Opinion | How Identity Politics Took Over the Republican Party – The New York Times

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Im Ezra Klein, and this is The Ezra Klein Show.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilliana Mason is a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the author of the 2018 book Uncivil Agreement How Politics Became Our Identity. And Uncivil Agreement is a touchstone book for me. For my money, its one of the most important books on politics published in the last decade. But its come out a little bit ago, so the work for it was done before even that, right, before even 2018, and a lot has happened. And so I wanted to have Mason on the show to talk through how her thinking on political identity changed across the expanse of the Trump era and into this era, into the Biden era.

One animating thought for this conversation: I talk a lot about polarization. I wrote a book on polarization, Why Were Polarized, out in paperback now. My book is very influenced by Masons book. But something Ive come to think of as a real problem when we talk about polarization is we talk about it as a singular, right? We are polarized. But over what? We often dont specify that, that over what. Its a theme of my book that I feel people sometimes miss.

I mean, you can be polarized on policy, but maybe youre not polarized on democracy and elections. You can be polarized on democracy, but maybe not on race relations across your society. You can be polarized on economics, but not on foreign policy. There are all these different possible dimensions of conflict in a political system, and which ones are front and center at any given moment is really important. And so tracking that is really important.

And this is a fascinating moment to track that. I mean, in the same year, the same year you have an insurrection, a violent insurrection at the Capitol and this very fundamental fight over voting in this country, you also have a big bipartisan infrastructure bill. You also have big Republican support in polling for much of Joe Bidens economic agenda.

And so thats a key question here. What is driving the composition of the political parties and the things they end up fighting over? And in particular, how has the coalition that both rose up behind Donald Trump and that Donald Trump assembled, how has that coalition changed the Republican Party? Thats a topic where Mason more recently has been doing some really fascinating, unnerving research.

One note before we get into this. We recorded this before, a couple of days before the infrastructure bill passed the Senate. You can hear in here that we expected that it would. And then a couple of days later, it did. But if the tenses sound a little bit odd, that is why. It is the nature of time and podcasting. But this one was a lot of fun. I love talking to Mason about these topics. So youre going to hear its very much a conversation, which is always a pleasure for me. As always, my email, if youve got guest suggestions, book or whatever else recommendations one of you just recommended the video game Kentucky Route Zero to me, I think it was, and Ive started playing it, and Im trying to get into it but you can send it all to ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilliana Mason, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. Its great to be back.

So theres something weird about this moment in politics. On the one hand, the fight between the parties feels existential. You have insurrections, and were divided over voting rights and democracy itself and what kind of country we are at root, and then you tune into Congress and were about to pass a giant bipartisan infrastructure package, and Joe Bidens major proposals actually poll pretty well with Republicans. So how do you square all that?

One way that I would think about it is we sort of have general agreement that government should help Americans, but what we disagree over is who gets to be American. The fundamental disagreement that were having is whether American democracy means being a fully representative, egalitarian, multiracial democracy, or whether it means something less than that and going backwards in time, and not counting people who are not white, rural, Christian, largely men having the most voting rights and having the most ability to influence government, and whether that sort of traditional social hierarchy, A, still exists at all, and B, should exist, right?

Thats the debate. And when we start having a debate over who is American, who deserves the rights and protections of the American government and Constitution, that is a place where there is zero room for compromise. We can compromise on how much money were putting into infrastructure and what counts as infrastructure. Thats compromisable. But do human beings count as Americans, people who were born here, do they count less as Americans because of their religion or their race, we cant find a middle ground on that. Either people are fully American and they have the full rights and protections of the Constitution or they are not. And thats a battle that becomes extremely passionate extremely quickly.

I think this gets to the core thesis of your 2018 book, Uncivil Agreement, which was very, very influential for me, which is that Americans dont experience politics through policy, they experience it through identity. And a lot of the debates we have in this country are identity debates masquerading as policy debates. Can you talk a bit about that?

So on average, Americans have left of center issue positions. Most people are to the left of center on their preferences for economic policy and legislation. Even when you put issues like abortion and gun control and immigration into the equation, right, were still a left of center country on policy preferences. The problem is that there are a lot of people who identify as conservative and hold liberal, leftist policy preferences, but that conservative or Republican identity is so strong that they will vote to make sure that their group is winning regardless of what the policies theyre actually voting for are.

And then at the same time, one of the main points of Uncivil Agreement was that we have this social sorting, right, where effectively the Republican Party has become increasingly white, Christian, rural, male or at least pro- sort of patriarchy and the Democratic Party is not as monolithic as that. Theyre just sort of the party thats trying to push for a more egalitarian, multiracial democracy. And so the Republican Party is kind of forced into this I mean, ironically, right identity-based politics where they are really trying to make sure that the white Christian male is at the top of the American social hierarchy. Thats what theyre fighting for.

