By Joel Kotkin
Thursday, September 17, 2020
Who you gonna
believe, me or your own eyes?
Chico Marx in Duck
Soup (1933)
The long-rising blue tide that has colored American
politics and values may have crested, but it could still have enough momentum
to make it through the election year. Even if Trump is somehow reelected, the
wielders of power and influence — academia, media, Wall Street, Hollywood, the
big-tech oligarchs, the dominant nonprofits, and the governmental apparat —
will remain deep blue for the foreseeable future.
The prospect of untrammeled progressive power, particularly
with a malleable Joe Biden in the White House, may seem depressing for
conservatives or even old-style liberals, who are concerned by the Left’s
increasingly censorious and authoritarian bent. But there is also a silver
lining of sorts. Everywhere blue policies — generally now referred to as
“progressive” — have prevailed, they have failed miserably, particularly for
those parts of the population, such as the working class and minorities, that
they purport to serve.
Over time, these failures will open up an opportunity
perhaps not for a resurgence of traditional conservatism but for a reshuffling
of political loyalties away from those whose policies don’t work. Many core
constituencies associated with blue politics may become aware that their interests,
prominent on the progressive menu, will never in reality be served. Ultimately,
results, not memes, matter most. Progressives have demonstrated monumental
incompetence in addressing everything from social equity to education, culture,
and energy policy. Even in postmodern America, failure cannot forever be sold
as success.
***
The cry for greater equality, particularly for
minorities, dominated the rhetoric of the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
Hollywood, the corporate world, professional sports, academia, and the
mainstream media are all being lured by the siren song of “social justice,” but
that song sounds nice and empathetic only until you look at the results.
In analyzing the nation’s 107 largest metropolitan
regions (populations over 500,000), Wendell Cox, a demographer at the Urban
Reform Institute, found that the worst places for minorities — judged by where
ethnic populations are growing and how minorities do compared with whites in
such areas as educational attainment and homeownership — are generally those
metros that are bluest. The best, Cox found, are generally reddish or purple
metros mainly in the South, Midwest, Great Plains, and desert Southwest.
African Americans, for example, generally do best, as
compared with whites, in southern metro areas, led by Atlanta, McAllen (Texas),
Raleigh, El Paso, Nashville, and Virginia Beach. The other best places are Sun
Belt cities such as Phoenix and heartland areas such as Des Moines and Kansas
City. Among the large metros, only the Washington, D.C., metro, which includes
parts of Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia, and the Baltimore metro, with
their large numbers of federal employees, make the top 20 for black progress.
At the bottom are mostly deep-blue metropolitan areas such as New York, Los
Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Chicago, and San Diego.
Much the same pattern is seen with Latinos, for whom
midwestern cities such as St. Louis, Columbus, Omaha, Kansas City, and Grand
Rapids, and southern ones such as Atlanta, Virginia Beach, and Fayetteville
(Ark.) all rate in the top 20. In contrast, Los Angeles, New York, San
Francisco, San Jose, and Boston fall way to the bottom. Asians, although doing
better generally, follow a very similar pattern, with Atlanta, Fayetteville
(Ark.), Kansas City, St. Louis, and Cincinnati in the top five. New York, Los
Angeles, and San Francisco — long the Asian-American population centers — all
cling to the bottom.
One critical difference can be seen in homeownership,
arguably the most essential mechanism for entering the middle class.
African-American homeownership as a percentage of households reaches nearly
one-half in Atlanta and nearly 45 percent in Charlotte and Nashville. By
comparison, it is less than 35 percent in Los Angeles, Boston, and New York.
Latino homeownership as a percentage of households exceeds 50 percent in Houston
and Dallas–Fort Worth but is below 30 percent in New York and Boston.
Perhaps most revealing of all is how minorities are
voting with their feet. Over the past two decades, the growth in the number of
African-American households has been the lowest in San Francisco, along with
New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New Orleans. Where are black populations
growing? Since 2000, among the larger metropolitan areas (over 1 million
population), Phoenix, Las Vegas, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Orlando, Dallas–Fort Worth,
and Atlanta have seen an increase of 70 percent or more in black households —
that is more than four times the national 15 percent increase in the black
population over the same period. Consistent with trends beginning even before
the coronavirus pandemic, smaller metropolitan areas — some with very small
black-population bases — have had even greater increases in black households:
for example, more than 200 percent in Boise (Idaho) and Fayetteville (Ark.),
and at least 150 percent in Provo (Utah), Portland (Maine), and Scranton (Pa.).
