Why the 2020s Could Be as Dangerous as the 1850s

this is a long article from which i pulled selected excerpts. the whole thing is at the link

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

If Joe Biden beats Donald Trump decisively next week, this election may be remembered as a hinge point in American history: the moment when a clear majority of voters acknowledged that there’s no turning back from America’s transformation into a nation of kaleidoscopic diversity, a future that doesn’t rely on a backward-facing promise to make America great   again.   But that doesn’t mean the voters who embody the nation’s future are guaranteed a lasting victory over those who feel threatened by it.

With Biden embracing America’s evolution and Trump appealing unrestrainedly to the white voters most fearful of it, the 2020 campaign marks a new peak in the most powerful trend shaping politics in this century. Over the past two decades, and especially since Barack Obama’s election in 2008, voters have re-sorted among the parties and thus   reconfigured   the central fault line between them. Today Republicans and Democrats are divided less by class or region than by attitudes toward the propulsive demographic, cultural, and economic shifts remaking 21st-century America. On one side, Republicans now mobilize   what I’ve called   a “coalition of restoration”; on the other, Democrats assemble a “coalition of transformation.”

Republicans have grown more reliant on support from mostly white and Christian constituencies and the exurban, small-town, and rural communities that have been the least touched, and most unnerved, by cultural and economic transitions: growing diversity in race, religion, and sexual orientation; evolving roles for women; and the move from an industrial economy to one grounded in the Information Age. Democrats have become the party of the people and places most immersed in, and welcoming of, those shifts: people of color, Millennials and members of** **Generation Z, secular adults who don’t identify with any religious tradition, and college-educated white professionals, all of them clustered in the nation’s largest metropolitan centers.

Heading into the campaign’s final weekend, Trump is facing erosion on both sides of this divide, with Biden consolidating most elements of the coalition of transformation, eroding Trump’s advantages with blue-collar and older white voters, and laying siege to the midsize industrial cities across the Rust Belt that moved sharply toward the president in 2016. Behind this two-front advance, Biden has consistently led Trump in national polls and surveys of the six swing states that both sides are most heavily contesting, especially the three in the Rust Belt that tipped the 2016 race to the president: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

The broad backlash against Trump’s vision of the GOP across the diverse, metro-based emerging America could provide Democrats unified control of government for the first time since 2010. It could also underscore the growing difficulty Republicans will face attracting majority support in elections to come.

And yet even a decisive Democratic win would not guarantee that the party can actually implement its policy agenda. As if laying sandbags against the coming demographic wave, Republicans have erected a series of defenses that could allow them to impede their rivals—even if demographic and social change combine to more clearly stamp Democrats as the nation’s majority party in the years ahead. And that could make the 2020s the most turbulent decade for America since the 1850s, when a very similar dynamic unfolded.

Donald Trump didn’t start the electorate’s re-sorting along the lines of transformation and restoration, but he has made the process vastly more intense and venomous. Throughout his divisive, belligerent, and norm-breaking presidency, Trump has governed as a wartime president for red America, with blue America—not any foreign nation—as the adversary.

In both rhetoric and policy, Trump has positioned himself in almost unrelenting opposition to the emerging America—from demonizing cities as   dirty   and   dangerous   to eviscerating Obama’s climate-change agenda. When the coronavirus pandemic initially exploded in blue states and cities, Trump feuded with Democratic governors and mayors and threatened to withhold federal aid when they criticized him. Likewise, when the death of George Floyd prompted enormous racial-justice protests nationwide, Trump disparaged the Black Lives Matter movement as a “symbol of hate,” deployed federal law enforcement into Democratic-run cities over the objections of local officials, and, through his Justice Department, even explored   bringing criminal charges   against several Democratic mayors for failing to act more aggressively against protesters.

In the campaign, Trump has run as much against the emerging America as he has against Biden. Earlier Republican presidential nominees might have implied to white suburbanites that minorities are a threat to their safety or lifestyle, as in the   Willie Horton ad   that George H. W. Bush ran in 1988. But Trump has made the implicit explicit, warning that Biden would unloose a “mob” of rioters through suburbia. He’s claimed that Biden would   appoint New Jersey Senator Cory Booker,   a Black man, to enforce integration of low-income families. The Republican convention provided a prominent   speaking slot   to a white couple from St. Louis   who face felony charges   for brandishing guns at racial-justice protesters. In all these ways, Trump has presented himself as the last line of defense—a human wall—against the changes that so many of his supporters fear.

This belligerence has helped bond Trump to his base. But the price of this approach has been clear in elections throughout his presidency. The first warning came in 2017, when a sharp recoil from Trump in the suburbs of northern Virginia and Richmond swept Democrats to control of the governorship and state House of Representatives, despite continued GOP strength in rural areas. In 2018, that revolt expanded nationwide, as Democrats recaptured the U.S. House behind sweeping gains, not only in suburban areas that were already trending blue, but also in Sun Belt metros where Republicans had not previously been vulnerable. The backlash was measured in more than votes: Democrats benefited in 2018 from an enormous surge in campaign contributions and volunteer activity.

