Trump's Return is a Civil Society Failure

Emily Elconin for The New York Times

 

We see throughout history of successful nations that once on top of the heap, instead to find ways to stay on top, they destroy themselves. We see in front of our eyes in Russia. Everyday that passes Russia digs deeper into a hole she can never comet in one piece. Everyone forgot the lessons of the past. Lets not go far the United States. After covid 19 and a crazy man dismissing scientific and medical protocols decided he knew better with bleach and lights inside the stomach. "If god intended us to be lit inside he would have put holes for the light to come through."Look how we have taken a loaded gun and put it on our heads and children's heads to get what? Brown people out, except we depend on them for food and economic stability. Even Trump most know that.

Adam

By Thomas B. Edsall

The New York Times

(Opinion)

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

A key question emerging from the 2024 election is whether the Democratic Party is significantly — or even permanently — wounded. Can it return to fighting trim in 2026 and 2028?

A post-election YouGov poll commissioned by the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank, sent a clear message to party loyalists.

YouGov asked 5,098 working-class voters (defined as those without college degrees), including detailed analyses of voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, and also asked 881 people in the national sample, to evaluate the political parties on measures of trust and commitment.

In response to the query which party do “you trust more to improve the economy, protect Americans from crime, handle the issue of immigration,” majorities of voters, according to the survey, chose the Republican Party, ranging from 55-34 on the economy to 57-29 on immigration. 

Asked whether the Democratic or the Republican Party is “in touch or out of touch” and “strong or weak,” majorities of working-class voters described the Democrats as out of touch (53-34) and weak (50-32) and the Republicans as “in touch” (52-35) and “strong” (63-23).

More significant, on two survey questions that previously favored Democrats — is the party “on my side or not” and which party do you trust “to fight for people like me” — the Democrats lost ground to Republicans. Fifty percent of all voters participating in this survey said that the Republican Party would fight for people “like me,” while 36 percent said the Democratic Party would.

Separately, 34 percent of those polled said that the Democratic Party was on their side while 49 percent said it was not. Fifty percent said that the Republican Party was on their side, and 37 percent said it was not.

In an essay accompanying the release of the poll, Will Marshall, president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, wrote:

The most lethal attack ad of the presidential campaign was a clip from a 2019 interview in which Kamala Harris explains her support for publicly funded sex-change surgery for prisoners, including detained immigrants. The kicker: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”

As 2024 came to a close, Patrick Ruffini, author of the 2023 book “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the G.O.P.,” posted an essay, “America Now Has More Republicans Than Democrats,” on his Substack:

Something very unusual by historic standards happened in this year’s election: there were lots more Republicans than Democrats in the electorate. After the exit polls were reweighted to reflect the final popular vote result, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 5 points in the AP VoteCast survey and by 4 points in the network exit polls.

The analyses by Ruffini and the Progressive Policy Institute come at a time when observers across the political spectrum suggest that the Democratic Party is in more trouble than the loss of one election would suggest. There have been many post-mortems like this, whose contents are captured in the headline of a Politico article from late December, “Is the Democratic Brand Toxic?”

If the past predicts the present, voters are quite likely, sooner or later, to turn against Donald Trump, once he is back in the White House, and the Republicans who control both branches of Congress. American politics are locked in a seemingly never-ending struggle in which neither side ever persuasively claims a durable majority. 

Despite this stasis, a question remains: How deep is the wound inflicted in November on the Democratic Party?

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More specifically: Are a growing number of voters, including a small but significant share of Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters, losing faith in liberal egalitarianism, the core premise of the left?

Are the defections of minority voters to the Republican Party a Trump-specific, momentary phenomenon or will defections continue to grow, as they have from 2016 to 2024, in what would amount to a partial realignment of the minority electorate?

Does the elite character of the Democratic Party — its domination by the college-educated, tied to cognitive elites and liberal foundations — preclude restoration of support among increasingly suspicious and hostile non-college voters?

Did Trump campaign’s focus on inflation, immigration, crime and transgender rights succeed in pushing the public image of the Democratic Party further from the mainstream, no longer concerned with the day-to-day issues of the middle class? 