Similar patterns exist for Asians, whose median household
income is 28 percent above the national average, and Latinos. Like African
Americans, no matter their politics these two groups are generally headed away
from progressive America and toward red regions and states, where taxes are
more reasonable, regulation is less oppressive, and housing prices are lower.
Given the now popular concept that traces all statistical
inequalities to “systemic” racism, one has to wonder when progressives will
confront the real impact of their own policies.
***
The political base of blue America comprises dense, big
core cities. In New York, San Francisco, and other major urban centers,
Democrats often win upward of 80 percent of the vote. The Democratic convention
paraded a bevy of former and current mayors, from Michael Bloomberg (who
governed New York as a Republican and an independent) to San Antonio’s Julián
Castro to Senator Cory Booker (formerly Newark, N.J., mayor) to Atlanta’s Keisha
Lance Bottoms, as exemplars of the kind of leadership the country needs.
Yet embracing the core cities as role models for
America’s future is increasingly problematic. Even before the pandemic, big
cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago were losing population, with
migration shifting to suburbs and lower-cost metros. The blue strategies —
affirmative action, higher taxes, expanded social programs, more regulation —
certainly have not slowed poverty’s spread; in the years between 1980 and 2018,
the number of high-poverty metropolitan census tracks doubled in population
while the wealth gap between these areas and affluent areas grew. Incomes in
these poor areas grew in the 1980s and 1990s but have not grown since 2000.
The coronavirus has been particularly brutal for the
urban poor. Some of this reflects the impact of density: Counties with 25,000
people per square mile suffered a fatality rate roughly five times that of
areas with typical suburban densities. Overall, counties with densities over
10,000 per square mile constitute less than 4 percent of the nation’s
population but have suffered nearly 15 percent of the deaths associated with
the pandemic. By comparison, in the most typical suburban areas (urban
densities of 1,000 to 2,500 per square mile), where 53 percent of the
population lives, the COVID fatality rate is approximately one-fifth of that.
In largely rural counties (urban densities of under 1,000), it’s one-sixth.
Dense urban areas generally have suffered more in the
pandemic because of what the demographer Cox labels “exposure density” brought
on by insufficiently ventilated places such as crowded housing, transit,
elevators, and office environments. The most vulnerable to infection and
fatalities have been those living in minority urban communities with higher
rates of poverty and household crowding, such as in New York’s outer boroughs,
East and South Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Chicago’s huge South Side and West
Side ghettos. In comparison, dense but affluent areas — upscale neighborhoods
of Manhattan, West Los Angeles, and Chicago’s Gold Coast — have suffered fewer
fatalities and less economic dislocation.
The poor have also suffered more from the pandemic’s
economic effects. In some New York City neighborhoods, unemployment now reaches
30 percent. Roughly half of all job losses in April were in such low-paying
sectors as restaurants, hotels, and amusement parks. Almost 40 percent of those
Americans making under $40,000 a year have lost their jobs, as the wage gains
made during the first two years of the Trump administration have largely
evaporated.
***
Even before the pandemic, cities had failed as places to
lift up the working or middle class, as a recent MIT report demonstrates. Today
our core cities suffer a level of inequality far worse than in the countryside
or suburbs and more closely resemble social conditions in Mexico. As Michael
Lind has suggested, the “post-industrial” city has abandoned production jobs
that are traditional sources of upward mobility while favoring the interests of
real-estate speculators and global-service firms. For all their progressive
pretensions, he notes, these cities instead have fostered “the very
trickle-down economics that Democrats like to denounce.”
Rather than supporting a robust middle class, core cities
suffer an ever-wider gap between the two critical blue constituencies — the
highly educated professional class and the urban poor. But after COVID, much of
the professional class appears to be decamping. Firms such as Google, Twitter,
Facebook, Pinterest, and Salesforce are now reducing their urban footprint,
with some scaling back or even canceling leases in San Francisco. A recent NFX
survey of venture capitalists indicated that dispersed work is now the norm for
the vast majority of start-ups.