And so that becomes infused into a lot of issue conversations that were having. So for instance, health care, which before Barack Obama was not correlated with racial attitudes in any way, is now correlated with racial attitudes, our feelings about health care. Same thing with gun control. Gun control attitudes were not correlated with racial attitudes prior to Barack Obama. And now, they are. And increasingly so under Trump. So we have all of these policy attitudes that, facially, theyre not about race or equality, but theyre increasingly becoming associated with racial attitudes, especially among people who are paying attention to politics and hold attitudes towards non-white, non-Christians that are negative and full of what we would call in this most recent paper animosity.

So when I talk to Republican politicians or Republican voters about whats motivating them, they dont say to me, well, I just want to make sure white Christian men are on the top of the American social hierarchy. When I talk to them about voting rights issues or election protection issues, they say Im worried about fraud, not that I want to make sure my vote counts more. So what makes you confident that that is the division here, that that is what is motivating at least a substantial portion of the Republican electorate?

So this is related to a study that I just published with Julie Wronski and John Kane where we used this data set called the Voter Study Group, which is publicly available. Its online. Anybody can get this data. And they interviewed like 8,000 people in 2011. And then when Trump was elected, they thought, you know, if we reinterview these people, we can maybe learn a lot about whats going on in politics.

So they reinterviewed them in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. Theyre doing it basically every year. But because they had interviewed these people in 2011, these data became sort of a time machine for us, where we could go back to 2011, before Trump was a major political figure, and try to see what types of people are drawn to Trump in the future. Before Trump existed, what were their characteristics that then predicted they would really like him in 2018.

So one of the things that we found, obviously being a Republican, being a conservative, that predicted that they would like Trump in 2018. And it also predicted that they would like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and the Republican Party in general. However, for Trump himself, and Trump alone, the other thing that predicted whether they would like him was that they disliked Muslims, African Americans, Hispanics and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. Any mix of those, but largely all of them. And that animosity towards those marginalized groups did not predict support for the Republican Party. It did not predict support for Mitch McConnell or for Paul Ryan. It just predicted support for Trump.

And also, these people were coming not just from the Republican Party. Democrats who had these attitudes in 2011 liked Trump in 2018. Independents who had these attitudes in 2011 liked Trump in 2018. So its almost like Trump acted as a lightning rod for people who held these attitudes. He was extremely attractive to them, regardless of party, regardless of ideology. Trump attracted and really kind of corralled this group of people from across the spectrum, and really empowered this faction of Americans who held these attitudes.

And I think its important to say that this is not about the Republican Party, because its not true these attitudes dont predict support for the Republican Party. Trump was really kind of crystallizing or collecting all of these people into one political movement. And they happened to take over the Republican Party, but its not that every Republican holds these attitudes. Its that people who hold these attitudes really love Trump, and Trump is now the figurehead, became the figurehead of the Republican Party. So its important to kind of keep them separate, to some degree.

I want to hold on that idea of takeover for a minute. So in your view, is the Republican Party of, lets call it 2020 or 2018, a compositionally substantially different party than the Republican Party of 2008? Like, are we really dealing with a different coalition of people?

So, slightly. What happened during the Obama administration is that racial attitudes became much more aligned with partisanship. Not because of anything Obama did, but simply because there was a Black man in the Oval Office. And for people who were not paying attention to politics previously, that was a very, very easy cue for them, to just look at the front page of the newspaper and see whos the president and that hes a Democrat. And of course, we have social media and Fox News and all of these other entities that are really doubling down on which team are you on, really? If youre a white person, should you really be on that Democratic team?

And so the racial messages I think became really powerful during Obamas administration. The Tea Party was very powerfully motivated by racial animosity. And ultimately, this faction of people who love Trump were kind of bubbling up during the Obama administration. And then Trump, of course, really encouraged it. But Trump pulled people from not just the Republican Party.

Now, this is not to say that the Republican Party has not been benefiting from racial rhetoric. And the entire Southern strategy is trying to use implicit racial dog whistles in order to get votes from racially resentful white voters. So its not an accident that Trump was popular within the Republican Party, because the Republican Party has been cultivating this group of people. Theyve just been doing it on an implicit level, to a large extent.

But for some reason, between then and now, it went from, if you say something out loud, youre in trouble and you have to defend yourself against accusations of racism. And to Trump, whos able to say racially explicit things Mexicans are rapists, right he just said racist things, and it didnt end his campaign. And in fact, according to this data, he actually attracted a bunch of people who werent previously all that excited about voting for Republicans.

