incumbents where voters are more centrist than liberal.

As has become ever more glaringly evident, these two factions hold conflicting views on both policy and strategy.

The progressive wing contends that the Democratic Party needs to take aggressive stands on issues from climate change to immigration, from police reform to massive infrastructure spending, from a minimum wage to strong antitrust regulation. These policy stands are crucial to the mobilization of the young, the poor and, often, Black and Hispanic voters, all of whom are essential to Democratic victories.

The moderate wing argues that for the Democratic Party to expand beyond its urban base, it must appeal to middle-of-the-road voters in purple America who distrust radical change, who support the police — or at least don’t want to defund them — and who prefer cautious steps to expand and improve health care, to reduce inequality and to improve conditions for the working poor. If those moderate voters are alienated, centrists contend, the Democratic Party will stagnate rather than grow.

While still a relatively small cadre, the left wing gained strength in 2020 with the election of Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush to the House. Both ousted seemingly entrenched Democratic incumbents in majority-minority districts, Eliot Engel in New York and William Lacy Clay in St. Louis. If progressives vote as a bloc, their numbers in both branches of Congress could prove crucial since Democrats will need every vote to pass legislation.

During the campaign, Cori Bush provoked a firestorm of controversy when she tweeted on June 4, “We need to defund the police and make sure that money goes back into the communities that need it,” and on Oct. 20, “If you’re having a bad day, just think of all the social services we’re going to fund after we defund the Pentagon.”

Moderate Democratic candidates have complained bitterly that rhetoric like this receives wide publicity, prompting some voters to believe that the Democratic Party will follow Bush’s suggestions. Republican strategists claim that “defund the police” and socialism have been highly effective when used in negative ads directed against Democratic candidates who in fact repudiated these views.

Looking to the future, the question is how these conflicting interests and trends will affect the outcome of the 2022 off-year elections and the 2024 presidential election.

Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina and one of the authors (along with Jonathan Weiler) of “Prius or Pickup?: How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America’s Great Divide,” cites the key role of urban and suburban whites in the 2020 election in Georgia to demonstrate their crucial position in the contemporary Democratic Party.

From 2016 to 2020, Hetherington argued in an email,

there was no marked increase in the percentage of nonwhite voters. The racial composition of the Georgia electorate was about the same in both 2016 and 2020. And, the percentage of African-Americans voting for the Democratic candidate was also about the same.

Instead, Hetherington found,

what appears to have changed the most is the voting behavior of whites. When Trump won Georgia by 5.1 points in 2016, 75 percent of whites voted for him. In 2020, however, that percentage dropped to 69 percent.

The key factor in this shift among white voters, Hetherington contended, was a major change in “the mix of urban, suburban, and rural voters” who turned out in 2020. The preliminary data suggests
that the percentage of voters in Georgia who hailed from rural areas plummeted from 23 percent of the electorate to 14 percent, while the percentage of the electorate from urban areas — a highly Democratic group — increased by five percentage points and the suburban share of the vote increased by four points.

This did not happen because rural Georgia voters stayed home. The numbers of votes cast in rural counties actually increased between 2016 and 2020. But the numbers of votes cast in more-Democratic friendly urban and suburban areas simply increased by a lot more,” according to Hetherington. “It seems plausible that the increase in Democratic support among whites is because more of those white voters lived in cities and suburbs than in rural areas.

I asked Hetherington whether the future of the Democratic Party lies in the suburbs. He replied:

It certainly seems that way. Biden was more successful than Clinton in stanching the Democrats’ bleeding in rural, white areas, especially in Pennsylvania where it mattered a lot. As an older, straight, white, male working-class guy, he might have been the only Democrat who could have pulled that off. Whoever the Democrats next candidate for president is, that person is unlikely to share many characteristics with Biden. So more highly educated people in the suburbs are going to be critical to future Democratic success.

Jennifer Victor, a political scientist at George Mason University, argued in an email that “the organizing principle around the parties is increasingly defined by social identities, rather than ideology, policy preferences, or organized interests.” Republicanism, she continued,

has come to be defined by Donald Trump and his brand of “Trumpism,” which is characterized as an America-first, masculine-bravado, defense of traditional social hierarchies. Democratic Party affiliates, on the other hand, are increasingly organized around the counternarrative to Trumpism. In this way party politics is strongly driven by negative partisanship.

