Understanding the Divide Between U.S. Democrats and Republicans Today
The divide between Democrats and Republicans in the United States in 2016 is best conceptualized as a divide between those who think that an America in which black, brown, yellow, red, etc. people vote is great, and a place in which they have a great deal to gain; and those who think that an America in which black, brown, yellow, red, etc. people vote is no longer great, and is a place in which they have something--maybe not a great deal if they do not have much, but something--to lose.
Let me start with the very sharp Francis Wilkinson's argument that the ressentiment driving the Republican Party today is not class-based--is not the result of the economic disappointments and difficulties suffered by the white working class over the past generation--but rather extends all the way up the income ladder:
Francis Wilkinson: Race, Not Class, Dictates Republican Future: "The class compositions of the Republican and Democratic parties keep evolving...
...Democrats have been shedding working-class white voters for decades, while the GOP, long the party of management, entrepreneurs and inherited wealth, has acquired a new affinity for blue-collar blues, including a presidential nominee who promises to keep economically unviable coal operations in business while crushing labor competition from low-skills immigrants.... Thomas Edsall... " the "Great Democratic Inversion."... "The 2016 election will represent a complete inversion of the New Deal order among white voters"....
[But] stories about the disaffected working-class supporters of Donald Trump apply almost exclusively to white voters. Other working-class voters--blacks and Hispanics--are poised to provide lopsided support to Hillary Clinton.... Working-class nonwhites, having endured decades of veiled hostility from the Republican Party, now face overt antipathy from the Trumpified GOP. They show no great desire to abandon the Democratic coalition.... There is no expansive, working-class rage in the U.S. There is white conservative rage... [that] may burn brightest in deindustrialized America... [but] extends across class and educational demarcations, from blue collars to billionaires...
Francis Wilkinson is, I believe, correct. What motivates the Republican base and holds it together up and down the wealth ladder today is not any feeling that they are poor, for the right-wingnut rage is as strong among the superrich Peter Thiels who have done very well indeed. What motivates them is a belief that the social order was supposed to give them a certain status and respect--sociological, cultural, and economic--that is under threat.
We see this in the weak-tea Trumpism that Mitt Romney campaigned on behind closed doors with his donors, either because he believed it, because he thought his donors would like to hear it, or both, in 2012. Listen to what Romney was saying then about the future of America and about Obama coalition:
I'm very concerned about what the nation is gonna be like over the coming decade or two.... I see these two very different scenarios. One is... a very vibrant America, with freedom and prosperity for the great bulk of the American people. On the other hand, I really do see something like Europe.... That's the path we're on right now....
My dad... was born in Mexico. And had he been born of Mexican parents I'd have a better shot at winning this, but he was [audience laughs] unfortunately born of Americans living in Mexico.... [If] you have no skill or experience... you're welcome to cross the border and stay here for the rest of your life....
47 percent of the people... will vote for the president no matter what... who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them.... These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax.... And so my job is not to worry about those people--I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives....
[Obama] followed the old playbook... especially [to] the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people.... Focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government, and then work very aggressively to turn them out to vote.... He made a big effort on small things. Those small things, by the way, add up to trillions of dollars....
Forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift. Free contraceptives were very big with young college-aged women.... Obamacare... anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big gift to young people.... [For Black and Hispanic voters]... making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free health care, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity, I mean, this is huge. Likewise with Hispanic voters, free health care was a big plus...
In Mitt Romney's view, he has his money--"I had inherited nothing. Everything that Ann and I have we earned the old-fashioned way, and that's by hard work..."--and yet Obama and his coalition are coming to steal it from them. In fact--as the dig about how "had [my dad] been born of Mexican parents I'd have a better shot at winning this" reveals--Obama has already stolen something from him. Via affirmative action, Obama stole John McCain's right to be president. And now in 2012 he is about to try to steal Mitt Romney's right to be president. And Obama is unworthy. He has unfairly cut the line:
[His] magnetism and his charm and his persuasiveness... [but he is] extraordinarily naive... "One word: VEAK!".... His attack of one American against another American... [his] division of America... [his] going after those who have been successful... "hope and change".... His policies... haven't worked... he's a bad guy... he did bad things... he's corrupt... He just wasn't up to the task.... "He's in over his head"... "the president's been a disappointment".... He's going to... try and vilify me as someone who's been successful...
This is a plutocrat feeling hard done by. (A plutocrat whose wealth has always seemed to me to be primarily based on using financial engineering to lift first workers' pension funds and then an outsized share of the franchise value of Bain Capital that left him with few friends either in the companies Bain operated on or among his ex-partners.) He feels hard done by because the world is not being fair to him. He is subject to: (a) progressive redistributive taxation, (b) the threat of more progressive redistributive taxation, and (c) having to see a Black man in the Oval Office.
This is the upper-class version of what the keen-witted Arlie Hochschild sees as the deep story of the right:
You are patiently standing in... a long line... [for] the American Dream.... But... people [are] cutting in line... beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare... career-driven women... immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees....
You're being asked to feel sorry for them all.... You see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He's on their side. In fact, isn't he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters... redistributing your money to the undeserving. It's not your government anymore; it's theirs...