So I want to pull out something kind of subtle in this conception of the electorate and how its changed. So imagine weve got an electorate of 100 people, and zero opinions have changed between 2000 and 2020, but that the people who have a lot of lets call it outgroup animosity, right, racial animosity, animosity towards L.G.B.T.Q. people, that they used to be split, lets call it, 70-30 between the parties. And then now, theyre split 90-10 or 95-5.

And the reason I think this is important for the dynamic that youre talking about is that its true that, for a long time in politics you know, lets call it the 90s and the aughts you got in more trouble if you violated, like, speech norms, in a way, on both sides, right? Like, a Republican had to try not to do that, too. And then post-Trump, its actually a huge selling point within the Republican primary electorate to be somebody whos constantly getting attacked by the liberal media for saying stuff that seems kind of racist.

But on the other hand, when these two groups were split between the parties more, they also had more suppressive power within American politics. So within the Democratic Party, too, they could keep the Democratic Party, for instance, from wanting to do too much on voting rights, or keep the Democratic Party very interested in things like welfare reform or having a very racialized view of poverty. So on the one hand, you had to be careful not to seem too racist in both parties, but on the other hand, both parties were either, lets call it a little bit more racist, or there was at least less of an interest in either party for a kind of forthright political agenda built around racial equality and just, Id say, generalized equality.

And so this is kind of this polarization-suppression tradeoff, I think, that weve been in for the past decade or two, where on the one hand, our politics now feels much more divisive, like, and angry, because weve structured it around, like, a really, really difficult, deep argument in American life, so that feels bad. But on the other hand, these are maybe arguments we needed to have that were suppressed when Democrats who would have been the party to prosecute, you know, at least the racial equality side of this, didnt want to split their own coalition. They didnt want to, say, lose white Democrats in West Virginia who were voting for Jay Rockefeller but who werent going to be on board with this kind of more forthright racial politics.

Yeah. I mean, I think that the Democratic Party has been gradually, partly in response to the Republican Partys attraction of attracting people who are high in racial animosity, the Democratic Party has had to react against that. So we end up with Obama, then Trump, and then Biden, for the first time ever, in his inaugural address, actually saying the words white supremacy. So the parties have been making it more clear where they stand along this line.

And unfortunately, that means that we have in the Republican Party and again, its really this MAGA faction, right, these people that really disliked marginalized groups even before Trump came along. Theyve always been in the American electorate. They were Democrats during the Civil War and Jim Crow, et cetera, and now theyve moved into the Republican Party.

But the problem with that is that we end up with an entire political party that is really trying to speak to these animosities and that sense of hatred of marginalized groups, which means that it has become an anti-democracy party, right? It is not in their interest to fully represent every single American. Its not in their interest to have a multiracial democracy. In fact, theyre campaigning against that.

And that puts us in a really dangerous place because we only have two parties. We need them to be both pro-democracy in order to have a functioning government. And if one of them is increasingly being led or pushed by this really racially motivated or anti-egalitarian motivated group of people which isnt tiny, its like 20 to 30 percent of Americans, and this group is also, as youve said many times before, institutionally and systematically overrepresented in our government because of various things like the Senate and the electoral college, et cetera, and gerrymandering if that group has control over the levers of government, it is effectively a group that is trying to lead a country with ethnic minority rule, ultimately. This is a country that has been diversifying. Its going to continue to diversify. White Americans will be not the majority relatively soon. And so ultimately, this movement is for future white ethnic minority rule of the country, which is not compatible with democracy at all. So I think that, in that sense, its something to really pay attention to and worry about.

So let me hold on the point you made about Democrats a minute ago, that they have changed in reaction to this, too. Because I think its easy, I think the audience for this podcast certainly leans liberal, and its easy to take what Democrats do or dont do or how they change for granted. But the blogger Kevin Drum, whos a liberal himself, has argued that, quote, its Democrats who have moved farther left on a lot of the policy issues, in particular issues around racial equality and on redistribution, than Republicans have moved right in the past 10 or 15 years, and that it is liberals, or progressives, if you want to put it that way, who are pushing really hard for progress, pushing really hard to diversify the country, diversify leadership, to change the way we understand American history.

And so its true that theres a huge counterreaction to this, that it often does terrible things. I think Kevin would say many of these fights are good, but that Democrats have to accept that part of whats happening here is that they have moved left and are pushing for change and are creating a reaction to that, and this is not all just something ginned up by Donald Trump. Like, this is, in some ways, a political choice of trying to fight for what they see as a more just world, but that its Democrats whove made the big kind of moves here. Do you think theres validity to that view?

