Blue vs. gray? Meet blue vs. red.
by Tom Sullivan
“Trump is the first president since at least the Civil War to so directly kindle the nation’s political conflicts,” Ron Brownstein writes at The Atlantic. Aw, come on. Now he’ll think he’s the new Lincoln.
Brownstein’s larger point is battle lines are drawn. They have not budged much since 2016. Donald Trump is the president of red America (read: rural) and punisher of blue America (read: metropolitan). The 2020 elections will be a cage match between the future vs. the past, between the Democrats’ “coalition of transformation” and Republicans’ “coalition of restoration.”
Readers know that the latter’s shrinking demographic footprint is being inflated by anti-democratic structural advantages states with smaller populations possess in the Senate and the Electoral College. Not to mention by vigorous efforts among Republicans to suppress the votes of young people and nonwhites. Given those factors, a Republican coalition built on “small states that remain mostly white and Christian” may yet hang onto power for a few more election cycles. “[B]oth parties live in constant fear that even the tiniest of blunders will lead to victory for the other,” Brownstein writes:
That the parties are growing in their differences only compounds that fear. Election outcomes now produce whiplash-inducing reversals in policy outcomes, since the two sides represent coalitions with such divergent priorities and preferences. Polling by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute captured that separation: In an October survey, 92 percent of voters who approve of Trump say Republicans are working “to protect the American way of life against outside threats,” while 75 percent of voters who disapprove of him say the GOP has been taken over by racists. Conversely, three-fourths of Trump approvers say Democrats have been taken over by socialists, while three-fourths of those who disapprove of him say the Democratic Party is endeavoring to make capitalism work better for average Americans.
As much as social-cultural differences are widening the divide, like much of human conflict this is about relative power. Plus, an unrealistic understanding of humans — shaped by the botched economic models of the last half-century — as rational economic actors. (We’ll be looking more at that in this space soon enough.)
Danielle Allen argues this morning at the Washington Post:
[T]here are three fundamental blind spots in our most recent paradigms of political economy. The first is a description of human beings as “rational actors,” whose decisions rest on essentially utilitarian forms of calculation. The second is a depiction of society as consisting of millions of Robinson Crusoes, all wholly independent of one another. The third is a failure to recognize the value in forms of coordination achieved other than through the price mechanism.
One might argue those blind spots in economic theory have contributed to the red-blue divide as much as cultural differences. Generations have learned to see one another as competitors in a zero-sum game of power and money in a society that perceives money as power and a perverse measure of virtue. Our economic model for Man has eroded cooperation among communities as much as technological change. The resulting tension drives social and racial animus among those for whom community has shrunk to kin and church. Where healthy communities are welcoming, threatened ones become suspicious and insular.
More than red hats and racism is at work here. More than immigration, too.
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