In 2020, the presidential wing of the Democratic Party was sustained by what Victor calls “the counternarrative to Trumpism.” That counter- narrative was less than adequate for the congressional and state legislative wings of the party. In 2022, Trump will be neither on the ballot nor in the White House. In 2024, Democrats might luck out with Republicans nominating Trump, or even his son Don Jr., although neither outcome appears likely right now.

Instead, the Democratic Party faces the daunting task of uniting a party with competing moderate and left factions built on a fragile “upstairs-downstairs coalition” — a party that stretches ideologically from Joe Manchin to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and financially from the 18th Congressional District in California’s Silicon Valley with a median household income of $149,375 to Michigan’s 13th District in Detroit with a median household income of $39,005.

Democrats struggled through similarly adverse circumstances during the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, but the outcome of the subsequent elections in 2000 and 2016 suggest a tough road ahead for Biden and his party, although both came close to putting their chosen successor in office. The suddenly key suburban moderates had little tolerance for the antics of the Trump administration; they are likely to have little tolerance for a faltering — let alone failing — Democratic administration.

This places a particularly heavy burden on Biden, both as the leader of a divided country and as the head of a fragile, if not fragmented, Democratic coalition. He will shortly have the opportunity to demonstrate whether or not he is equipped to meet the challenge.

The Far Left: Mobilizing Republicans or the Democratic Black Urban Base.

THOMAS EDSALL, NY TIMES


The Democratic Party is struggling with internal contradictions, as its mixed performance on Election Day makes clear.

Analysts and insiders are already talking ­— sometimes in apocalyptic terms — about how hard it will be for Joe Biden to hold together the coalition that elected him as the 46th president. But it’s important to remember that conflicts are inherent in a party that seeks to represent constituencies running the gamut from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 14th district in New York (50 percent Hispanic, 22 percent non-Hispanic white, 18 percent Asian, 8 percent Black) to 7th generation Utahan Ben McAdams’s 4th District in Utah (74 percent white, 1 percent Black, 3 percent Asian, 17 percent Hispanic.)

Jonathan Rodden, a political scientist at Stanford who has explored the structural difficulties facing Democrats in his book “Why Cities Lose,” wrote in an email that the concentration of liberals in urban communities creates a built-in conflict for the party:

“The ‘presidential wing’ of the party,” he said, referring to the wing most concerned with winning the national election for the White House, “faces no incentives to worry about the geography of Congressional or state legislative districts at all.” The ideal platform for winning presidential elections, Rodden continued,

might be one that hurts the party in pivotal Congressional races. This dynamic might be even more pronounced if the ”presidential wing” decides to pursue a strategy of mobilizing the urban base in order to win those pivotal states.

Race, Rodden added,

only enhances this effect. Given the urban concentration of African- Americans in Northern cities, the Democratic political strategy that maximizes the probability of winning the electoral votes of a pivotal state is probably more responsive to the policy priorities of African-American voters than the strategy that would maximize the probability of winning the mostly white pivotal exurban district in that state.

Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, put the problem this way:

The Democratic Party’s intraparty schism is closely tied to the nationalization of Congressional elections. What works in local campaigns between urban, suburban and rural areas cannot be neatly packaged into a one-size-fits-all national message. You end up with this tension between what drives national media coverage and donations, and what actually works on the ground for a particular district’s constituents. This is part and parcel of the breadth and heterogeneity of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition.

A Democratic operative with experience working on elections from the presidency on down to local contests emailed me his views on the complexities involved in developing Democratic strategies. He insisted on anonymity to protect his job: “I do think that defund the police and socialism hurt in Trump-leaning swing districts with more culturally conservative swing voters,” he wrote, but, he continued,


it’s not clear what one can do about it as you can’t reject your own base. You do need progressive politicians to be a bit more “OK” with centrists denouncing their own base. And you need centrist politicians being OK that the grass roots will have ideas that they don’t like.