American politics have now been in the midst of a slow-moving realignment that first saw a disproportionately white group of relatively informed and knowledgeable voters reverse partisanship as those with college educations became increasingly Democratic while those without degrees became more Republican.

More recently, this same education-linked schism is beginning to emerge among minority voters, creating the possibility of a class-dominated, downscale Republican Party and an upscale Democratic Party, a substantial inversion of New Deal era politics.

The volatility inherent in a realignment, combined with the development in recent years of a two-tier economy — one strikingly prosperous in nonrural blue America, the other struggling in exurban and rural red America — casts doubt on the reliability of predictions.

One clearly troubling development for Democrats is the failure of Biden’s economic initiatives to win votes in either red or blue counties.

While inflation was profoundly damaging to Democratic prospects in 2024, Biden administration programs like the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act paid large dividends to the regions of the country that had been economically suffering the most ­— red America. 

Detailed economic studies compiled by the Brookings Institution clearly demonstrate these favorable trends.

In 2020, the 2548 counties that voted for Trump accounted for 29 percent of gross domestic product, according to Brookings data. In 2024, after four years with Biden and Harris in office, the 2553 counties that voted for Trump produced 38 percent of the GDP.

That nine-point increase in the share of GDP translates into $3.66 trillion worth of additional goods and services produced in Trump-voting counties, according to Brookings, an exceptional economic lift by any standard.

In addition, the share of national income going to the Trump counties grew to 43 percent from 34 and the share of private employment rose to 42 percent from 33, according to a separate data set supplied to The Times by Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings.

I asked a wide range of experts for their assessment of where things stand. especially for the Democratic Party and liberalism. Their views differ sharply. 

Stanley Feldman, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, wrote by email that

a substantial fraction of Trump (MAGA) supporters believe that demographic change and changes in gender norms are a threat to their way of life and to their status in American society. Most importantly, Republicans (and influencers) have successfully convinced many people that Democrats and liberals are directly responsible for creating and supporting the social forces that they are frightened of.

Some Democrats, Feldman wrote,

are talking about toning down rhetoric on hot button social issues like transgender rights and taking a harder line on immigration. It’s true that it would benefit Democrats if these sorts of issues became less politically salient. I’m not sure how easy this will be, however.

How much can Democrats move away from being a socially inclusive party without alienating some of their supporters? And how far would Democrats have to moderate their positions and rhetoric on social issues to prevent Republicans from continuing to paint them as out of touch urban liberals who care more about L.G.B.T.Q. rights than the plight of white workers? Just think about how many anti-trans ads the Trump campaign ran against Kamala Harris. It doesn’t take much to play on people’s fears and create easy targets.

Along similar lines, Mohammad Atari, a professor in the department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and director of the university’s Culture and Morality Lab, wrote by email to say that

the combination of the perceived elite status of many Democratic leaders and their lack of emotional resonance can indeed make their policy proposals feel empty, or even disingenuous, to working-class voters. This disconnect stems from both cultural and emotional dynamics that influence how policies are received, irrespective of their actual merits.

This “elitism” perception is not just about education but also about lifestyle and values, which may seem out of touch with the struggles of working-class folks. When proposals are delivered in a tone that reflects elite sensibilities, they risk being dismissed as “not for us.”

“Almost everywhere you look, Fareed Zakaria, a columnist at The Washington Post and an analyst at CNN, writes on Jan. 4,

the left is in ruins. Of the 27 countries of the European Union, only a handful have left-of-center parties leading government coalitions. The primary left-of-center party in the European Parliament now has just 136 seats in a 720-seat chamber.

Even in countries that have been able to stem the rise of right-wing populism, such as Poland, it is the center-right that is thriving, not the left. And in the United States, of course, the breadth of Donald Trump’s victory — nearly 90 percent of U.S. counties moved right — suggests that it is very much part of this trend.