Yeah, I mean, I think that its laid out right there in make America great again, right? Something has changed in America, and Trump supporters want it to go back to the way it was before. And youre right that, if you look at white peoples racial attitudes, Republicans have stayed relatively stable, but that is at a very, very racially resentful level, right, while white Democrats have really changed their attitudes.

Im not sure what the chicken and egg answer is for this particular phenomenon because I think there has been a lot of sort of iterative change between Democrats and Republicans, with activists getting more attention in the Democratic Party to reveal whats really happening, in terms of race and racism and institutional prejudice and brutality. Weve also had social media and cell phone videos, right? I mean, we have a lot more information about racism in America now. And thats also part of the reason why we see this pushback against critical race theory, right? As the sort of reality of racism is becoming more apparent, the parties are kind of required to go to their respective corners and pull in very opposite directions.

Theres a dynamic here that Ive come to think of as ricochet polarization, although I know polarization may not be the word all would prefer for it. But there is this way that youre getting at that the parties change repeatedly in response to each other. And something important in your book is that its not that identity and policy are completely separate. Its that oftentimes our policy positions are downstream from our identity positions. We take the identity position first, and then we find the policy position that supports it.

And I want to use immigration here as an example. If you go back and look at, say, the Democratic National Committee platform in 2004 or 2008, or even 2012, its very focused on border enforcement. Its very focused on things that Democrats, frankly, dont talk about that much these days. But then Donald Trump happens, and he gives the Republican Party a much more forthright anti-immigrant identity. Like, that had always been a strain in the Republican Party, but George Bush and John McCain had tried to keep that in check. And then Trump says, nope, thats who were going to be.

And in response, you watched Democrats become much more pro-immigrant as an identity. And then behind that, the policy begins to change, right? And they become more pro more legal immigration, and more skeptical of certain kinds of border enforcement. And so theres this way in which the identities change, like the party sentiment towards different groups and sentiment about who they represent change, and you really watch changes in the policy happen behind that, which I think, to your point about chicken/egg, is really important because things arent just stable, theyre in this kind of constant dynamic equilibrium with each other.

And in particular, the parties move in reaction to the other. Like, if the Republican Party becomes much more anti-immigrant, the Democratic Party becomes much more pro. And to some degree, vice versa. And so it becomes hard to say whos moving what because they move the other one.

Yeah. I mean, same with trade policy, right? We saw that completely reversed during the Trump administration. So this brings up this whole, like, what even is ideology? Like what

Yup. [LAUGHTER]

what are even in opinions? Do they exist in reality? Which is very existential, so I wont go into that one. But absolutely, our elites, our party leaders have influence on voters opinions, and we take cues from our leaders. But were supposed to do that. Like, thats how the system was created because, as voters, were not supposed to know everything. Our leaders are supposed to do a lot of the thinking for us, and then give us a simplified set of choices based on what they think is the best.

The most benign version of this is actually, its working the way it should. The problem happens when the leaders can say anything. Maybe theyre not making the best choices for us. Theyre just trying to make sure that they get the most power or they get the most money or they get whatever it is theyre after. And so if theyre not giving us reasonable choices, but were still kind of blindly following them, then we end up in a less normatively good Democratic situation. And that is sort of where we are now, right? Our leaders are partly encouraging their voters to be kind of their most extreme selves, to take on what the leaders tell them to take on and to defend it with everything that they have because this partisan battle has become so dire for everyone involved. Everyone feels very angry about it. And it feels really, really important, and its like the country is going to end if the other people win the election. So opinion leadership is good if its done for good reasons, but it certainly can be weaponized. And I think were seeing it weaponized now.

I want to go into the existential part of this, where the whole ground drops out beneath our feet. [LAUGHS] So one of the things that youre getting at there that I struggle with all the time: so my background is as a policy reporter. I covered health care for years, and the economy, and I spent so much time at think tank lunches and the unveilings of new bills. And so much of the policy community in Washington, D.C., what they do is they think of ways to conceptualize the policy space, right what is it the Republicans want today, what is it the Democrats want today and come up with clever ways to achieve their goals that seem to work for both sides.

And what that is built on is an idea that policy preferences are stable, and that youre running some kind of negotiation between the preferences of the two sides. But if theyre not, if theyre driven by identity, and identity is at least somewhat negative, such that a big part of my identity is, I dont want the other side to win, like, then the policy collapses beneath your feet. You try to build a health care bill, and you say, well, Republicans have liked the individual mandate in the past, well put that in there.