Achieving this delicate balance is no easy task. This strategist continued:

This all needs to be more of a "wink wink do what you need to do” arrangement, but it’s not there right now — it’s all too raw and divisive. So as someone involved in campaign strategy, that is frustrating. But to me, this is less of a campaign and message issue, and more of a political one — it’s about organizing and aligning the various constituencies of our party to work together. If we can do that, then we can figure out how to solve the message puzzle. But if you don’t do that, then this conflict will continue.

The strategist stressed his own ambivalence:

We need to extend the tent and extend the map further in some way — out of necessity. That’s where I sympathize with the centrists. You also need a strong, passionate, determined base. That’s where I sympathize with the progressives.

The Democratic Party, he noted, is inherently

hard to manage. From race, to culture, to socioeconomic status. All of these items — knowledge professions vs. working class, young vs. old, rural vs. suburban vs. urban — makes us far more complex to manage than the G.O.P.

The intraparty dispute burst out full force on Nov. 5 during a three-hour House Democratic Caucus telephone meeting — a tape recording of which was put up on the Washington Post website.

Moderates angrily lashed out at liberals, accusing them of allowing divisive rhetoric such as “defund the police” and calls for socialism to go largely unchallenged. Those on the left pushed right back, accusing centrists of seeking to downgrade the demands of minorities, including those voiced at Black Lives Matter protests.

Abigail Spanberger, who represents the 7th Congressional District in Virginia — which runs from the suburbs of Richmond through the exurban and rural counties in the center of the state — voiced her instantly famous critique of the liberal wing of her party during the phone call: “We have to be pretty clear about the fact that Tuesday — Nov. 3 — from a congressional standpoint, was a failure,” she told her Democratic colleagues. “The number one concern that people brought to me” during the campaign “was defunding the police.”

Spanberger, who barely survived her bid for a second term — 50.82 percent to 49.0 percent — was relentless.

We need to not ever use the words ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again because while people think it doesn’t matter, it does matter. And we lost good members because of that.

If House Democrats fail to address these liabilities, she continued, “we are going to get torn apart in 2022,” Sparnberger said, intensifying her comment with a word that can’t appear here.


Representative Rashida Tlaib, whose Michigan district is among the poorest in the country, and who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America — directly countered Spanberger and other moderates: “To be real, it sounds like you are saying stop pushing for what Black folks want.”

THE INTERPRETER: Original insights, commentary and discussions on the major news stories of the week.Sign Up

Other Democrats who describe themselves as democratic socialists, including the former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, have become a substantial Democratic constituency. In addition to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib, there are multiple members of Democratic Socialists of America in state legislature and City Councils. The number of D.S.A. college chapters has more than tripled in the past five years.

In March 2020, Gallup found that “a slight majority of Americans, 51 percent, say they would not vote for an otherwise well-qualified person for president who is a socialist while 47 percent say they would.” Some 65 percent of Democrats said they have a favorable view of socialism, compared to 9 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of independents.

The realities of maintaining a liberal, multiracial coalition are complex.

Tom Emmer, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told The Wall Street Journal that the attack on Democrats over defunding the police was effective “everywhere that it was used,” adding: “You can’t equivocate. You either support the men and women of law enforcement or you don’t.”

Marc Farinella — a frequent adviser to Democratic campaigns for Senate and governor and now the executive director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Survey Methodology — voiced his concerns in an email:

The party is being pushed too far to the left, thereby jeopardizing Democratic candidates and incumbents in suburban districts. Many Democratic candidates are feeling compelled to give lip-service to — or at least not take issue with — unrealistic and out-of-the-mainstream policy proposals in order to avoid running afoul of the activist minority who dominate primaries and who could make the difference in general elections.

Race, according to Farinella, continues to be problematic terrain for Democrats:

This year, some major Democratic candidates forcefully pledged to “build wealth for Black families.” Of course, we must do that. But, upon hearing this pledge, I bet many white middle-class families wondered if these candidates were calling for an expensive new social welfare program to help ‘someone else,’ and wondered why government isn’t also helping their families build wealth since many non-Black families are struggling, too.

To remain competitive, Farinella argued,

Democrats have to focus more on policies that lift all boats and that give everyone — not just targeted groups — a chance for a better life. Fighting to ban exclusion for pre-existing conditions is a step in the right direction. So is protecting Medicare. The reason these policies work so well for Democrats is, at least in part, because they are not perceived as giving special treatment to one group over another.