In Zakaria’s view, the problems of the left are caused by its failures:

The crisis of democratic government then, is actually a crisis of progressive government. People seem to feel that they have been taxed, regulated, bossed around and intimidated by left-of-center politicians for decades — but the results are bad and have been getting worse.

Zakaria warns that

If Democrats do not learn some hard lessons from the poor governance in many blue cities and states, they will be seen as defending cultural elites, woke ideology and bloated, inefficient government. That might be a formula for permanent minority status.

In a reflection of the scope of dispute on these issues, Charles Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, declared in an email: “I fundamentally disagree with the proposition that Trump’s re-election is a watershed moment marking the demise of the progressive cause.”

Instead, Kupchan argued, “Trump’s victory reflected an anti-incumbent wave, not a decisive rightward shift.”

Electorates in many democracies, Kupchan pointed out, “are living through the same socio-economic disruptions as Americans — disruptions born of digital technology and globalization. They, too, are voting for change.”

Kupchan noted that internationally, the anti-incumbent movement has resulted in the defeat of both left and right:

In cases where right-wing parties have held power, the left has come out on top. In the United Kingdom, Poland, and Brazil, center-left governments have recently replaced the right-wing governments.

While parties on the left in many nations are struggling, it is hardly smooth sailing for those on the right.

Ivo Daalder, chief executive of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, acknowledged that “there is no doubt that liberalism, and the left generally, are having a tough moment in established democracies — not only in the U.S., but in much of Europe as well.” 

But, Daalder continued,

I don’t think conservatism is having a grand moment either. The larger problem is that established political parties have not been able to address some of the major issues facing the country and advanced industrial states. That makes populism — and anti-liberalism — attractive.

Daalder contended that his major concern “is not that liberalism has lost its ability to offer solutions but that populism’s failure will lead to repressive consequences by the very strongmen who rode the populist waves to power.”

Those inclined to downplay the long-term significance of the 2024 election see the results as the unexceptional expression of discontent by a dissatisfied electorate.

Neil Malhotra, a political scientist at Stanford, wrote by email that

the idea that the Democratic Party is a tarnished brand or that the Democratic Party is nearing collapse is highly overrated. An unpopular incumbent administration lost a close election. This has happened countless times in American history, and we have not claimed that a party was on its deathbed.

The 2024 election, Malhotra continued,

is nothing compared to the 1980s when the Democrats lost three consecutive landslide presidential elections. In the 1930s, the Republican Party was shut out of power across the country except for the Supreme Court, and the party survived.

Malhotra acknowledged that there are significant changes taking place in both the content and the demographic underpinning of political conflict here and abroad:

We clearly see a trend across the world that in a post-materialist society (where people’s lower-levels of Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are being fulfilled), cultural concerns are gaining more importance. And cultural liberalism is being more associated with the educated class, who are gravitating toward the left based on cultural issues. This is not just going on in the U.S.

Michael Podhorzer, former political director of the AFL-CIO and co-founder of the Analyst Institute Board, has his own take on the significance of the 2024 election. In a Jan. 4 post on his Substack, “How Trump ‘Won’: The Anesthetized Anti-MAGA Majority,” Podhorzer argues that Kamala Harris lost because a group Podhorzer describes as “anti-MAGA surge voters” stayed home on Election Day:

The popular vote result was almost entirely a collapse in support for Harris and Democrats, not an increase in support for Trump and MAGA. Trump was no more popular this year than four years ago, while Harris significantly underperformed Biden 2020.

Most of Harris’s losses were due to anti-MAGA surge voters staying home. She lost the most ground in deep-Blue urban areas, where the dangers of a second Trump administration seemed most remote. About 19 million Americans who cast ballots for Biden in 2020 did not vote in 2024.

Anti-MAGA surge voters stayed home because they were less alarmed by a second Trump Administration than they were four years ago. A key to Biden’s 2020 victory was high turnout from less-engaged voters who believed they had something to lose under Trump. In 2024, however, about 15 million fewer votes were cast ‘against’ Trump than in 2020.

Podhorzer’s thesis does not absolve the Democratic Party. His argument suggests that the party is dependent for victory on fear of Trump and the MAGA agenda and that it struggles to prevail on its own merits.

