Trump accelerated a realignment in the electorate around racism, across several different measures of racial animus — and that it helped him win. By contrast, we found little evidence to suggest individual economic distress benefited Trump. The American political system is sorting so that racial progressivism and economic progressivism are aligned in the Democratic Party and racial conservatism and economic conservatism are aligned in the Republican Party.
.. In the French parliamentary elections this month, the ruling Socialist Party saw its 280 seats dwindle to 29 out of 577. In the Netherlands, the number of seats held in parliament by the Dutch Labor Party fell from 38 to 9 after the March election.
.. The Financial Times has documented a steady decline in class-based voting in Britain. In 1987, the British middle class voted for the Conservative Party by 40 points more than the national average, while the working class voted for the Labor Party by 32 points more than the national average — a 72-point spread. By 2017, the spread had dropped to 15 points. Once a Tory stronghold, the British middle class now splits its vote evenly.
.. education emerged as the strongest predictor of votes for a right populist option, where the less educated chose it more often than those with degrees.
.. Austria to this list. The presidential election there in May of 2016 pitted Van der Bellen, the center-left candidate, against the hard-right populist Norbert Hofer. Polls showed that Van der Bellen won decisively among the well educated and the better paid, while Hofer won workers and the less well educated in a landslide. The election in the Netherlands was also emblematic
.. Macron’s genius has been to argue that he can thread the political needle, by embracing globalization and reinforcing social protections to compensate those exposed to its downside. In the process, he has obliterated traditional parties of the left and the right, while promising a synthesis tailor made for the twenty-first century. If he can bring it off, he will become a model for other leaders to follow — including in the United States.
.. among all voters, Clinton won 52-42 among the college-educated while Trump carried those without degrees 51-44.
.. A candidate making that appeal, however, and seeking to build a broad majority biracial coalition, must in fact have broad biracial appeal. As of now, Sanders is far from personifying broad majority biracial appeal. Worse, existing Democratic candidate recruitment and nomination processes have paid insufficient attention to the selection of candidates who are competent to build bridges across America’s immense cultural gaps.
.. there is a “growing tension” between the Democratic Party’s “ascendant militant wing and Democrats competing in conservative-leaning terrain.”
.. The “ascendant militant wing” — a colorful, if controversial, description of the Sanders-Warren wing of the party — has the moral high ground within Democratic ranks but the votes they want the party to seek are those of some of the least reachable constituencies — white men and women whose views on immigration, race and political correctness are in direct conflict with liberal idealism. It would be an extraordinary challenge to get these particular voters to join with minorities and progressive activists.
.. Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity.
In practical terms, Beinart writes, “it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.”
.. The hard part
is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.
.. Exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference — the hallmarks of liberal democracy — are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness.
.. Americans, Beinart contends,
know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he — a black man with a Muslim-sounding name — twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.
What we are seeing now is the replacement of class-based politics, a trend apparent in the United States and Europe. This gives us a more racialized and xenophobic politics, on one hand, and a politics capitalizing on increasing levels of education and open-mindedness in the electorate on the other.