Farinella stressed that he is

absolutely not suggesting that Democrats abandon their commitment to fight for disadvantaged or oppressed groups. But I am suggesting that being the champion of each struggling group individually is not a substitute for being the champion of the working class and middle class collectively.

Dane Strother, a Democratic consultant whose firm has represented candidates in states from New Hampshire to Montana, was more outspoken in his view:


Four years ago, Democrats’ final messaging was “which bathroom one could use.” This year it was Defund the Police. The far left is the Republicans’ finest asset. A.O.C. and the squad are the “cool kids” but their vision in no way represents half of America. And in a representative democracy 50 percent is paramount.

Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, agreed that “it is pretty clear that the Republican characterization of the Democratic Party as radically left leaning worked to mobilize support for Trump in 2020.”

In an email, Cain argued that “Biden and the Democratic leadership will have a plausible case for reining in the far left,” unless the party is successful in the two Georgia Senate runoffs. In that case, the Democrats would have control of both the White House and Congress, and pressure would increase for the enactment of liberal policies, according to Cain’s analysis:


If the Democrats do flip the Georgia seats, it will make coalition management a little harder and raise tensions between factions, but even then, I do not think the votes in the Senate will be there due to defections from Joe Manchin and others representing purple states.

Bernard Grofman, a political scientist at the University of California-Irvine, shares Strother’s assessment but is still more assertive in his belief that the far left has inflicted significant damage on Democratic candidates. He wrote by email:


“Defund the police” is the second stupidest campaign slogan any Democrat has uttered in the twenty first century. It is second in stupidity only to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 comment that half of Trump’s supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables.”

Moreover, Grofman continued,

the antifa “take back the neighborhood’” in Seattle, where a part of the city became a police no-go zone, with the initial complicity of Democratic office holders, hasn’t helped either, especially after someone was killed within the zone. That allowed the Democrats to be seen as in favor of antifa, and, worse yet, to be portrayed as in favor of violence.

Even more damaging, in Grofman’s view,

have been the scenes of rock throwing demonstrators and boarded up stores that Republicans have regularly used for campaign fodder and that were a long-running story on Fox News. Every rock thrown, every broken window, is one more Republican vote.


ImageCredit...Mike Segar/Reuters


Darren Kew, a professor in the University of Massachusetts-Boston Department of Conflict Resolution, pointed out that the internal tensions within the Democratic Party are exacerbated by polarization between the parties: “Political culture is often that part of the system that is hardest to see — the values, norms, and patterns of behavior that govern our actions within the context of institutions — but it’s the glue that holds it all together,” Kew wrote by email, noting that


20-30 percent of Americans on either end of the political spectrum are getting their information from highly politicized sources and are therefore not agreeing on the basic facts of whether an event has even happened or not.

The left has not remained silent in this debate. On Nov. 10, four key progressive groups — New Deal Strategies, Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement and Data for Progress — released a seven-page report, “What went wrong for Congressional Democrats in 2020.”

The report observes that Democratic have in the past been wary of “the simple statement ‘Black Lives Matter,’” of “being too closely associated with Colin Kaepernick and Black athletes kneeling during the national anthem.”

In this context, the report suggests,

the latest choice for Democrats to locate our fear and blame is the slogan from many Black and young activists who marched the streets this summer: “Defund The Police.” Conservative Democrats may change the terms and people we blame and fear year-by-year, but Democrats must take on the Republican Party’s divide-and-conquer racism head-on and not demobilize our own base.

The Democratic base, the report contends, was crucial:

This election, the Black youth leading the Black Lives Matter movement have turned their power in the streets into votes and have helped secure Biden’s victory in key cities.

The report turns its fire on the Democratic leadership:

Democratic leadership has failed over the years to make sustained investments in field organizing, forcing grass roots organizations to carry the bulk of organizing work in key battleground states on their own.

The Democratic leadership, according to What Went Wrong, also failed in other ways:


When Democratic leaders make unforced errors like showing off two subzero freezers full of ice cream on national television or cozy up with Wall Street executives and corporate lobbyists while Trump tells voters we are the party of the swamp, it is not surprising that we lose.