And the Republicans say, no, no, no, no, we now think the individual mandate is unconstitutional. Or this would come up with Donald Trump a bunch of different times, where he would say something out there that some Democrats thought meant maybe theres a compromise here, like I want to raise taxes on people like me. But then it turned out he didnt want to do that, and he definitely didnt want to do anything that Democrats would see as a win for them.

And so I always try to push this idea that you can compromise on policy. Like, policy is a positive sum environment. Like, I can come up with policies and make a lot of different ideological groups better off, and kind of fit their ideas well enough. But identity and electoral competition are often zero-sum. And that if thats whats really happening, then theres a lot less room for compromise.

It is true, I think, that Josh Hawley has a lot more room to compromise with Bernie Sanders than John Boehner or Paul Ryan ever did. It is also true that, in practice, I dont think Josh Hawley is going to compromise very much with Bernie Sanders because central to Josh Hawleys identity is owning the libs. And you cant do that working with the libs all that often.

So occasionally therell be a feint here or there, but when it comes down to it, youre just not going to see big coalitions on central issues because, if Josh Hawley developed a reputation for voting with the Democrats on issues of economics, he would get a reputation as being somebody who wasnt owning the libs. And like, that would be very, very destructive for him. So if you take this, I think, sort of Lilliana Mason-ified view of politics, the space for policy compromise really, really narrows because whatever you think it is is not what its going to be after Democrats decide to adopt a conservative policy or even Republicans decide to adopt a liberal one.

Right. And also, unfortunately, the way any of these government achievements is covered, right, is who won? Legislation to give every American $1,000, which party does that benefit? And thats generally the framing. And so in a sense, you know, Trump was right when he said were going to get tired of all the winning, right, because so much is just about who wins, rather than what does government do, what is governments role? You know, how much should government be helping citizens or intervening in their lives?

And those are the sort of traditional debates, right? The traditional debate over policy is what role does government play in regular Americans lives? And so you can find some common ground in the middle of that conversation. But if the conversation instead is which party wins literally everything, then why would anybody want to find common ground there?

Everyones just going to try to make it a win regardless, and also to prevent the other side from winning. So its not even about what government is supposed to be or governing at all. Its about winning, which is horrible. I mean, that is absolutely not the way to run a government. That doesnt allow the government to function. I mean, the Republican Party doesnt have a platform right now, they dont even have policies, because its just winning.

And this is also one of the asymmetries between the parties. Because American policy preferences are generally to the left of center, the Democratic Party actually has a much more popular policy agenda. So its actually in the Democrats interest to talk about policy and enact policy and try to do these popular things. But what then the Republicans are incentivized to do because of that is focus on the grievance politics, so that even if a policy helps someone, theyre not going to vote for Democrats because they hate that Democrats helped other people, as well.

So the two parties have very different incentives in terms of campaigning and governing. And I think weve seen that, just comparing the Trump administration to the Biden administration, right? Actually getting things done and trying to not only pass legislation in Congress, but even just the president just trying to care for American people and enact things that help them.

So its not exactly the same for both parties. And I think thats another thing that we need to start talking more about, because this is one of the things thats really been bothering me. We have these norms, both in journalism and in academia, norms of sort of non-partisanship.

But what were seeing is very asymmetric, and the things that are happening on the Democratic side are not exactly the same as the things that are happening on the Republican side. So increasingly, from a democratic, small d, like democracy, point of view, its really, really important that we actually point out the differences between whats happening in the Democratic and Republican parties, because to pretend theyre the same is allowing an anti-democracy faction of people to get an opportunity to harm our ability to govern ourselves.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Let me try out a version of what is different between the parties on you here. So one version of whats different that Ive argued for years, its a big part of my book, is that the Democrats have to abide by and are disciplined by democracy, and the Republicans arent. That if the Republicans had to win majorities of the country to win the Senate, to win the House, to win the presidency, then the strategy theyve been pushing would not have worked, right?

Donald Trump did not win a majority of voters in 2016. Republicans in the Senate routinely do not win most voters when they go before the electorate. And so they would have to try to figure out some way to appeal to more people, which might mean offering policies that actually appeal to more people, whereas Democrats really have to appeal to a lot of people, including people who maybe culturally dont like them that much. And so they push on policies that give them something to say to skeptical electorates because they have to win, you know, 51, 52, 53 percent of the popular vote more than that in the Senate in order to win a majority.