The sole potential exception to this pattern is the possibility that Trump could notch some gains with Black and Latino men (especially younger ones, who are doubtful that either party can deliver for them). But the immovable resistance Trump faces from Black and Latino women limits the overall growth he can expect among voters of color (including Asian Americans, who are likely to vote against him in even larger proportions than Latinos).

While Trump faces the likelihood that most key groups in the coalition of transformation will coalesce against him in significantly greater numbers than in 2016, he is struggling to generate comparable unity on his side of the divide. Trump continues to stir enormous enthusiasm among his core constituencies. But even increased turnout may not benefit Trump as much as in 2016, because he is facing modest, but measurable, erosion in his margins among some of his best groups.

Seniors have been the most visible defectors. No Democratic presidential nominee has carried voters 65 or older since Al Gore in 2000, but disillusionment over Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, combined with a greater affinity for Biden than for Hillary Clinton, has provided the former vice president a chance to break that streak. Even Trump’s backing from his core group of non-college-educated white voters is wavering—slightly, but potentially pivotally. Trump still draws around 60 percent of their votes in national polls. But even that formidable showing represents a decline from 2016, when he captured around two-thirds, the best performance for any nominee in either party since Ronald Reagan in 1984. Against Biden, Trump isn’t matching those elevated margins, especially among blue-collar white women and especially in the key Rust Belt states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The common theme of all of these trends: The circle is closing tighter around Trump.

“In 2016, you still had some Republicans, some conservatives who were biting their tongue and voting for Trump, taking him ‘seriously but not literally,’” the Tufts University political scientist Brian Schaffner,   who has studied   the roles sexism and racism played in the last election, told me. But since at least 2018, there’s been “a whittling away of people who weren’t necessarily strong supporters for him, but voted for him out of a habit of voting for Republican nominees.” With more of those Americans gone from the Trump coalition, he will grow even more dependent than in 2016 on the voters most uneasy with racial change and evolving roles for women. “We are going to be even more sorted [in this election] along these cultural markers about race attitudes and attitudes about misogyny,” Schaffner said.

Geography tells the same story of a narrowing circle for Trump and the GOP. Even compared to last time, Trump and his party are slipping further in the populous places that most embody the nation’s changes. At the same time, Biden is clawing back ground in some of the areas that provided the foundation of Trump’s victory, the small and midsize communities that more closely resemble the profile of mid-20th-century America.

In almost every state, the best way to think about the political alignment now is to imagine a beltway circling each of the major population centers; all of the bustling communities inside those beltways are becoming more blue, while the less densely settled terrain beyond them is turning deeper red.

In 2020, Biden is consolidating the vote inside those beltways and denting the president’s dominance beyond them. Biden appears likely to recover at least some ground in midsize, blue-collar cities where Trump recorded huge gains last time, such as his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania. And while Biden is unlikely to pry away many rural counties from Trump, Democrats are cautiously optimistic that he can reduce the president’s margin in some of them, particularly across the Rust Belt.

Simultaneously, Trump is at risk of cratering in America’s population centers. Already, in 2016, Trump lost 87 of the country’s 100 largest counties to Clinton; this year, he could lose about half of the 13 he won. (Maricopa County, centered on Phoenix, is one to watch: The largest county in America that Trump captured four years ago, it has seen its voters move away from Republicans, starting in the 2018 midterms.)

Trump’s problem isn’t just that some of the large counties he carried in 2016 will turn against him. Many of the ones he lost appear poised to deliver even bigger—maybe much bigger—margins for the Democrats. Clinton, for instance, won Harris County, home to Houston, by about 160,000 votes; local political observers I spoke with believe Biden could at least   double   that margin in 2020. Likewise, Biden appears virtually certain to improve on Clinton’s totals in big urban centers with large Black populations, such as Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Philadelphia, where turnout declined, in some cases substantially, relative to Obama’s 2012 showing. In the 100 largest counties, Clinton won by 15 million votes combined; Biden could substantially enlarge that number.

In the same way that Trump has isolated the GOP from the growing groups in American society driving demographic change, he is exiling the Republican Party from the places at the cutting edge of economic change. The Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution   calculated   that while Clinton in 2016 won fewer than one-sixth of U.S. counties, her counties accounted for nearly two-thirds of total GDP. “What we’ve seen is an increased sorting in which the Democratic vote has aligned around a future-oriented, higher-tech information economy, anchored by diverse urban places with dense collections of workers,” Mark Muro, the MPP’s policy director, told me. “Meanwhile, the Republican vote has sorted to essentially become a bastion of holdover traditionalist economic activities”—led by manufacturing, energy extraction, and agriculture—“and smaller, rural, less dense places.”

....The increasing influence of the racially diverse, heavily secular, and well-educated Millennials and Gen Zers will make it difficult for Republicans to dislodge Democrats from that majority position. This year will mark the most profound generational transition in the electorate since around 1980, when the Baby Boom supplanted the Greatest Generation as the largest bloc of voters,   according to analysis   by the nonpartisan States of Change project. Since then, for a remarkable four decades, Boomers have ruled as the largest group of both eligible and actual voters. But in 2020, for the first time, Millennials and Gen Zers   have matched   the Boomers as a share of eligible voters. And by 2024, the two younger generations will equal the Boomers and even older generations at the ballot box, and will surpass them by substantial margins very quickly thereafter, States of Change projects.