The report refers to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s late night TV appearance in which she showed off her subzero refrigerator freezer, filled with upscale ice cream bars. The appearance became the subject of a Trump ad that declared:

Not everyone has a $24,000 stocked fridge. Pelosi snacks on ice cream while millions of Americans lose their paychecks, “Let them eat ice cream” — Nancy Antoinette.

The report argues, furthermore, that


scapegoating progressives and Black activists for their demands and messaging is not the lesson to be learned here. It was their organizing efforts, energy and calls for change needed in their communities that drove up voter turnout.

The authors of “What Went Wrong” acknowledge that “there is no denying Republicans levied salient rhetorical attacks against Democrats,” but argues that these will continue to happen as they do every cycle. We cannot let Republican narratives drive our party away from Democrats’ core base of support: young people, Black, Brown, working class, and social movements who are the present and future of the party.

Michael Podhorzer, senior adviser to Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, emailed to voice his across-the-board criticism of all those seeking to place blame for the Democrats’ setbacks in downticket races:

It is far too early to make any kind of comprehensive judgment about the results of the election. But, distressingly, those who had axes before the election are grinding them with cherry picked data points that provide no credible causal evidence for their case.

While Podhorzer faulted all those making judgments, the focus of his critique appeared to be more on complaints from the center/moderate wing of the party:

They are asking us to believe that after four years of colossal disasters, with more than 200,000 dead from mismanaged Covid, with millions waiting without hope for needed relief to continuing mass unemployment, with more than $14 billion in spending, with massive disruptions to established norms and a President who made this a referendum on four more years of the same, what made the difference was this or that position advocated in the debate that neither Biden nor House Democrats endorsed.


Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts and the author of the book “Politics is for Power,” is not persuaded of the good faith and ultimate commitment of the affluent left. In addition to arguing that “moderate Democrats don’t want their brand tied to progressive policy priorities,” Hersh questioned the depth of conviction of the so-called progressive elite:

Many of the supporters who say they want big liberal policies at the national level don’t really mean it. For example, well-to-do liberals in fancy suburbs who say they prioritize racial equality but do not want to actually level the playing field in educational opportunities between their districts and majority-minority districts.

He cited his own state, Massachusetts:

Here there’s tons of liberal energy and money to support taking big progressive fights to Washington. Meanwhile, our schools are segregated, our transit system is broken, our housing is unaffordable, our police force is a mess of corruption and there’s little pressure being put on the state legislature and governor to fix any of it.

What, Hersh asks, “to make of all this?” His answer: “The push for big progressive policy is something of a facade.”

The political reality, however, is that the constituency Hersh criticizes so sharply has become a crucial part of the Democratic coalition, one that cannot be excised or dismissed without endangering future majorities.

Dani Rodrik, a Harvard economist, suggests that any reconciliation of the Democratic Party’s internal conflicts requires an upheaval in contemporary liberal thinking. In “The Democrats’ Four-Year Reprieve,” an essay published Nov. 9 on Project Syndicate, Rodrik argues that the central question is:


How did Donald Trump manage to retain the support of so many Americans — receiving an even larger number of votes than four years ago — despite his blatant lies, evident corruption, and disastrous handling of the pandemic?” It is clear, Rodrik continued, “that the election does not resolve the perennial debate about how the Democratic Party and other center-left parties should position themselves on cultural and economic issues to maximize their electoral appeal.

What is also apparent, in Rodrik’s view, is that “Political leaders on the left need to fashion both a less elitist identity and a more credible economic policy.”

Parties on the left everywhere, he continued,

have increasingly become the parties of educated metropolitan elites. As their traditional working-class base has eroded, the influence of globalized professionals, the financial industry, and corporate interests has risen. The problem is not just that these elites often favor economic policies that leave middle and lower-middle classes and lagging regions behind. It is also that their cultural, social, and spatial isolation renders them incapable of understanding and empathizing with the worldviews of the less fortunate.

In an email, Rodrik wrote:

The first priority of the Democratic Party ought to be to have a sound program for economic transformation — one that promises to increase the supply of good jobs for all, including the lagging regions of the country.