Podhorzer continues:

As I’ve been saying for years, America has an anti-MAGA majority, but not necessarily a pro-Democratic one. In 2020 (and 2022, in part) alarm about Trump and MAGA was enough to overcome the cynicism and alienation of mostly younger voters who desperately want bigger systemic change, but who oppose the MAGA agenda.

This time, their cynicism won out. This was in no small part because the media and other nonpartisan civil society leaders were themselves more skeptical of the dangers, and because the inaction of the Biden Administration and Democrats in Congress against MAGA threats belied their rhetoric of existential danger to the nation.

The defining feature of American politics this century, Podhorzer writes, “is that neither party can ‘win’ elections anymore; they can only be the ‘not-loser.’ In this context “a collapse in support for Democrats does not mean that most Americans, especially in Blue America, are suddenly eager to live in an illiberal theocracy.”

In short, Podhorzer concludes,

Americans are fed up. This election wasn’t just a vote of no confidence in Democrats; it was yet another vote of no confidence in our entire political system. We cannot mistake this result for an active embrace of Trump or MAGA fascism.

Podhorzer offers an illuminating but incomplete analysis of the state of contemporary American politics. What he leaves out is the vulnerability of the Democratic Party to demonization and the successful effort by Trump and his allies to make the Democrats an unacceptable alternative on Nov. 5. 

In an email, Podhorzer argued that the outcome of the 2024 election reflected, in part,

a civil society failure. In 2020, the mainstream media was consistent in validating the threats of a second Trump term; in 2024 it sent mixed signals. It didn’t help that Democrats were sending mixed signals for the media to report on, but that did not abdicate the free press’s responsibility to fully inform the public.

If anything, Podhorzer continued, “Trump did less well than he might otherwise have had he spent more time emphasizing those themes (immigration, inflation, transgender) rather than retribution against the ‘enemies within.’ ”

While many low-turnout, anti-MAGA voters stayed home on Election Day, their absence was not entirely because of a failure to persuade these voters of the dangers of another four years of Trump in the White House.

One of the most effective strategies to get voters not to vote is to create conflicts in their minds — to make both the Democratic and Republican alternatives seem unacceptable.

American Democrats and liberals seeking to address this problem will have to extend the scope of their studies beyond national borders.

James M. Lindsay, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Affairs, described the issue in an email, pointing out that the trends in the United States “are buffeting mainstream parties on both the left and right across industrialized democracies where the center is giving way to the extremes.” 

Elaborating on the arguments made by his colleague, Charles Kupchan, Lindsay pointed out that in France:

The political momentum is on the far left and the far right. The German Social Democrats and Green Party are headed for historic losses in the Bundestag elections next month, while the Christian Democrats wonder how far they should go in absorbing the agenda of the right-wing AfD. The Tories took a shellacking in the United Kingdom, their Labour Party successors are now hemorrhaging support, and the right-wing UK Reform is surging in the polls.

The question, then, is not why the Democrats lost the White House, but why the center is not holding across industrialized democracies. The list of culprits is long. Rapid globalization. Waves of immigration that exceed the capacity of countries to absorb them. Growing income inequality. Technological change that diminishes the employment prospects for unskilled workers and will soon diminish the prospects for skilled workers. Social media that give disproportionate attention to extreme voices.

So, yes, the liberal project is endangered, but it is endangered in both its right-of-center and left-of-center versions. And it has not mattered whether countries have a robust social safety net — think Germany — or a threadbare one — think the United States. Too many voters believe that the status quo is not working for them, that their communities have changed too much too fast, and that tomorrow will not be better than today.

Voters are turning to populist parties, many on the right, according to Lindsay, because

The promise of someone who can cut through the morass of problems and “fix things” is alluring. Of course, where they gain power they face the curse of the incumbent — the need to turn promises into realities. If those parties succeed, they will remain in power. If they fail, the pendulum will swing in the other direction.

Put another way, Trump’s second term will be yet another test of his 2016 declaration, “I alone can fix it.”