So I think thats a huge difference. But on top of that, its true that Democrats are polarizing more on policy. Theyre moving further left on policy right now than Republicans are moving right on it. But Republicans have been polarizing, if thats the right word, against the political system itself. That the nature of the Republican coalition, where theyve been moving very far to the right, is in how they view elections, is in how they view the media, is in how they view more fundamental questions of, like, liberal democratic competition.

The two parties are really, to the extent they become more extreme, they become more extreme on different things. Republicans have become like more of an anti-system party, and Democrats have become, like, that much closer to being a truly liberal or, if you want, Democratic socialist party. But its not just, like, asymmetric because one side has gone more left or one side has gone more right, its asymmetric because, like, the locus of thing the parties are changing on is actually different in the two parties. Theyre actually not having the same argument, really.

Exactly, yeah. They are, right now, disagreeing about democracy. And youre right that Democrats are kind of becoming more liberal on policies that would create a more multiracial democracy, but also Republicans are trying to stop democracy from happening, and even just basic governance, right? The things that the Republican Party wants to do policy-wise just Im not even sure what they are.

Its so much more powerful to appeal to identity and threat, right? Thats what my book is ultimately about, is that when you make people feel like their group is being threatened, the status of their group is being threatened, they respond much more forcefully and emotionally than they do if youre going to enact a policy that they dont like. Its a very different emotional response.

And what sort of white Republicans are being constantly told is that their place in society is being threatened. They dont get to be at the top of the social hierarchy anymore. And if they want to be at the top of the social hierarchy, then they should really be the only ones voting. Stop the steal was about you know, they said if it wasnt for Madison and Milwaukee, right, we would have won. Its like, if it wasnt for non-white people in cities voting, then Trump did win. If we dont count non-white people in the electorate, Trump won the 2020 election, right?

So youre right that theyre polarizing on two different things, but I also do see some sense that theyre both pulling on the same rope when it comes to democratic access and the equal protection of people under American laws. In that particular fight, I think theyre pulling on the same rope. And thats where the battle is, and thats where theres no room for compromise.

That I agree with. I just think that the Democrats, in their relationship to democracy itself, have become somewhat more progressive, but not wildly. You know, Democrats are trying to do a really major expansion of voting rights right now under, you know, in HR 1 and HR 4, but theyre not willing to do that much to get it done. Like, they wont even, in the end, get rid of the filibuster. And so their view on democracy, which I think is sharper now but is continuous with our recent history, is we are a democracy, and we should be a bit more of one.

And the Republican take on this I think has changed dramatically. You will hear much more direct anti- small d- democratic rhetoric now from Republicans, like Mike Lee tweeting about how ranked democracy is the threat, or Tucker Carlson going to Hungary to talk about how great it is, where Hungary is like the example in Europe of a country that was a democracy and has backslid into competitive authoritarianism. Or Donald Trump, you know, saying in the 2020 election that, if the vote by mail stuff the Democrats wanted to do had happened, like, Republicans would never win an election in this country ever again, and that any election against him is rigged. And so thats more my point. Not that I agree that the fight over democracy is the central fight, but where Democrats seem to me to have changed dramatically is policy. They were for democracy and more, and maybe now theyre for democracy and more plus, whereas Republicans, like from where a Mitt Romney stood on this, or a George W. Bush, in many ways, or a John McCain, like, that has been sharp in a way that their economic policy just, like, has not changed that sharply.

Yeah, I mean, Dick Cheney himself is now worried about the direction the Republican Party is heading in, right? And you can see this in even in the January 6 commission, the makeup of that commission, right? You can find two Republicans to sit on that commission who actually think it was really bad that people stormed the Capitol on January 6 in order to steal the election, right? Or undo the election. And that those people are ostracized from the party, as well.

The way that I see it is that we have this really sort of anti-egalitarian faction in the Republican Party thats very loud and votes in the primaries and, you know, does all the talking and yells at town halls, and then you have other Republicans who think that thats gross and they dont like it and makes them uncomfortable, but they think Democrats are worse. And so we have some people who are really fighting for, essentially, a white supremacist, Christian nationalist nation, and other people in the party who just dont want to vote for Democrats.

And so I would really love to see and this is never going to happen but what I would really love to see is some sort of fight back from the kind of Liz Cheney wing of the party that says, Im a Republican, Im not MAGA, right? Like, Im part of a responsible party that believes in democracy and is going to actually work in government to do things. Im not here to make a giant riot and to wave around Confederate flags, right?

Im not a militiaman, Im a Republican. And I would love to see something like that just kind of, like, grow out of the Republican Party, because I think there are people in there that believe that. But its just too scary to kind of disassociate yourself from this really loud group of people that are scary. Theyre terrifying. They stormed the Capitol.