Both strategically and substantively, Rodrik may be dead on, but his argument raises a set of questions that have no easy answers: The Democratic Party represents an enormous group of competing constituencies, running the gamut from trade unionists to feminists, from minorities to environmentalists, from secular Americans to LGBT advocates, a list that can be extended to multiple pages, with many people in the party answering to several of these descriptions, further complicating matters.

It is the very determination of each of these blocs to place a priority on its own agenda that casts doubt on the ability of the Democratic Party to unite in support of the kind of economic platform Rodrik describes, a step that would require the subordination of narrower interests in favor of the party’s collective interest. Unfortunately, this demand for a willingness to sacrifice or compromise factional interests comes at a time when there has been a steady erosion of a national commitment to collective responsibility.

In a way, this is yet another tragic legacy of the Trump administration. Liberal advocacy groups have become more in-your-face, more intense, partly in reaction to the intransigence of the Trump regime, a development that is in turn irrevocably linked to the intensity of the conflicts across the country and within the Democratic Party itself.

Biden Is Not Out of the Woods

Unanticipated electoral developments are affecting both presidential campaigns in surprising ways.

THOMAS EDSALL, NY TIMES 

Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

With 20 days to go, most signals favor Joe Biden, but the chain of events that delivered an Electoral College victory to Donald Trump in 2016 still hovers in the rearview mirror.

Recent headlines reflect the widespread view that Biden is poised to prevail:

Washington Post: “As Trump stumbles, voters finalize their choices, and Biden’s lead grows”; New York Times: “Virus Pulls Down Trump, Poll Shows, and G.O.P. Senators Suffer With Him”; Wall Street Journal: “Biden Scores 14-Point Lead Over Trump in Poll After Debate.”

One thing continues to stand out, even in the polls these pieces describe, which is that white Democrats, who remain the majority in their party, have been moving leftward for nearly a decade, particularly on racial and moral issues, and that shift has pushed the party further away from the nation’s median voter. This gap has damaged Democratic prospects in the past, but the ultimate outcome of Trump’s determined efforts to capitalize on it has not yet been revealed.

Here are some of the things causing anxiety among Democratic partisans, particularly political professionals. 

One way to measure voter enthusiasm is to compare voter registration trends for each party. A Democratic strategist who closely follows the data on a day-to-day basis wrote in a privately circulated newsletter:

Since last week, the share of white non-college over 30 registrations in the battleground states has increased by 10 points compared to September 2016, and the Democratic margin dropped 10 points to just 6 points. And there are serious signs of political engagement by white non-college voters who had not cast ballots in previous elections.

David Wasserman, House editor for The Cook Political Report. wrote on Oct. 1 that voter registration patterns over a longer period in key battleground states show that “Republicans have swamped Democrats in adding new voters to the rolls, a dramatic GOP improvement over 2016.”

Four of the six states Trump won by fewer than five points in 2016 allow voters to register by party: Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. In recent months, there have been substantially more Republicans added to the rolls than Democrats in each of them except for Arizona.

Turning from registration figures to polling data, many trends are favorable to Biden, but not all of them.

For example, there has been a modest drop in the Democratic margin of support among Hispanic Catholics, according to surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center.

More worrisome for Biden, the Pew survey shows modestly weakened support among Black women, a key Democratic constituency. Black women supported Clinton over Trump 98 to 1; this year they support Biden over Trump 91-6.

Evangelical white protestants remain firmly in Trump’s camp, backing him by 61 points over Biden, the same margin he had against Clinton in 2016.

Democratic strategists are also worried about how well their voters will perform in properly requesting, filling out and mailing in absentee ballots.

More than twice as many Biden voters as Trump voters — the actual ratio is 2.4 to 1 — plan to cast ballots by mail, according to polling by Pew. So far, however, Democratic requests for absentee ballots have not reached the levels that surveys suggest will be needed for the party to cast votes at full strength on Election Day.

Catalist, a liberal organization that specializes in voter data analytics, found that Democrats are requesting absentee and early vote ballots at substantially higher rates than in 2016, but these rates are below the more than two-to-one ratio cited in the Pew poll.