Now there are those like the very sharp Ann Pettifor who are working hard to give this process a social-democratic spin. They say that the underlying problem is a mighty neoliberal market running roughshod over people's lives, expectations, and incomes:
Ann Pettifor: Brexit and Its Consequences: "The ‘Brexit’ vote is but the latest manifestation of popular dissatisfaction with the utopian ideal of autonomous markets beyond the reach of regulatory democracy...
...A form of social self-protection from self-regulating markets in money, trade and labour.... The economic profession’s deflationary, liberal finance bias.... The necessary restructuring and rebalancing of the global economy have been postponed. With the historic Brexit vote, the British people rejected this flawed brand of economics.... Britain’s ‘Brexit’ vote is but the latest manifestation of popular dissatisfaction with the economists’ globalized, marketized society...
It is certainly true that Polanyi was right in emphasizing that the ownership and use of land determines people's communities, that the deployment of labor determines people's incomes, that the deployment of finance determines what industries grow and shrink--and that all of these are or perhaps, people think, ought to be governed by a sociological logic of what people deserve. Thus turning land, labor, and finance into market-economic commodities to be governed by the logic of maximizing value inevitably, as Polanyi argues, leaves a great many people feeling that they have been cheated: They had reasonably social fabric-based explanations for where and how they would live, how much money they would make, and what they would do. In many cases the logic of the market breaks those expectations, and that breaking creates ressentiment.
But what also creates ressentiment is the upending the racial, national, ethno-linguistic, and gender hierarchies of traditional society. Neoliberal economics has not failed Germany. (Or, rather, say that the secret Keynesianism of an undervalued currency has served Germany's white working class very well indeed even as neoliberal economics has failed Europe as a whole.) And yet Angela Merkel is in as much trouble from her own indigenous Trumpists as any centrist political leader in the North Atlantic.
As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in back in 1848, with the coming of market society:
Alles Ständische und Stehendes verdampft... All privileges and establishments are steamed away...
Looking at the crosstabs, it is very difficult to see economic anxiety because of slow growth and instability as playing a large role in the process of mobilizing the Republican base, from its underemployed basement-dwelling teabaggers all the way up to the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson. It is very easy to see status anxiety because minorities, women, queers, and so forth no longer know their place--and no longer know that their place is not in the Oval Office--as the big motivating factor.
So how is this Republican coalition who, almost uniformly, see America as a place that is going to take their stuff and give them no respect under control?
The first task--however low the odds of success--is to bolster those forces inside the Republican coalition that think that this ressentiment master narrative is (a) wrong, and (b) electorally disastrous for the long run.
The second task is to strengthen and maintain the opposed, heterogeneous, Democratic coalition of those who see America as great and as a true society of opportunity.
Francis Wilkinson sees this Democratic coalition as under considerable tension:
Francis Wilkinson: Race, Not Class, Dictates Republican Future: "Democrats... [are] managing an increasingly unwieldy coalition extending from white cosmopolitan millionaires who send their kids to private schools...
...to low-paid Hispanic service workers and black factory and office workers facing economic dislocation.... Keeping that coalition pointed in the same general direction might be impossible without the dedicated efforts of the Republican Party...
I do not.
Rather, I see it as comprised of all of us who believe that America is great and works.
It is comprised of white people, predominately but not exclusively college-educated, who believe that even though society is not fair they do not have a big beef, and who believe that they have lots of open opportunity here in America. It is comprised of women and minorities of all kinds, for whom America now is manifestly and enormously greater than it was a generation or two ago, and promises to be greater yet in the future--provided the Trumpists can be kept from wrecking things. It is the coalition of the prosperous and progressive opportunity society. Holding it together should not be a big problem. Growing it larger should not be a big problem, with assistance from not-stupid policies and a normal amount of luck.
The Republicans face a much bigger problem:
Francis Wilkinson: Race, Not Class, Dictates Republican Future: "A large majority of white conservative respondents believed that whites' economic prospects might dim...
...they would be discriminated against--as racial diversity flowered. The implications for status anxiety, powered by a fear of whites changing places with nonwhites in the socioeconomic hierarchy, are obvious....
If it doesn't diversify and become more accommodating to nonwhites, the GOP will only grow crazier and scarier, and its effort to wield power with the support of a shrinking white base will become even more extreme. At some point, this could even entail radical efforts to suppress nonwhite votes, abandon democratic norms concerning court appointments and basic governmental operations, and engage in and rationalize frightening levels of demagogy in the pursuit of increasingly scarce white votes.
Of course, that point is already passed, isn't it?
As Wilkinson concludes, odds are that it is no longer salvageable, any more than the Republican Party in California is salvageable. It has been fifty-two years since then-young Republican whippersnapper William Rehnquist shifted from trying to get more African-Americans to vote to trying to suppress minority votes. Originally this was a tactical decision. Now keeping Black and brown people from voting is, along with tax cuts for the superrich, the only thing that unites the Republican Party. That will leave a mark. It was an electoral plus for Republicans until 2006. It is electorally neutral now. The shadow it casts is likely to be electorally disastrous a decade from now.
For those young people interested in political careers outside the Democratic Party, now is probably too early to jump ship and start working to build what will replace the Republicans as the Republicans replaced the Whigs in the 1850s. 2019 should, I think, be the optimal moment to jump.