Well, even if theyre not scary, you do need their votes. I mean, this, to me, is what cowed that group. Look, a lot of Republicans are like that. And I think if you talk to Republicans in Congress, a lot of them say, I am doing that. I mean, I didnt storm the Capitol. I was hiding from those people. And here I am, working on bills that you never pay any attention to, and here I am, like, putting out bog-standard completely boring press releases about government red tape and regulation and so on. But the problem is that they dont want to have a internal confrontation, because what holds a party together is you need to win elections.

I mean, this is our mutual friend and your mutual political scientist, Lee Drutman, his argument for why America so badly needs multiparty democracy, because in some other world, maybe a Republican Party or Republican coalition on the right that has different parties in it. And so theres a MAGA-ish party and a conservative party, and maybe on the Democratic side theres a Democratic socialist party and a liberal party and so on. And you can have different coalitions form and fall, but if you had a different electoral system that had more proportional representation, like, it wouldnt be a total disaster if you didnt get the votes of the MAGA faction. There would be other ways to come into power.

But in a two-party first past the post system, like, if Republicans dont get more votes, or at least more electoral college points or more states or more districts than Democrats, like, they just dont win power. And it seems to me that, on the one hand, a lot of Republicans have realized the energy in the party is in the animus. And thats why you see somebody like JD Vance adopting this Twitter persona to how to win the Ohio primary for Senate. But on the other hand, even the ones who dont want to become a kind of bootleg Donald Trump recognize that you cant win by splitting your own party. Like, you cant have a schism. And so they say theyre acting exactly as you want them to act, theyre just not going to, like, get into a fight.

This is what they all say about Liz Cheney, that they didnt excommunicate her from leadership because she believed the 2020 election was correctly decided, that they kicked her out because she wouldnt stop talking about it. And like, what they want is to keep the peace at any cost. And like, that is, to me, the central vulnerability of the party, that they will forever try to keep the peace internally, even as the compromises that means making become more and more horrific, and even as that means then allowing their base to go down a path that they cant recover from, because at some point, like, it goes so far you really cant challenge it. And I think probably [INAUDIBLE] the Republican Party is already there.

Thats right. And thats why theyre sort of stuck in this position. And as Lee Drutman says, thats one of the problems with the two-party system, is that it requires a zero-sum mentality. Every election is zero sum. One of the parties is going to win the thing.

Its also true that the Republicans are uniquely vulnerable to this because theyre much more homogeneous, racially and religiously, than Democrats are. And so theyre much more focused on sort of purity and loyalty and staying exactly with what the party is doing at all times, whereas Democrats are a huge mix of people who are all kind of talking in different directions. And its easier for that to happen in a really heterogeneous mixed group. And in previous work that I have with Julie Wronski, we actually found that Republicans are much more sensitive to people who dont fit the mold, the social mold of Republicans.

People will discount other Republicans who arent the correct combination of identities, and theyll even identify less as a Republican themselves if they dont fit that white Christian paradigm. Whereas with Democrats, you can be kind of any collection of identities that you are, and you still feel like a Democrat. So I do think the Republican Party is particularly vulnerable to that, which, again, just piles on to all of the other sort of institutional problems that are in the way of trying to calm things down and create more concern for actual democracy and equal representation and equal protection. Right? Thats just another thing on the list of why its going to be hard for us to defend democracy against these forces.

So I do want to question on the Democratic side, because I do think this is a genuine weakness of the Democratic Party, whether its true that you can be any collection of identities and feel comfortable as a Democrat. And I think the biggest weakness of the Democratic Party is that it often makes people feel stupid or retrograde. The leaders of it, the kind of atmosphere of it, which is not to say like every individual Democratic politician or person, but the partys kind of cultural structure has just become, like, much more dominated by college-educated liberals and postgrad liberals. And like, theres a lot of knowing the right language. You know, like using Latinx and things like that. Like, that is the sorting in the Democratic side that makes me most concerned, which, of course, like, I, as a nerdy college-educated guy with glasses who likes to do a lot of podcasts with political scientists, is probably not exactly helping. But the sorting on education, the education polarization, like, thats a real issue for the Democratic Party. In many ways, I think class was, like, a healthier cut for them.

But there are a lot of people who, they tune in and it doesnt feel like them. Joe Biden has helped on that a lot. I think Joe Biden is somebody who a lot of folks feel like theyre in his tent and well liked by him, but Biden is, in many ways, a very throwback politician, where if you look at the ones vying to be the leader of the party in the future, I dont think its quite as open, particularly if youre not somebody who shares a lot of the kind of fundamental language and concepts.