In presidential battleground states, the Democratic share of absentee and early vote ballot requests through Oct. 13, according to Catalist, was 57.4 percent, and in Senate battleground states 55.2 percent. 

At the same time, there are multiple developments bolstering Democratic confidence as the election approaches.

In addition to the overall poll data favoring Biden, many of the demographic details are welcome news to Democrats.

The relatively minor decline in Democratic support among Hispanic Catholics, for example, is more than made up for by Democratic improvement among non-Hispanic white Catholics. In 2016, Trump crushed Clinton among this group, 64-31, or 33 points; now Trump leads Biden by 52-44, or by 8 points.

Biden has cut into other key 2016 Trump voting blocs, including whites without college degrees, white men, middle-income whites and married men. He has done so while strengthening support among constituencies that have been trending Democratic for a while: white women with college degrees, young voters between the ages of 18 and 29, upper-income voters and single women.

The fastest growing religious category — atheists, agnostics and “nothing in particular” — has become an even more rock-solid Democratic constituency. In 2016, the nonreligious voted 65-24 for Clinton; according to the most recent Pew data, Biden leads Trump among these voters 71-22.

Scholarly studies of voter attitudes reinforce the pluses and minuses we see in Biden’s poll numbers.

One recent study, “Racial attitudes & political cross-pressures in nationalized elections: The case of the Republican coalition in the Trump era,” by Carlos Algara and Isaac Hale, political scientists at the University of Texas-El Paso and the University of California-Davis, found that there continue to be large numbers of racially conservative Democrats who can be persuaded to vote for Republican candidates. 

As Algara and Hale put it:

Even during the era of highly nationalized and partisan elections, racial attitudes are still a mechanism by which Republicans can win significant electoral support among Democrats and relatively liberal voters in the white electorate.

The ability of Republicans to capitalize on “conservative racial attitudes helped mitigate Republican losses during the 2018 midterm elections,” the two argue.

As a result of the effectiveness of this racial strategy,

We expect that Republican candidates for federal office will continue to make racial appeals in the 2020 campaign — and reap electoral rewards for doing so.

I asked Algara how well the argument holds up given other studies that show white Democrats are becoming more liberal on racial issues. He replied by email: “Among white Democrats, there is still a healthy amount of variation in racial conservatism,” Algara noted, adding that

the greater this differential, the greater the likelihood this cleavage grows within white Democrats, to the electoral benefit of Republicans. We also show this cleavage exists among white voters that are closer in ideological proximity to liberal Democratic candidates. In sum, our results show that while white Democrats are becoming more liberal on their racial attitudes, variation still exists and Republicans can exploit this variation toward their electoral aims by generating support among white Democrats that still exhibit more racially conservative attitudes.

Another paper, “Disavowing White Identity: How Social Disgust Can Change Social Identities,” provides a different assessment of how racial issues are playing out among white voters. The authors — Ashley Jardina, Nathan Kalmoe and Kimberly Gross of Duke, Louisiana State and George Washington Universities — argue that Trump has gone too far in his use of racially charged messages, provoking disgust among a segment of voters. This disgust has, in turn, driven many white voters to lessen or abandon their sense of white identity or white solidarity.

“The decline in white identity was driven mostly by whites expressing disgust toward Trump,” they write.

In other words, by pushing racist themes and rhetoric to extremes, Trump has damaged his ability to continue to capitalize on an issue that was essential to his victory in 2016, according to the authors.

Crucially, Jardina, Kalmoe and Gross note that

We find that it is disgust, in particular, and not just negative Trump affect or negative Trump attitudes in general, that is most tied to changes in white racial identity.

Separately, Jardina shared data that she and Trent Ollerenshaw, a political science graduate student at Duke, put together, which shows a key aspect of the leftward shift among Democrats: a sharp decline in racial resentment among white Democrats, particularly from 2012 to 2020.

A similar pattern emerges in studies of other issues.

Steven W. Webster, a political scientist at Indiana University, provided The Times with data that also showed a widening gulf between white Republicans and Democrats on questions designed to measure “moral traditionalism.”