Some suggest this is a temporary trend and that offices
will no doubt fill up more than now, but most serious research indicates that
many high-end jobs will continue to depart urban cores. Corporate executives
have expressed satisfaction with the shift to online work as they reap
surprising productivity gains. Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom projects that,
ultimately, we will see telecommuting increase from 5 percent of the workforce
before the pandemic to something closer to 20 percent. More important still,
most people now working from home express a preference — some 60 percent,
according to Gallup — to keep doing so for the foreseeable future. Even when
offices opened early this summer in New York, real-estate brokers report, most
workers refused to return.
The pandemic has greatly undermined the constituency for
urban living. According to a 2020 American Enterprise Institute survey that
used a 2018 Gallup survey as a baseline, the percentage of Americans saying
they want to live in cities dropped 55 percent in just two years, down to
barely 13 percent. Rather than the much ballyhooed “back to the city” movement,
we are entering what Zillow describes as “a great reshuffling” to suburbs,
smaller cities, and less expensive states. Another recent AEI survey showed
that people are increasingly heading to sprawling metros such as Sacramento,
Phoenix, and Las Vegas. For the first time in over a decade, according the
USDA’s Economic Research Service, even non-metro areas are beginning to gain
population.
The recent wave of riots, the most widespread in 50
years, is not likely to make cities any more attractive. Nor is the increase in
urban crime. Yet even in the face of these two threats to public order, many
blue-city politicians embrace the notion of “defunding” the police and have
taken a remarkably hands-off approach to looting and other acts of violence.
Some, such as in Minneapolis, have been notably slow to denounce looting and
acts of physical violence — if the cause fits their narrative. District attorneys
in such indigo locales as San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and St. Louis
recoil from incarcerating even violent looters. The DA in California’s Contra
Costa County went so far as to suggest that if cops decide that the looter
needed the goods, he should not be charged.
This indifference comes with a cost. Rising crime and
lack of law enforcement tend to expel businesses as well as affluent residents,
who pay a large proportion of taxes; the top 1 percent pay 43 percent of New
York City income taxes. If this exodus continues, the poor may soon find
themselves increasingly on their own.
In the pages of the Guardian, In These Times,
and The Atlantic, writers on the left have suggested that the departure
of wealthy residents is a positive trend that will allow a more just and
accessible city to be “reborn.” This seems like wishful thinking. Over time,
riots typically hurt black-owned and immigrant-owned businesses and
small-property owners. In past cases, after initial pledges by big businesses
and nonprofits to aid the inner city, the longer-term trend has been to reduce
investment in poor inner-city areas. The “no justice, no peace” rhetoric common
around the L.A. civil unrest 30 years ago hardly improved conditions over time;
instead, as shown by a UCLA Luskin Center study, South-Central Los Angeles, the
site of two of the worst riots in American history, has suffered a growing gap
with the surrounding area in terms of homeownership, income, and educational
attainment.
***
Urban policy is just one example of blue policies that
are hurting the poor and working classes. Energy and environmental policies,
such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, much of which has been
adopted by Biden, also could have a regressive impact that extends beyond the cities.
Of course, the nation is not yet subject to the GND, but
we can see the impact in California, where a junior version is already being
imposed. An analysis by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy details
how the state’s draconian anti-climate-change regime has driven California’s
cost-adjusted poverty level to being the highest of any state. Even before the
pandemic, nearly one in five Californians, many of them working, were living in
poverty, and the Public Policy Institute of California estimates that another
20 percent live in near-poverty — roughly 15 million people in total.
Once a major energy producer, California is now coping
with gas and electricity prices that are among the highest in the nation. Since
2011, electricity prices have increased five times as fast as the national
average; in 2017 alone, they increased at three times the national rate. This
is not a fluke. Most countries that have adopted draconian green mandates —
Germany, Demark, and even resource-rich Australia — have experienced huge
spikes in energy prices. In Europe, according to a recent Council of Europe
Development Bank study, reliance on renewables has left an estimated 30 million
in “energy poverty.”
Similarly, in California, according to a 2015 Manhattan
Institute report, “energy poverty” has risen most among the minorities and the
poor, particularly the heavily Latino working class. These trends seem doomed
to worsen, notes energy analyst Robert Bryce, as the state seeks to ban natural
gas. Overall, continuing the state’s intensifying war on all carbon fuels and
its insistence on renewable energy will inevitably cause, as a 2020 report by
the California Energy Commission states, “rapidly increasing gas customer bills
and rates,” with the “impact of these cost increases” particularly affecting
“low- and moderate-income Californians or renters, who may be unable to
electrify due to upfront costs or lack of home ownership.”