Yeah, I mean, I think that the key thing to specify here, though, is that these are white Democrats. So race and class are sort of cutting against each other in a lot of ways in contemporary partisanship. And its generally kind of the rural white Democrats who feel looked down upon, sort of less educated white Democrats. And I can see that being true. And part of the reason, I think, that they can be attracted to somebody like Trump is that just based on the psychology.

When you have a person whos feeling like they are low status in society, that other people in the society look down upon them, theyre going to cling much more strongly to identities that are high status. Thats partially why its a white phenomenon, right, because people who feel looked down upon who have a white identity can then cling to that identity, can hold on to that and use that to help them feel higher status. And that becomes, then, a threat to that identity.

Thats a vulnerability thats always existed in American, among American white society. And part of the education part of it is that in institutes of higher education, institutions of higher education, there is sort of a language that people learn. But part of that language is due to these institutions trying very hard to be as inclusive as possible. Thats whats happening on college campuses, is that the kind of push for the fully multiracial, egalitarian society that the Democratic Party wants for democracy, thats what college campuses are trying to live right now. And theyre probably the most egalitarian places in the country at this point.

So exposure to that type of place creates sort of an acknowledgment of the current social hierarchy, the things that are unfair within it, and it also does create this language that says, if you use language that dehumanizes another person, thats bad. You shouldnt do that. And youre going to be socially sanctioned for that. Obviously, that would be really embarrassing and feel really condescending to someone.

And then Trump can come along and say, look at all this PC bull crap, you know, that everybody is telling you to do. You dont have to do that. So the education relationship I do think is related to this sort of social inequality phenomenon. These are the places where I think the institutions are trying the hardest to maintain a sort of peaceful, egalitarian place. Now, theyre certainly not succeeding, all of them, but I think that they are trying more than, for instance, like a corporate boardroom.

I think thats true, but let me indulge my inner reactionary here for a minute on this, because within the colleges and I think were talking here a little bit more about elite colleges than the just sort of, like, say, community college world I think a lot of things begin with the idea that they can be inclusive, and they end up being exclusionary, they end up being guild-protecting, they end up being other things. And I think youre seeing this in the electorate, right? It is true enough that a lot of what is going on is about the racial divisions in society. Its of course the case that some of the things that are upsetting people about speech is that they cant say things that are racist. And so like, Im on board with you cant say things that are racist or you get socially sanctioned.

But you know, Latinx is an example people use a lot. That is not the way most people who are covered by that designation talk about themselves. So like, saying youre using inclusive language that people dont use about themselves, I mean, I get the kind of academic argument for it, but its getting into a weird place. And youre starting to see this, I think, play out in elections that are not exactly conforming to these theories of electoral inclusion that particularly elite Democrats are putting forward.

I mean, you have Eric Adams in New York, who wins the Democratic mayoral primary with this very working class multiracial coalition, running very much against a lot of these trends of the Democratic Party, on crime, but just also on the way Democrats talk about things, a lot of like, as you said, the sorting is mostly among white voters, so Democrats still have a lot of more conservative and moderate Hispanic and Black voters in the coalition. In the 2020 election, Democrats do better among white voters, and thats part of how Joe Biden wins, but Donald Trump made real gains, particularly with Black voters, with Hispanic voters, to some degree, with potentially Asian voters.

So theres got to be some questioning on the Democratic side about if you are driving a pretty intense political theory thats supposed to make you a more inclusive party, but the trends are going actually a little bit against you on that, like, is it working? Like, do you have to rethink where maybe a good motivation, but then a set of, like, tactics and internal group dynamics have actually gotten you?

Yeah. So I mean, I think the Latinx things a little overblown. Like, I used the word Hispanic and Latino all the time, and Ive never been socially sanctioned for it.

Yep, agreed.

And yeah, Im a professor, right? Im constantly surrounded by people who know the term, just they dont get that mad at me. So the Trump appeal among Black and Hispanic mainly men, actually, voters, but so one of the things, going back to this study that we did where we looked at peoples attitudes in 2011, the people who had animosity towards any of these four groups were not all white, right? There was a pretty mixed bunch, actually.

And so within that group are African Americans who dislike L.G.B.T.Q. people, right, or Hispanics who dislike Muslims. You can harness hatred from a lot of places. And thats really what Trump was so good at, just harnessing whatever grievance, whatever hatred you have, and putting it to electoral political use. So its not like non-white people are immune from prejudice. And those who hate other groups are possibly going to appreciate something that Trump has said thats against one of those groups, or any of those groups.

Follow this link:

Opinion | How Identity Politics Took Over the Republican Party - The New York Times