The survey asked people on a zero to 4 scale to “agree strongly” or “disagree strongly” with four statements:

1. Newer lifestyles are contributing to the breakdown of our society.

2. The world is always changing and we should adjust our view of moral behavior to those changes.

3. This country would have many fewer problems if there were more emphasis on traditional family ties.

4. We should be more tolerant of people who choose to live according to their own moral standards, even if they are very different from our own.

From 2000 to 2016, white Republicans maintained consistently high levels of moral traditionalism, according to Webster’s research, dropping less than a point, from 10.9 to 10.1, over the 16-year period. White Democrats, in contrast, dropped by 3.2 points, from 8.8 to 5.6. 

Webster’s data show that partisan divisions between Democrats and Republicans over moral traditionalism went from a middling split in 2000 to a much more severe split, with much less possibility of compromise, in 2016 — and there is no reason to believe this trend has abated in 2020.

 

Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

On a broader scale, Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts, provided The Times with data on trends on an “ideological liberalism scale” for white, Black and Hispanic Democrats, and for all Republicans. The scale is based on answers to survey questions about health care, immigration, gay marriage, gun control, the environment and government spending from 2010 to 2018, collected by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.

Republicans maintained a consistently low liberalism score through all eight years. Democratic constituencies became uniformly more liberal, but the shift to the left was most pronounced among white Democrats, who pulled well ahead of their Black and Hispanic co-partisans.

All of these findings add credibility to an analysis of contemporary politics that Jeffrey Stonecash, an emeritus political science professor at Syracuse University, sent to me.

To understand the election, Stonecash wrote, we should be asking “about what values and ideas are driving polarization and which groups embrace some ideas rather than others.” At the moment, he argues, Americans seems intensely divided by the question:

What defines America: is it a set of people (white, Christian) or is it a set of ideals that anyone can come and achieve. To the former immigrants are an alien threat and dangerous (as it has always been in American history). What value should prevail: individual rights and anti-government beliefs or is there a collective interest that sometimes requires some constraints on individuals?

Out of these basic issues, further questions arise at the center of political debate, Stonecash continued:

Are there traditional moral behaviors that must be followed or should there be more freedom to pursue individual choices? What is patriotism: is it celebrating how great the nation is while downplaying faults or is it taking a hard look at how well we fulfill our ideals and being critical when necessary? How does America really work: can any individual succeed or are there systematic limitations and discriminations?

Over time, the two parties have staked out consistently opposing views on these questions, many of which are driven by the views of voters toward immigration and the prospect that whites are projected to become a minority in roughly 25 years.

The composition of the two parties has, in turn, come to reflect this partisan division: a Republican Party that has barely changed over the past two decades and a Democratic Party that has become the embodiment of diversity. 

In “An analysis of the changing social bases of America’s political parties,” Joshua N. Zingher, a political scientist at Old Dominion University, describes the contrasting demographic dynamics of the two parties in detail.

Start with the Republican electorate. From 2000 to 2016, the share of white non-college voters, of Protestants, of weekly church attendees, changed by a single percentage point or less, despite the fact that the country has experienced rapid change.

For Democrats, in contrast, the share of African-Americans rose from 20 to 27 percent; of Latinos from 8 to 19 percent, of the nonreligious from 18 to 31 percent and of white college graduates from 25 to 29 percent.

The two parties now embody the broad divisions over values and diversity described by Stonecash — over the questions, in his words, of “who is a ‘real American,’ who is deserving and whose lives and beliefs should be honored.”

These values conflicts are real, they are deeply felt, and have become ever more central to the competing visions of what kind of a country Americans want to live in.

In less than three weeks, the people will speak. There is a huge market for what Trump is selling, and the fact that Trump has the loyalty of 40 to 45 percent of the electorate speaks to that. If Biden wins, can the Democrats move past mobilizing voters in opposition to Trump to the development of a governing strategy that builds and maintains a functional majority coalition, instead of provoking a repeat of the post-victory waves of opposition that plagued the party in 1994 and 2010? 

The question of the hour, though, is what happens if and when Trump himself is taken out of the political equation. In what guise might the ethnonationalism he has mobilized re-emerge? Can Biden contain the forces that are now on the loose? How likely is the country, or the world for that matter, to reach a state of near ungovernability? Is there any candidate, or any movement, that represents a way out of today’s extreme partisanship? Or are we venturing toward the point of no return?