These populations tend to inhabit the less temperate
interior and often work in energy-dependent industries such as agriculture,
trucking, and manufacturing. Firms in these industries have problems with
intermittent energy supply, and as a 2018 MIT report suggests, this leaves
residents and businesses as vulnerable to nature’s whims as medieval peasants.
Not surprisingly, growth in manufacturing, energy, and
home-building, all key employers for working- and middle-class Californians,
has stagnated even as the state’s economy, in aggregate, has seemed to be
booming. Over the past decade, as my colleague Marshall Toplansky and I
reported in a Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy study, amid the wealth
generated by the tech sector, 85 percent of all California jobs have been in
the low-paid service sector. California’s ability to create middle-income jobs
ranks among the lowest in the country.
The state’s green-driven assault on attainable suburban
development in favor of dense, and expensive, urban areas, as Ali Modarres of the University of Washington,
Wendell Cox, and I have shown, has helped make California’s housing the most
expensive outside Hawaii. Outer suburbs have lower costs, while central urban
areas, particularly near the beach, command extraordinarily high prices. This
is one key reason that California’s homeownership rate among minorities is so
low.
Most tragically, for all this suffering, California’s
junior Green New Deal has provided little benefit for the environment.
According to a recent Center for Demographics and Policy study, since 2007,
when the Golden State’s “landmark” global-warming legislation was passed,
California has accounted for barely 5 percent of the nation’s greenhouse-gas
reductions. The state, not including the ruinous effect of fires, ranks a
mediocre 40th in per capita greenhouse-gas reduction over the past decade, and
state policies may be increasing total emissions by pushing people and
industries to states with less clement climates.
If Joe Biden and Kamala Harris win in November, we can
expect these “green” policies to be adopted nationwide. Already, in
anticipation of their victory, natural-gas projects are being put on hold and
could be canceled. The impact of the GND, which has already hurt Californians,
is likely to be even worse in other states more dependent on energy production,
such as Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania — where many of
the nation’s 9 million energy jobs are concentrated. These states cannot
fantasize, as some do in California, that the bills will be paid by the
oligarchs; lacking sufficient numbers of the rich and famous, they will find
that the alternative is permanent penury.
***
Nowhere are progressive memes more passionately embraced
than in the education bureaucracy. Schoolteachers, college professors, and
administrators are all major contributors to progressive causes. A 2018 study
of 51 top-rated colleges by the National Association of Scholars, for example,
found that the ratio of leftists to conservatives among faculty was generally
at least 8 to 1, and often as high as 70 to 1. At elite liberal-arts schools
such as Wellesley, Swarthmore, and Williams, the ratio reaches 120 to 1.
Students, administrators, and faculty may be impassioned
about fighting systemic racism and inequality, but overall, the education
industry has done little to improve long-term prospects for working-class or
minority Americans. Collecting degrees, particularly from elite schools, has
become an indispensable ticket to the most lucrative positions, but access to
such schools has been diminished by the soaring cost of a university education,
which more than tripled as a proportion of the national median salary between
1963 and 2013.
The universities may be adept at radical politics, now
even affecting once-secure fields like science and math, and they may believe
they are advancing the cause of social justice. In reality, though, their
actual impact on working-class people is hardly beneficial. Harvard, Princeton,
Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top
1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60
percent. Robert Reich, a lion of the Left and a former Harvard and current
Berkeley professor, characterizes the modern elite universities as being
designed mainly “to educate children of the wealthy and upper-middle class.”
They have emerged as shapers of what David Rothkopf, in a 2008 book, calls “the
global superclass.”
For affluent parents who want to ensure the future
success of their offspring, elite degrees would be worth the cost even without
the kids’ actually attending school. But, increasingly, many students at less
prestigious schools are finding education ineffective and absurdly overpriced,
particularly with the shift to online learning. A 2011 study of American
college students found that more than one-third of students “did not
demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” in four years of college.
The performance of 17-year-olds has actually stagnated over the past 50 years,
and even with more kids going to college, notes a 2016 Brookings report,
America’s numeracy and literacy levels have dropped. Employers report that recent
graduates are short on critical-thinking skills. “Over the last 30 to 40 years,
the United States has invested heavily in education,” the report concludes,
“with little to show for it.” Often, the products of today’s universities
simply maintain rigid positions on various issues, confident of their own
superior intelligence and perspicacity. And according to a 2019 Gallup survey,
among “graduates who strongly felt that a purpose was important, only 40
percent said they had found a meaningful career” after college.