That’s an ominous prospect for the GOP. Trump has run well among Baby Boomers, but he has defined the party in opposition to seemingly every priority that the younger generations have embraced, including climate change, racial equity, and gay rights. Trump might as well try to convince fish to fear water as to persuade young people to view the diverse country around them as harmful to American traditions. “On every one of these issues that has to do with a more pluralistic, cosmopolitan America, they grow up living in that world,” Robert P. Jones, PRRI’s founder and CEO, told me. “There is no conceivable way most of them will be sold on the idea that it’s a threat.”

Yet it’s far from clear that the coalition of transformation can implement its agenda, even if it convincingly establishes itself as the nation’s majority through the coming decade. Republicans benefit from multiple features of the current electoral system that could allow them to hobble Democrats.

....These same flammable ingredients were present in the 1850s, when a rising majority found it impossible to impose its agenda because of all the structural obstacles laid down by the retreating minority. As the decade proceeded, it became more and more clear that the newly formed Republican Party, dedicated to barring the spread of slavery to the territories, constituted an emerging national majority. It was centered on the northern states, which by 1860 would represent 60 percent of America’s population, including 70 percent of its white population. In their writings and speeches, southerners were acutely conscious of their status as a national minority. Yet for decades they successfully maneuvered to block restrictions on slavery through their powerful position in the Senate and their influence over pro-slavery Democratic presidents. That allowed them not only to suppress most legislative threats, but also to establish a friendly majority on the Supreme Court. In the 1857   Dred Scott   decision, the Supreme Court, with seven of its nine justices appointed by earlier pro-South Democratic presidents, declared that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories. As the Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz   recently told me , “What   Dred Scott   did, in effect, was to declare the platform of the Republican Party unconstitutional.”

Whether Abraham Lincoln could have maneuvered around those obstacles we’ll never know, because the South seceded before anyone could find out. Even if Democrats consistently win elections through the 2020s, red states aren’t likely to follow the example of the pre–Civil War South and quit the union. But Republican behavior in recent years suggests that they share the antebellum South’s determination to control the nation’s direction as a minority. That determination is evident in the extraordinary steps Republicans have taken to   shift the Supreme Court , including denying a vote on Obama nominee Merrick Garland in 2016 and then rushing a vote on Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett this month, after more than 60 million Americans had already voted. It’s evident in the   flood of laws   that Republican states have passed over the past decade making it more difficult to vote. And it’s evident in the fervent efforts from the party to restrict access to mail-in voting this year. In many ways, recent history has suggested that Republicans believe they have a better chance of maintaining power by suppressing the diverse new generations entering the electorate than by courting them.

...If racial and cultural moderates abandon the GOP, the voters left in the party will tilt even further toward Trump’s message of racial and cultural resentment. “The Republican Party is going to continue to shrink and become more monolithic and less relevant and more regionalized,” Madrid, the Lincoln Project co-founder, told me. “They believe they are the last stand for America and [that] America is the white Christian nation. They believe they are what America is. And that kind of identity gets stronger as it loses—it becomes more self-righteous as it loses.”

The inexorable change coming to the Democratic Party could make the GOP even more reactionary. Biden has defined himself as a “transitional” figure, and demands are already building for a Democratic leadership corps that reflects the party’s increasing reliance on young people and people of color. It’s not hard to imagine that by 2024, Democrats will be led by presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian descent; vice-presidential nominee Pete Buttigieg, an openly gay man; and House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, who would be the first Black person to hold that post. Much like Obama did in 2008, such a roster would symbolize a changing America in a way that inspires the coalition of transformation—but terrifies many in the coalition of restoration. “It would touch on everything that a lot of Trump supporters were reacting to when they supported him in 2016—this sense of feeling threatened by the [challenge] to white supremacy in the U.S,” Schaffner told me.

...A Republican Party deepening its reliance on the most racially resentful white voters, as Democrats more thoroughly represent the nation’s accelerating diversity, could test the bonds of the union to the greatest extent since the Civil War. If Trump wins a second term, that crisis could come very quickly: Blue America isn’t likely to quietly acquiesce if a reelected Trump follows through on any of his multiple threats to criminalize his opponents, deploy large numbers of federal law-enforcement officers to blue cities, or pursue punitive actions against media institutions and technology companies he considers threats.

Winning next week would give Biden an opportunity to temper partisan hostilities and “bind up the nation’s wounds,” as Lincoln put it. But through his long career, the former vice president has not often shown the dexterity required to satisfy the ascendant left in his own party while building meaningful bridges to the other party. Nor is there much reason to believe that the Republicans left in Congress after a big Democratic win—a group that would be concentrated in Trump country even more than today’s GOP caucus—would have much interest in reaching back out to Biden. The 2020 election has been among the most vitriolic and divisive America has ever experienced, with the prospect of further disruption and even violence still lingering in its aftermath. But all of that may be just the opening bell for a decade that tests the nation’s cohesion like few others ever have