The educracy’s worst work, though, particularly for the
poor and working class, is evident in the grade schools. Blue-state, and
particularly blue-city, school districts are notorious underachievers. Many
core-city school districts, including Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Detroit,
produce extraordinarily bad student test scores; almost all of them controlled
by progressives, these schools keep failing compared with their suburban
counterparts.
California, which once boasted a fine education system,
again offers a cautionary tale. To be sure, there are some excellent districts,
particularly in heavily Asian-American suburbs; but with its overall
performance now ranked 49th in the nation, the state is egregiously failing
poor and working-class students. San Francisco, the center of California’s woke
culture, suffers the worst scores for African Americans of any county in the
state. That approximately 40 percent of incoming freshmen in the California
State University system need remedial courses reveals the low level of
preparedness among the state’s high-school graduates.
But if the kids can’t read or calculate, California’s
educracy seems determined to teach them “right thinking.” The state’s new
ethnic-studies mandate for both the secondary and the college levels inculcates
the fashionable notion that systemic racism has defined our history. This
delegitimizing of the entire American experience is being promoted elsewhere
with the widespread adoption by school districts around the country of the New
York Times’ toxic 1619 Project curriculum.
No doubt these programs provide emotional satisfaction
and even potential employment for extremist ideologues and activists. But the
number of employers looking for largely unskilled people inculcated with
radical Marxist rhetoric, not to mention simmering racial and gender
resentments, is likely to be small. Here, too, people are not fooled. Polling
suggests that a majority of Americans have little confidence in public schools,
and universities, in particular, have been steadily losing public confidence.
Many poorer households flock to charter and private schools, which produce
generally better outcomes for their children.
A Democratic win in November may leave charter and
private schools in dire circumstances, since they are adamantly opposed by
teachers’ unions closely tied to Democratic politicians, including Joe Biden.
But political cover from Washington may not be enough to rescue a public-school
industry facing a drop in the number of high-school graduates and a declining
market for four-year college graduates.
New approaches will be needed. Some mostly red states
such as Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, and Ohio are already shifting resources to
skills education, which is more accessible and practical for many minorities
and working-class whites. A certificate to qualify as a plumber, electrician,
or machinist provides a better way up to the middle class than a degree in
Latinx literature or gender or race studies. Given the current shortage of
welders, for example, by 2024 there may be a need for as many as 400,000 of
them.
***
However mighty the blue tide may seem to be, its alliance
of the rich and the dispossessed may not prove sustainable. Corporations,
seeking to earn their woke credentials, have placed themselves in the odd
position of providing funds to stridently anti-capitalist, neo-Marxist-led
groups such as Black Lives Matter. These include tech firms such as DoorDash,
Amazon, 23andMe, Microsoft, Airbnb, and Dropbox, as well as manufacturers such
as Nabisco, Gatorade, and Unilever.
Billionaires may think contributions to BLM, the climate
movement, and the Democrats will buy them some form of indulgence from the
Left, yet they are more likely to appear as what Lenin allegedly once described
as “useful idiots.” The tension between ultra-capitalists and Marxists will
intensify once their current joint project of removing Trump ends. And it will
intensify further as the Democrats keep moving left, as evidenced by last
spring’s Democratic primaries in which a bevy of socialist candidates
supplanted old-line liberals in places as diverse as New York, Pennsylvania,
and even Missouri and Kentucky.
Unlike Clinton-era liberals, socialists like AOC — who
helped stop Amazon’s expansion into Queens, part of which lies in her
congressional district — have no interest in accommodating even a putatively
“enlightened” oligarchy. Both Bernie Sanders and his New York acolyte are quite
open in declaring that they want to “abolish” billionaires in the future. The
new progressives in cities such as San Francisco and Seattle have been calling
for higher taxes on the tech community and real-estate interests. Progressives
may embrace technology but not as a device for a few to gain fantastic riches;
they prefer to see what one futurist-oriented faction of the Left calls “fully
automated luxury communism.”
Perhaps someday, after the Trump ogre has left the scene,
Jeff Bezos and other oligarchs will realize their folly. Already, demonstrators
have designated the Amazon grandee and Washington Post owner as fit not
for a social-justice award but for a guillotine — which they placed in front of
his Washington manse. Perhaps they did not read his paper’s glowing review of
Antifa fashion.
***
A choice between oligarchic domination or a Maoist class
revolution amounts to poison for the middle class. Both radicals and oligarchs
reject the traditional American politics — right and left — dedicated to how
best to improve life for the bulk of the citizenry. Democrats, in particular,
may be making a miscalculation by shifting their focus from bread-and-butter to
race-and-gender issues, as the Democratic theorist Ruy Teixeira recently noted
in an essay for Persuasion.
As Teixeira argues, the woke agenda lacks a large
electoral constituency. Conservative traditionalists are also a minority,
representing barely 25 percent of Americans, according to the recent Hidden
Tribes survey; woke progressives constitute only one-third that percentage,
or just over 8 percent. The survey describes roughly two-thirds of Americans as
“the exhausted majority.” The vast majority of Americans — including
Millennials and minorities — also reject political correctness. “PC’s
opponents,” suggests Wesley Yang, writing in Tablet, “are a portrait of
rainbow-coalition America itself — people of all ages and all colors.”
Even in the inner city, the agenda of BLM and other
radical groups may not be as popular as the media suggest. Woke writers and academics
may embrace the widely celebrated book In Defense of Looting, whose
author was recently given a respectful interview on NPR, but those living in
the crime-ridden inner city may feel differently about tolerance for
lawlessness. Gallup estimates that, rather than calling to shut down law
enforcement, 80 percent of African Americans want the same number of or more
police in their neighborhoods. In contrast to mostly white woke mayors,
African-American politicians in Minneapolis, Houston, and Atlanta have all
rejected this call.
As the big blue metros have experienced increased
unemployment and population loss, the big winners have generally been smaller
cities such as Louisville, Bismarck, Madison, Boise, and Salt Lake City, as
well as suburban hotspots such as Plano, Texas, and Overland Park, Kan. With
very few companies now looking to expand in large cities, Americans will likely
be seeking, and finding, opportunity in these smaller locales. These trends
will accelerate as more Millennials desert the deep-blue cities, swapping an
ultraprogressive milieu for generally less progressive politics in the suburbs,
smaller towns, and even rural areas.
As former urbanites move away from the deep-blue areas,
they may tend to moderate their views. For almost 30 years, suburban voters
have made up the majority of the electorate. Shifting their preferences in each
election, they generally hew to the center. Following this trend, even
nominally progressive Millennials, once they begin to raise children, buy houses,
and start businesses, are likely to reject the more intrusive progressive
policies pushed by New Left urbanists that threaten their living standards by
eliminating single-family zoning and forcing communities to accept large
numbers of dense, low-income, publicly owned apartments. The point of moving to
the suburbs, after all, is to avoid density.
But Republicans also face challenges in winning over the
“exhausted majority.” Some conservative market fundamentalists, like
progressives, favor the eradication of single-family neighborhoods. Others
recoil from trade policies that violate free-trade principles, even when hewing
to those principles threatens the livelihoods of both middle-income households
and, even more, the downwardly mobile working class.
The biggest obstacle politicians of both parties may face
in coming years will be appealing to increasingly diverse suburban and
small-town voters. Today, two-thirds of America’s immigrants live in the
suburbs, as do a majority of African Americans. This population is not only
increasingly nonwhite but has generally adopted very liberal attitudes toward
interracial dating and marriage. Trump may use urban dysfunction as a political
hammer, but his seeming casual acceptance of white-nationalist memes, such as
his unfortunate use of “America First,” with its xenophobic roots, and harsh
rhetoric on immigration has convinced many, and not just progressives, that he
shares, at least in part, that perspective. Thus his approach does not seem the
best way to appeal to this part of the population.
Forcing the two parties to go after these suburban and
small-town voters is the country’s best long-term political hope. This would
nurture a market for pragmatic policies, whether conservative or, like mine,
more social-democratic. The shift to common sense may be further enhanced by
the arrival of Generation Z. Formed by the experiences of recession and now the
pandemic, the so-called Zs tend, as noted by the generational researchers
Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, to be more grounded and less prone to radicalism
than their Millennial predecessors.
Of course, this new generation likely won’t become Reaganites or Trumpians, but neither are they likely to join Antifa, the extreme greens, or the anti-cop racialists of BLM. Overall, their political future remains very much up for grabs. Here lies an opportunity, born of massive blue failures, to forge a new politics that is fundamentally pragmatic and reflects something of the middle-class aspirations that have long defined and blessed this country.
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